Later Realism's Fifteen Minutes

Extract

Recent years have witnessed a wide-ranging and revisionist return to late nineteenth-century French art and visual culture. Renewed critical interest in those Salon painters, Academicians, and ‘second-rate’ modernists, heretofore maligned or sidelined by the modernist narrative of impressionism as the synecdoche for an age, has enriched the art-historical account of the period with much-needed complexity and nuance. Marnin Young's accomplished study of the continued salience of certain realist practices and theories for artists working within and around impressionism, elucidated with methodological clarity and an impressive grasp of the extensive corpus of contemporaneous art criticism, contributes admirably and usefully to this body of scholarship.

Realism in the Age of Impressionism consists of five chronologically arranged case studies of individual paintings created or exhibited in Paris between 1878 and 1882. These case studies do not combine to identify an explicit or coherent later realist ‘movement’, but rather demonstrate the existence and relevance of a broad network of related representational problems and questions, centred upon the core concern of temporality and its vicissitudes (214). Young aims to reconsider late nineteenth-century realism, impressionism and naturalism alongside one another in dialectical terms, emphasizing that their points of contact are moments evidencing a wider cultural tension animated by the contemporaneous and politicized reorganization of time. Ostensibly formalist questions of style and method therefore become, for Young, suffused with cultural and political significance: the confrontation of distinct representational paradigms – mid-century realism on the one hand and the modernism of impressionism on the other – becomes entangled with the politics of time, and the problem of how, or indeed whether, to represent its passage. In this respect, Young successfully balances the competing methodological influences of Michael Fried and T. J. Clark; however, the brief reference to Whitney Davis’ theory of visuality in the introduction only serves to underscore the essentially exclusive attention paid to high art in the hermeneutic thrust of the text. Young's central argument is that in both form and content the loose grouping of painters he terms ‘later Realist’ were united by a desire to maintain a way of painting and of looking slowly that was becoming, by the 1870s and 1880s, increasingly incompatible with, and inconceivable within, the speed and immediacy of modernity (12).