Transcending Realism

Realism is a word that gets thrown around a lot. The realist movement existed in France and other parts of Europe in the mid 19th century. Gustave Courbet was the leading painter of that movement. He was interested in painting regular everyday people in a raw, unidealised realistic way. To this day anyone doing something remotely like that is catagorised as realist. Realism emerged around the same time as photography and when the great genre paintings became irrelevant. It birthed many other 'isms' - Impressionism, post impressionism, surrealism, photorealism, superrealism, hyperrealism... I'm sure I've left out a whole bunch of isms. The horrors of the world wars, the destruction of communities in the industrial age and modern life in general affected painters and realism profoundly and produced individual, subjective, intimate realism such as the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon's work was a perfect mix of figuration, abstraction and symbolism and it stretched the term realism even further, as did the work of other mid 20th century painters such as Lucian Freud, Leon Kossof, Frank Auerbach etc. Realism was the perfect term to describe the dense, heavy, ugly, hard, fixed, stubborn reality of modern times. Today I am beginning to think that realism just isn't relevant anymore. We are entering a new age inwhich we are understanding that reality is what we perceive it to be. We are beginning to understand that we can create our reality and that the sky is the limit. So in this new hightened state of consciousness realism just won't be relevant anymore. We're going to have to find some new isms to describe how we depict the world.