Naturalism in art

The naturalism (also idealism) in art is a flow of about 1870 to 1890, in the broadest sense: the tendency to the most complete and absolutely accurate reflection of reality in all its manifestations, details and details. In the visual arts, such a tendency manifests itself constantly, from time to time taking shape in concrete historical directions, trends, schools, creative methods and techniques of individual masters.

Naturalism has been used with many different meanings It is predominantly applied to painting, and in its broadest sense it describes any art depicting actual, rather than religious and imaginary, subject-matter It implies a style in which the artist tries to observe and then faithfully record the subject before him without deliberate idealization or stylization. The term has been used more specifically and (sometimes confusingly) in relation to 19th-century art, particularly French art, both as a synonym for REALISM and as a label for certain mutually exclusive subcurrents of it Nevertheless, a more selfconscious development, Naturalism, can be discerned in the 19th century, which is centred on the ideas of Jules-Angoine Castagnary and Emilie Zola.

Naturalism in the visual arts less sharp than in the literature. In addition to naturalism as a concept of the epoch, as a correspondence to naturalism in literature, one also speaks more generally of naturalism as a form of representation that is independent of time and ideological background. Naturalism uses realismas a means, like this it only depicts visible reality and dispenses with the representation of abstract ideas, but does not strive, like realism, for the representation or construction of an aesthetic totality. By scarcity and reduction of shapes. On the contrary, it opens up to details and new social and metropolitan issues.

In the 19th century “Naturalism” or the “Naturalist school” was somewhat artificially erected as a term representing a breakaway sub-movement of Realism, that attempted (not wholly successfully) to distinguish itself from its parent by its avoidance of politics and social issues, and liked to proclaim a quasi-scientific basis, playing on the sense of “naturalist” as a student of Natural history, as the biological sciences were then generally known. The originator of the term was the French art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary, who in 1863 announced that: “The naturalist school declares that art is the expression of life under all phases and on all levels, and that its sole aim is to reproduce nature by carrying it to its maximum power and intensity: it is truth balanced with science”. Émile Zola adopted the term with a similar scientific emphasis for his aims in the novel. Much Naturalist painting covered a similar range of subject matter as that of Impressionism, but using tighter, more traditional brushwork styles, and in landscapes often with more gloomy weather.

Definitions
Before the term “impressionism” appeared, its representatives were ranked as naturalists (for example, Zola did in the 1868 essay “Naturalists”). As the impressionists gained more and more recognition, interest in naturalism came to naught. The tasks of the dispassionate fixation of reality, which were set by the artists of this direction, successfully began to perform photography.

Naturalism as an epoch
Jules Antoine Castagnary’s Manifesto La philosophie du salon de 1857 (1858), which related to painting but also had a great influence on literature (particularly Émile Zola), stood as the programmatic script at the beginning of naturalism in France. The goal of the naturalistic artist is to represent the representational world without omitting the socially low, the simple life. However, external correctness does not guarantee inner truth. This is why the artistic naturalism of the 19th century, like the literary one, is coupled with social engagement.

In this context, the terms naturalism and realism cannot be differentiated precisely. Realism can mean that, despite its social commitment, the style of representation is even more strongly attached to romanticism. Realism claims to penetrate beyond the external to the essential, to the inner truth. Naturalism can also mean that open-air painting is given preference over studio painting. The French painter Gustave Courbet has played the role of a pioneer in this theoretical discussion since the middle of the 19th century.

The German representatives of a naturalistic painting of the 1880s (Hans Herrmann, Max Liebermann) already tend towards impressionistic luminarism (representation of light spots and bundles of light, stimulated by the identification of the electromagnetic wave character of light by James Clerk Maxwell in 1864, experimental measurements of the speed of light by Albert A. Michelson 1878) and the post-materialistic, anti-positivist and sensualist philosophy of Ernst Mach (1883: The mechanics in their development).

Naturalism as a representation
In a figurative sense, art history speaks of a tendency towards naturalism or a naturalistic representation regardless of an epoch, when artists pursue naturalistic goals in their work, that is to say, show an almost positivistic, non-idealizing depiction in their works. Examples can be found in the late medieval manuscripts and tapestries, in old Dutch painting, as well as in some 19th-century painters, who in this way avoided – in contrast to realism – taking social positions with their art.

Max Deri, on the other hand, rejects the assumption that naturalistic painting is a positivist art form that only represents “external nature”, that is, it does without psychology. Her best representatives such as Rembrandt or Wilhelm Leibl had succeeded in making “inner nature” visible.

The definition continues by Jost Hermand, who understands every naturalism as a conscious reaction against a stagnant or formally frozen artistic development supported by a ruling class, which one “tries to counter the formlessness of unlimited truth”. Naturalism is directed against academic conventions, against classicism, mannerism, but also against artistic and social authorities as a whole. This critical, form-destroying impulse characterized the naturalism of the 15th century, which opposed the late Gothic with peasant hardnessMagnificent style, as well as the critical turn of naturalism in the 17th century (early Rembrandt or the “peasant painter” Adriaen Brouwer) turned against mannerism, the naturalistic opposition of the 18th century against rococo, which was based on Rousseau, or naturalism of the 1880s, the front did against the grandeur of the Wilhelminian era, against the backdrop of “Renaissance” and “Salon Staffage”. Naturalism is not actually style-forming, but merely a critical, often aggressive, cynical or compassionate impulse that asks the merely natural over all aesthetic questions of value. This often leads to cartoon-like “grotesque distorted images of the previous ideals”.

From this and from his often close milieu ties there is also the specific narrowness of naturalism: his aggressive impulse is exhausted after a few years and changes into an objectifying attitude in which things are only reflected, or he recalls the “form forces of tradition ”.

Definition of Georg Schmidt
Notational
The art historian Georg Schmidt tried to detach artistic naturalism from the social and ideological in a period of interpretation inherent in the work after the Second World War. So he came up with relatively time-independent definitions. Naturalism is not about “truth” but about “correctness”. The following criteria are decisive for him:

Three illusions
Spatiality (central, color, aerial perspective, drop shadow, etc.)
Physicality (linear perspective, shadow modeling)
Materiality (correct representation of the fabric, material etc., haptic surface quality through light reflection)

Three accuracies
graphic correctness (degree of sharpness of the eye)
anatomical correctness (single and overall shape)
color correctness (object / local color (in neutral light); appearance color)

Naturalism – realism – idealism
Schmidt also tried to differentiate the term naturalism from the terms realism and idealism. While naturalism strives for “external correctness”, that is, the perfect image, virtually without value, realism depends on “inner truth”, that is, on the essentials. Idealism is about “heightening reality”, for example, about the transfiguration of a mythological scene, while realism strives for “knowledge of reality” and its spiritual penetration.

Realistic naturalism: Greek classic, Italian art (14th / 15th century), German and Dutch art (15th century).
Realistic anti- naturalism: dismantling the individual elements of naturalism (late work by Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso).
Idealistic anti-naturalism: Maya, Inca, archaic / early Christian / Byzantine art (early civilizations).
Idealism: Effects and details are subordinate to the idealistic representation (Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, August Weber)

Naturalism, an artistic movement in Western painting: around 1880-1920
The naturalist movement has recently distinguished from realism and various currents of painting in the xix th century.

If realism, in painting as in literature, aims at objective reality, later, naturalists want to “reproduce nature as it is”

The naturalist painters choose to stage peasants, workers and the poor and also the middle class, in town and in the countryside, at work, at rest, in society, in their religious practices: they have more targeted choices on the facts of society that Courbet, which nevertheless serves as a reference. The personality of Émile Zola was decisive in the choice of naturalists. The formats are much more monumental than realistic painters of the middle of the xix th century, Courbet, Millet… They reconnect with the formula of Caravaggiowhere the foreground is almost one to one. Details are always depicted in such a way as to emphasize significant parts: exhausted or happy faces, hands deformed by work or thin and smooth, everyday objects marked by use… The colors are sometimes clear, often brushed, the fabrics keeping an unfinished aspect: memories of impressionist painting.

They use the know-how learned in Fine Arts schools: this is the case for Thomas Eakins, but also for Jules Bastien-Lepage, trained by Alexandre Cabanel; Léon Charles Canniccioni, Jules-Alexis Muenier and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, trained by Jean-Léon Gérôme, himself very interested in the use of photography as a document for painters from 1860. All will make more or less use of photography, some will make their own photographs for this purpose, with the mutual assistance available in the photography companies which multiplied even in the provinces sometimes before 1880, but especially after 1888, time of the appearance of the Kodak portable device in hand. The photographic print is then scrupulously enlarged, often by the tiling method, but the composition often requires selecting (eliminating certain details), prioritizing (some parts are simply sketched while others are precisely detailed) and the Editing multiple parts from multiple photographs is often the most practical solution. Models, places, animals and accessories are then used successively for numerous shots with a view to a single painting.

In the 19th century, naturalism also influenced Russian painting, only in a different way than in the art of Western Europe. Thus, the Peredvizhniki artists, speaking out against academicism for topical subjects from the life of the people, used both academic and naturalistic methods of painting, which in general were “critical realism” of exposing reality, close to the journalistic and literary aspirations of that time. Nevertheless, in Russia naturalism could not be formed as an independent artistic movement, genre or school, becoming one of the techniques in painting..

In the twentieth century, many movements appeared, representatives of which declared “contemporary art”, neorealism, “new materiality” and realism, but allotted demonstrated frank naturalism: Dadaism, readymade, hyperrealism and photorealism, installations, transfigurative reality.

Artist of naturalism late 19th century / early 20th century
The list is arranged in chronological order according to the dates of birth of the artists.

August Weber (1817-1873), German painter of idealism
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), French painter who played an important role in the realism / naturalism debate
Paul Weber (1823-1916), German painter, at times active in the United States

Constantin Meunier (1831-1905), Belgian painter and sculptor
Carl Oesterley junior (1839-1930), German painter
Jean-Charles Cazin (1841-1901), French painter
Eugen Bracht (1842-1921), German painter
Hans Herrmann (1858-1942), German painter
Léon Lhermitte (1844-1925), French painter
Alfred Philippe Roll (1846-1919), French painter
Max Liebermann (1847-1935), German painter
Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884), French painter
Per Hasselberg (1850-1894), Swedish sculptor
Jean-François Raffaëlli (1850-1924), French painter
Magda Kröner (1854-1935), German painter
Marie Bashkirtseff (1860-1884), Russian painter
Arnold Lyongrün (1871-1935), German painter
Gari Melchers (1860-1932), American painter