Social realism

Ministry of Education, Science, Youth and Sports of Ukraine

National Technical University of Ukraine

«Kiev Polytechnic Institute»

Institute of Publishing and Printing

CHAIR OF GRAPHIC ARTS

 

 

 

 

LIBRARY RESEARCH PAPER

on topic:

SOCIAL REALISM

 

 

 

Executed by:

Student of the 3^rd course, group   SG-02

Kozyr Julia

Scientific advisor:

Senior lecturer Kononenko S.A.

 

Kyiv 2013

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

		Page*
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………		2
CHAPTER
	I    DEFINITION AND ORIGINS  ……………………………………………………………………………………………….	3
	II  DIEGO RIVERA  ………………..………………………………………………………………..................................	5
	III   INFLUENCES ON MOVEMENT ………………………………………………………….................................. mexican revolution……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… great depression……………………………………………………………………………………………........................	?
	III   SOCIAL REALISM IN PHOTOGRAPHY……………………...……………………………………………………….. dorothea lange…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… walker evans……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… iv  ashcan school……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. v   connected movements………………………………………………………………………………………………. iDEALISM………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. REGIONALISM…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… vi   “american gothic”………………………………………………………………………………………………………	?
BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..		?
GLOSSARY ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….		?

 

 

 

 

 

 

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 

1. Figure 1. (“Creation” by Diego Rivera)……………………………………………..6
2. Figure 2 . (“History of Mexico” by Diego Rivera)…………………………………7
3. Figure 3. (Photo from Great Depression time)…………………………………….9
4. Figure 4 (“Migrant Mother”,  by Dorothea Lange)………………………………..9
5. Figure 5. (Photo by Walker Evans of Allie Mae Burroughs)……………………11
6. Figure 6.( George Bellows, Both Members of This Club,1909)………………...13
7. Figure 7. (Robert Henri, Snow in New York 1902)………………………………..14
8. Figure 8. (Everett Shinn, Self-portrait, 1901 )……………………………………..14
9. Figure 9. (George B. Luks, Allen Street, c.1905)…………………………………15
10. Figure 10. (William Glackens, Coney Island Fruit Stand, 1898)……………….15
11. Figure 11. (John French Sloan, McSorley's Bar,1912,)………………………....16
12. Figure 12. (Edward Hopper, Summer Interior 1909)…………………………….16
13. Figure 13. (Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930 )……………………………….18

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DEFINITION, ORIGINS

 

Social realism is an artistic movement which first started in the 1930s during the Great Depression. It was seen in art, books and film. Social realism rejects the romanticized view of life and instead truthfully shows poverty, discrimination, and the difficult life of the working class. Social realism discards superstition and mysticism, both of which are often featured in other films to distract people from the hopelessness of their situation. 

An artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic. The movement is a style of painting in which the scenes depicted typically convey a message of social or political protest edged with satire. This is not to be confused with Socialist Realism, the official USSR art form that was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934 and later allied Communist parties worldwide.

Social Realism developed as a reaction against idealism and the exaggerated ego encouraged by Romanticism. Consequences of the Industrial Revolution became apparent; urban centers grew, slums proliferated on a new scale contrasting with the display of wealth of the upper classes. With a new sense of social consciousness, the Social Realists pledged to “fight the beautiful art”, any style which appealed to the eye or emotions. They focused on the ugly realities of contemporary life and sympathized with working-class people, particularly the poor. They recorded what they saw (“as it existed”) in a dispassionate manner. The public was outraged by Social Realism, in part, because they didn't know how to look at it or what to do with it.

Term used to refer to the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and film makers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these conditions. In general it should not be confused with Socialist realism, the official art form of the USSR, which was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934, and later by allied Communist parties worldwide. Social realism, in contrast, represents a democratic tradition of independent socially motivated artists, usually of left-wing or liberal persuasion. Their preoccupation with the conditions of the lower classes was a result of the democratic movements of the 18th and 19th centuries, so social realism in its fullest sense should be seen as an international phenomenon, despite the term’s frequent association with American painting. While the artistic style of social realism varies from nation to nation, it almost always utilizes a form of descriptive or critical realism (e.g. the work in 19th-century Russia of the Wanderers).

Social realism’s origins are traceable to European Realism, including the art of Honoré Daumier, Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet. In 19th-century England the Industrial Revolution aroused a concern in many artists for the urban poor. Throughout the 1870s the work of such British artists as Luke Fildes, Hubert von Herkomer, Frank Holl (e.g. Seat in a Railway Station—Third Class, wood engraving, 1872) and William Small (e.g. Queue in Paris, wood engraving, 1871) were widely reproduced in The Graphic, influencing van Gogh’s early paintings. Similar concerns were addressed in 20th-century Britain by the Artists international association, Mass observation and the Kitchen sink school. In photography social realism also draws on the documentary traditions of the late 19th century, as in the work of Jacob A. Riis and Maksim Dmitriyev; it reached a culmination in the worker–photographer movements in Europe and the work by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn and others for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project in the USA in 1935–43.

In the USA during the first decades of the 20th century, Ashcan school painting, including George Luk’s Breaker Boy (1921; Minneapolis, MN, Walker A. Cent.) and John Sloan’s Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street (1928; New York, Whitney), depicted the unattractive reality of city and working life. The Ashcan school influenced the art of the Depression era, for example Thomas Hart Benton’s mural City Activity with Subway (1930; Williamstown, MA, Williams Coll. Mus. A.). The scale and commitment of these works were inspired by the example of the muralists active in Mexico after the Revolution of 1910. Their murals, which were largely propagandizing, emphasized a revolutionary spirit and a pride in the traditions of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. Diego Rivera’s History of Mexico from the Conquest to the Future (1929–30, 1935; Mexico City, Pal. N.), José Clemente Orozco’s Catharsis (1933; Mexico City, Pal. B.A.) and David Alfaro Siqueiros’s The Strike (fresco, 1957; Mexico City, Mus. N. Hist.) are characteristic of the movement. Their example also encouraged social realism in other Latin American countries, from Ecuador (e.g. Oswaldo Guayasamín, The Strike, 1940; Quito, Mus. Fund. Guayasamín) to Brazil (e.g. Cândido Portinari, Coffee, 1935; Rio de Janeiro, Mus. N. B.A.).

In Europe, the symbolic style used by such socially critical artists as František Kupka at the beginning of the 20th century gave way to Expressionism, particularly in Germany. There Käthe Kollwitz, for instance, expressed concern for victimized women, as in Raped Woman (etching, 1907; Hannover, Sprengel Mus.). More caustic social criticism was characteristic of Neue sachlichkeit of the Weimar Republic era, as portrayed in George Grosz’s Teutonic Day (1921; Hamburg, Ksthalle) or the work of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann. A related realism was also evident in the Netherlands in the work of Charley Toorop (e.g. the Friends’ Meal, 1932–3; Rotterdam, Mus. Boymans–van Beuningen), Pyke Koch and others. Even in France the rural images of Maurice de Vlaminck and Roger De la Fresnaye, and the more critical works in the 1930s of Jean Fautrier and Francis Gruber, pursue social realist objectives. With the political polarization of the period the distinction from Socialist Realism became increasingly blurred, as exemplified by the position in Italy of Renato Guttuso. After World War II social criticism was absorbed by Socialist Realism in Eastern Europe, while in the USA and Western Europe it became overshadowed by the dominance of abstract art movements, though it continued to be important in cinema.

 

 

DIEGO RIVERA

 

 

Diego Rivera .( December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957) was a prominent Mexican painter and husband of Frida Kahlo. His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in Mexican art. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals among others in Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City.

Rivera believed that all people (not just people who could buy art or go to museums) should be able to view the art that he was creating. He began painting large murals on walls in public buildings. Rivera's first mural, the Creation (1922), in the Bolívar Amphitheater at the University of Mexico, was the first important mural of the twentieth century. The mural was painted using the encaustic method (a process where a color mixed with other materials is heated after it is applied). Rivera had a great sense of color and an enormous talent for structuring his works. In his later works he used historical, social, and political themes to show the history and the life of the Mexican people.

1.

Between 1923 and 1926 Rivera created frescoes in the Ministry of Education Building in Mexico City. The frescoes in the Auditorium of the National School of Agriculture in Chapingo (1927) are considered his masterpiece. The oneness of the work and the quality of each of the different parts, particularly the feminine nudes, show off the height of his creative power. The general theme of the frescoes is human biological and social development. The murals in the Palace of Cortés in Cuernavaca (1929-1930) depict the fight against the Spanish conquerors.

He briefly espoused Cubism but abandoned it 1917 for a visual language of simplified forms and bold areas of colour. He returned to Mexico in 1921, seeking to create a new national art on revolutionary themes in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. He painted many public murals, the most ambitious of which is in the National Palace (192957). From 1930 to 1934 he worked in the U.S. His mural for New York's Rockefeller Center aroused a storm of controversy and was ultimately destroyed because it contained the figure of Vladimir Ilich Lenin; he later reproduced it at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. With Jos Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rivera created a revival of fresco painting that became Mexico's most significant contribution to 20th-century art. His large-scale didactic murals contain scenes of Mexican history, culture, and industry, with Indians, peasants, conquistadores, and factory workers drawn as simplified figures in crowded, shallow spaces. 

2.

 
INFLUENCES ON SOCIAL REALISM

 

 

The Mexican revolution was the first social revolution of the twentieth century (1910-20). It started as a political revolution against the more than thirty-year dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz. This movement was led by Francisco I. Madero, whose motto ‘Effective suffrage, no re-election’ crystallized discontent around the country in 1910-11 against Díaz's permanence in power. Eventually Díaz went into exile in Paris, while Madero won democratic elections and became Mexico's president in 1911. However, the ancien régime forces, supported by United States ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, overthrew and assassinated Madero, and installed General Huerta in power in 1913. Under intense pressure from several revolutionary factions, Huerta fled to the United States in 1914. 
 
After this the violent conflict became a social revolution. Leaders such as Emiliano Zapata in the south and Pancho Villa in the centre-north fought for land reform and social justice. Eventually these groups had to compromise with the more liberal-constitutional-oriented ones headed by Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregón. The result was the drafting of the 1917 Constitution, a social liberal constitution, the first of its kind, which still rules Mexico today. The constitution granted liberal (civil and political) and social (land reform, progressive labour legislation) rights. The ideal was to create the conditions for the development of modern social citizenship. This new framework, probably the Mexican Revolution's greatest achievement, enabled Mexico's twentieth-century sociopolitical history to be more progressive than several other big Latin American countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, where no social revolution took place.

 

Great Depression was the longest and most severe economic depression ever experienced by the Western world. It began in the U.S. soon after the New York Stock Market Crash of 1929 and lasted until about 1939. By late 1932 stock values had dropped to about 20 of their previous value, and by 1933 11,000 of the U.S.'s 25,000 banks had failed for a combination of reasons, including declining property values, bank runs by panicked customers, and defaults on loans. These and other conditionsworsened by monetary policy mistakes, adherence to the gold standard (until 1933), and the introduction of voluntary wage-and-price controls through the National Recovery Administrationled to much-reduced levels of demand and hence of production, resulting in high unemployment (by 1932, 2530). Since the U.S. was the major creditor and financier of postwar Europe, the U.S. financial breakdown precipitated or exacerbated economic failures around the world, especially in Britain and Germany. Isolationism spread as nations sought to protect domestic production by imposing tariffs and quotas, ultimately reducing the value of international trade by more than half by 1932. The Great Depression contributed to political upheaval. It led to the election of U.S. Pres. Franklin Roosevelt, who upon taking office declared a national bank holiday during which all banks were closed until being deemed solvent by government inspectors. He also introduced major changes in the structure of the U.S. economy through his New Deal programs of economic relief and reform. The Great Depression also advanced Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933 and fomented political extremism in other countries. Before the Great Depression, governments relied on impersonal market forces to achieve economic correction. Afterward, government action came to assume a principal role in ensuring economic stability.

 

3.

 

SOCIAL REALISM IN PHOTOGRAPHY

 

 

4.

 

Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.

From 1935 to 1939, Dorothea Lange's work for the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor and forgotten — particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers — to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era.

Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother." The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson. The original photo featured Florence's thumb and index finger on the tent pole, but the image was later retouched to hide Florence's thumb. Her index finger was left untouched (lower right in photo).

In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (Popular Photography, Feb. 1960)

After Lange returned home, she told the editor of a San Francisco newspaper about conditions at the camp and provided him with two of her photos. The editor informed federal authorities and published an article that included the photos. As a result, the government rushed aid to the camp to prevent starvation.

According to Thompson's son, Lange got some details of this story wrong, but the impact of the picture was based on the image showing the strength and need of migrant workers.^[6]

In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans to relocation camps, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA).^[7] She covered the rounding up of Japanese Americans and their internment in relocation camps, highlighting Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. To many observers, her photograph of Japanese-American children pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to internment camps is a haunting reminder of this policy of detaining people without charging them with any crime or affording them any appeal.^[8]

Her images were so obviously critical that the Army impounded them. ^[9] Today her photographs of the internment are available in the National Archives on the website of the Still Photographs Division, and at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1945, Lange was invited by Ansel Adams to accept a position as faculty at the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). Imogen Cunningham and Minor White joined as well.^[10]

In 1952, Lange co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture. Lange and Pirkle Jones were commissioned in the mid-1950s to shoot a photographic documentary for Life magazine of the death of Monticello, California and of the displacement of its residents by the damming of Putah Creek to form Lake Berryessa. The magazine did not run the piece, so Lange devoted one whole issue of Aperture to the work. The photo collection was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960

 

Walker Evans began to photograph in the late 1920s, making snapshots during a European trip. Upon his return to New York, he published his first images in 1930. During the Great Depression, Evans began to photograph for the Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm Security Administration (FSA), documenting workers and architecture in the Southeastern states. In 1936 he traveled with the writer James Agee to illustrate an article on tenant farm families for Fortune magazine; the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men came out of this collaboration. 
 
Throughout his career Evans contributed photographs to numerous publications, including three devoted solely to his work. In 1965 he leftFortune, where he had been a staff photographer for twenty years, to become a professor of photography and graphic design at Yale University. He remained in the position until 1974, a year before his death.

 

5.

ASHCAN SCHOOL

 

 

Key Dates: 1891-1918

A group of urban realist painters in America creating work around the early part of 20th century. The group, founded by the artist and teacher Robert Henri, began its activities in Philadelphia around 1891. Henri attracted a gathering of newspaper illustrators–George Luks, John Sloan, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn–and led them in a new artistic movement.

The Ash Can School was more revolutionary in its subject matter rather than its style. The Ash Can school artists sought to paint “real life” and urban reality. These artists believed what was real and true in life was what was beautiful and what constituted “art.” They painted gritty urban scenes and the poor and disenfranchised in America.