Realism

Reality Through the Arts (6th Edition)

This introductory exploration of basic artistic concepts and terms applies them to a skeletal multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural history of artistic styles. It treats all the arts–painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, music, theatre, dance, film, architecture, literature–uniformly, and uses a common outline to reinforce the relationship of terms and concepts to the perceptual process. The book also ties both artistic media and history to the theme of art as a reflection of human reality This examination focuses on the media of the arts, pictures, sculpture, music, theatre, cinema, dance, architecture, literature, the styles of the arts, ancient approaches, artistic reflections in the pre-modern world, as well as artistic styles in the emerging modern world and, the beginnings of modernism, pluralism in a post-modern age. For art enthusiasts and others interested exploring how artists express themselves.

Drawing from Observation

Perceptual drawing, in which one renders the physical world as it appears to an observer, is the focus of this new text for the introductory drawing course. Drawing from Observation offers a balanced mix of hands-on technique and perceptual theory while making a compelling argument for the long-term value of studying perception-based drawing.

An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art: N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, James Wyeth

Rackstraw Downes

It might seem odd that a brilliant realist painter would choose to spend months working on a seven-foot-long canvas of a boring stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike. But in Rackstraw Downes' hands, ordinary or unappealing elements of the American landscape suddenly seem worthy of close attention. Rackstraw Downes, an overdue tribute to the English-born artist, combines 100 striking color reproductions of the artist's panoramic paintings (including vivid details) with illuminating commentary. After studying at Yale University in the early 1960s, when abstraction was beginning to yield to Pop and Minimalism, Downes found his footing by taking a long, careful look at landscape. In recent years, he has painted sites in Manhattan, including luminous city views and an eerie 1998 portrait of untenanted office space in the World Trade Center. But his major subjects have always been marginal spaces in nature—landfills and scrubland, culverts and dumps. Putting up with the vagaries of weather and interruptions by suspicious officials, he paints these scenes onsite. Lively details picked out in jewel-like colors are united by the precise evocation of light and atmosphere, the geometry of lines and curves, and Downes' complex system of perspective. (He writes about recreating the experience of turning your head to take in an entire panorama.) Seeking neither to romanticize these scenes nor to critique them—although he is an environmentalist at heart—Downs prefers the naturalist's dispassionate approach. An essay by Sanford Schwartz engagingly discusses the artist's background and interests. Robert Storr, the former Museum of Modern Art curator, analyzes Downes' relationship to key issues of realist painting in the twentieth century. Downes, a longtime essayist, contributes detailed observations about his use of perspective, which lead him on conversational excursions into the history of art. A detailed chronology and bibliography round out this superb study of an "artist's artist" who deserves a much wider audience. --Cathy Curtis

Rackstraw Downes paints down-to-earth, often gritty features of today's American environment in an unflinching and highly realistic style. This book is the first to provide a multifaceted picture of his work, its intellectual foundations, and its place in the history of art--from both outside commentators and Downes himself.

Beautifully illustrated, with copious examples from thirty years of the artist's work, the book makes eminently clear why Downes is widely regarded as a "painter's painter." It showcases many of the artist's panoramic pictures--painted with a strong sense of place and a miniaturist's sense of scale. The images, which depict industrial parks, construction sites, housing projects, refineries, razor wire, and landfills, stimulate fresh thoughts about these supposedly unattractive sights. Bathed in the light of a precise time, the paintings resonate with a strikingly evocative quality.

The three essays that accompany Downes's art provide rare insights into the way a painter thinks and works. Sanford Schwartz explores the relationships between the artist's personal and intellectual background and his oeuvre. Robert Storr situates Downes in the context of a number of highly prominent contemporary artists such as Chuck Close, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, and Robert Smithson in a way that offers a new interpretation of Downes's work, while making clear its importance within twentieth-century art. Downes's own essay, "Turning the Head in Empirical Space," presents a direct, firsthand account of his working methods within a larger discussion on spatial paradigms of Renaissance and post-Renaissance modes of painting.

Paint Radiant Realism in Watercolor, Ink & Colored Pencil

Discover an exciting new way of painting--a multi-medium approach that combines the vivid moods of watercolor, the punch and contrast of ink, and the intriguing textures of colored pencil. In this book, Sueellen Ross will introduce you to her unique "Four-Step Program"--a simple method of layering one medium on top of another in easy-to-control stages. Step-by-step, you'll see how to use this technique to paint cozy interiors, beautiful flowers, cats, birds and other delightful subjects in a brilliant, realistic style!

Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin

Adolf Menzel was one of the most important German artists of the nineteenth century, yet he is scarcely known outside his native land. In this book a leading art historian argues that Menzel deserves to be recognized not only as one of the greatest painters and draftsmen of his century but also as a master realist whose work engages profoundly with an extraordinary range of issues-artistic, scientific, philosophical, sociopolitical. Michael Fried has written the first book in English to explore Menzel's large and fascinating oeuvre, and in so doing has made the artist's stupendous achievement accessible to a wide audience at last.

Fried compares Menzel's art to that of the nineteenth century's two other great realist painters, Courbet and Eakins. Analyzing paintings, drawings, and prints from all stages of Menzel's long career, he asserts that the distinctive quality of Menzel's realism is found in his concern with evoking the multi-sensory, fully embodied relationships of persons with the universe of physical objects, tools, and situations. Establishing connections between Menzel's work and a broad array of extra-artistic contexts, Fried has created a work of compelling originality, one that for the first time establishes Menzel as a key artist of modernity.

Realism (Style and Civilization)

Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane

Russia: The Land, the People

Art of the Real Nine American Figurative Painters