Suitable Realism
Although realist artists attempt to convey a candid image of modern life, their tendencies to render a more relatable and aesthetically pleasing result exceeds their objective realities. In both Huysmans’ Against Nature and James’ The Real Thing, the protagonists seek a more evocative reality; one that transcends the boundaries of the objective and replaces the idea of what is natural with the more arousing powers of imagination. In James’ short story, using the real thing, defined by the true nature of Major and Mrs. Monarch, becomes irrelevant to his depiction as the figures rendered by the artist appear as uninhabited forms and in no way suggest the reality of their social stature. Instead, what in person appears artificial and inauthentic, two separate beings insignificant to the social realities of superiority in the eighteenth-century, embrace the dignified postures and mannerisms of high society to a higher degree than the Monarchs who in fact are the real thing. In Against Nature, Huysmans’ Des Esseintes escapes 19th century bourgeoisie society in a manufactured sanctuary, void of anything real or absolute. What is real outside of his retreat has no value, but his own reverie, contrived and artificial, creates a deeper and more emotional beauty. The characters of Charles Dickens, the women of Gustave Moreau, the artificial flowers, “fashioned by the hands of true artists,” encapsulate the essence of his imaginary reality. Transcending into Realist art itself, both works suggest that for art to appear “real”, it must come from a counterfeit representation. In this proposed exhibit, I will examine the question of if art can ever truly present the objective and if it is possible for realism to preserve this.
To Henry James, reality itself is too fixed and retrained to illustrate the true significance of what an artist desires to portray. From the moment the Monarchs arrive, the artist in The Real Thing struggles to believe the social stature of the two models, both “insurmountably Stiff,” Mrs. Monarch “[is] the real thing, but always the same thing,” alluding to the idea that she cannot escape her own disposition (p. 119). Attempting to render this disposition and nature of nobles, the artist longs to have the real thing manifest itself, regrettably continuingly failing to do so. Although the identity of Mrs. Monarch is so nicely defined and designated, her inability to escape her own cast simply delivers a desolate form. The artist’s inability to get inside the characters he so desperately wants to represent, results in an almost repelling, faulty embodiment. Likened to the prototypical titles of Mr. and Mrs. Monarch, the characters are unoccupied and simply represent an ideal of what is an eighteenth-century aristocrat, rendering them not as characters but simple forms. He again seeks a more powerful reality that the crude and uncultivated Miss Churn and Oronte are able to embody with ease, a better version than what is perhaps the real thing, Mr. and Mrs. Monarch. Manifesting the exact essence of aristocratic realities, the inauthentic and clumsy Miss Churn and Oronte become the symbols of eighteenth-century aristocracy. In an essential piece for this exhibit, Self-Portrait as a Wounded Man, Gustave Courbet projects himself onto a wounded soldier, a handsome young man stabbed in the heart by a sword. Courbet uses artifice to project a more powerful and romantic representation of a wounded individual, compared to a true image of a wounded soldier, which would not convey an as effective result. Both James and Courbet suggest that real people are simply means to developing more alluring characters, in The Real Thing, the ideas being Mr. and Mrs. Monarch and the characters that emerge from them being Miss Churn and Oronte. In Courbet’s self-portrait, the real thing being a real soldier wounded at war and the character that emerges from this being Courbet stabbed in the heart in a battle for love. Similarly in Huysmans’s Against Nature, Des Esseintes cherishes the fictive characters he reads of but loathes the ideas that formulate them, real people. “I liked things that appeared…whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always profitless question,” Henry James concludes that appearance and aesthetics outweighs the importance of whether or not what is contrived is derived from reality. In Des Esseintes’s sanctuary, his reality is defined by the world he contrives within his home, based on his imaginary pleasures and the aesthetics of his surroundings. In an attempt to fabricate a monastic atmosphere, he uses “magnificent materials to give the impression of old rags,” reversing the typical optical illusion which uses cheap fabrics to play the role of rich and opulent décor. Sustaining this illusion and upholding the idea of a promiscuous and uncomfortable Trappist cell creates an almost improved version of reality for Des Esseintes. As he describes the “wonderful collection of tropical plants” he possesses, he unravels the truth of the flowers being contrived by “the hands of true artists” (p.83). As he becomes tired of these artificial flowers consistently “aping real ones, he want[s] some natural flowers that would look like fakes” (p.83). Here, Huysmans presents the idea of the power of artifice, which becomes more and more threatening to reality as what it can create significantly outweighs the beauty of what is natural. As he later describes the beautiful flowers he purchases, what is natural becomes an illusion for what is contrived, “anyone would have taken it for a bit of stove-pipe,” further confirming this idea that the natural is limited, if manipulated, it will always better suit the creator (p.88). In Courbet’s Studio of the Painter: A Real Allegory summing up Seven Years of my Artistic Life, the artist employs a similar idea to Des Esseintes; by transforming his studio into an allegory of his influences and emotions, he presents that although he desires to imply real into his work, what is real to the artist will always be subjective and his subjective will always transcend what is real. The artificially created studio better suits and conveys Courbet’s sentiments, the creator. Although artists like Edgar Degas, Gustave Courbet and Rodin liked to claim their desire to only manifest art from reality they, perhaps subconsciously, agreed that reality is too fixed and restrained to not employ artifice and contrivance to their own works.
The works of realist artists, although perhaps based on reality, are still contrived from their subjective and derived often from artifice. In Edgar Degas’s Absinthe of 1876, a young lady, dressed as a prostitute, aimlessly stairs ahead as she is about to sip her cup of absinthe. The viewer feels the sense of despair and social alienation of the two characters as Degas presents them voyeuristically, from an angle as an outside viewer. Their roughly dressed appearances, poor postures and public drinking habits encapsulate the essence of socially separated Parisians. The characters, although assumed by many to be “real” socially alienated individuals in poverty, are in fact two symphony musicians who posed for Degas in a Parisian café, divulging the idea that for artists, most real looking people were simply representations of ‘types’ of people, paradoxes and not real at all. In Rodin’s statue titled The Age of Bronze, his depiction of the male body is so perfectly projected that many accused Rodin to have rendered it from a male cast. Although the perfect anatomy employed in Rodin’s sculpture seems remarkably real, he still proves how art is always better than the real thing, comparing the body of Rodin’s model, the sculpture is much more beautiful than the body of the animate model. In Courbet’s The Bathers, he also attempts to create the visual manifesto of realism. Escaping idealized female nudes, Courbet focuses on the true curvatures and folds of the female body. Although the artist strives for naturalism, he steadily employs artifice to the painting; the landscape is from one place, the models painted in another. The viewer is left with confusion of whether this is a narrative or simply a painting of something occurring in reality, their poses, however, appearing too strange to be that of a banal act. These realist artists, all of whom desired the materialization of reality, so often conveyed their realities through exterior sources, proving that all art is contrived and thus always subjective. As Huysmans presents in Against nature, the limitations of nature and the real thing make imagination a more powerful source for creation, what is contrived always will be more relevant and suitable to the creator. This exhibit of proclaimed realist artists will give viewers the opportunity to look more into the powers of an artist’s subjective and imagination and pass the idea that realism is purely a vision of contemporary life. Although the idea of realism is to create a non-idealized reality, in order to do this, these artists employed artifice in order to improve their realities, using false models and actors to portray an idea rather than painting what they actually see. Andy Warhol, a supporter of the idea that contrived beauty overshadows the natural, once discussed the central idea behind the exhibition,
“People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television - you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.” Demonstrating that perhaps all of our realities are contrived, Warhol examines the imagination and how it transcends what is real. Realist artists, although still focusing on the realist manifesto, still allow their subjective reality to replace reality itself, manifesting a more poignant and relative end.