Neorealism
also: Neo-realism
In the visual arts, neorealism names a family of movements committed to depicting the real world without academic idealization. Its painting strand was founded at the outbreak of the First World War by the ex-Camden Town painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman, who set out to capture the spirit of their age through the shapes and colors of daily life. Ginner's manifesto in the New Age (1 January 1914) attacked academic art and warned against the merely decorative imitators of Post-Impressionism; Robert Bevan joined their Cumberland Market Group. The same plain devotion to everyday reality reappeared in southern Europe and Latin America - the Portuguese Julio Pomar and the Brazilian Candido Portinari gave it a social, often political edge - so the label covers more than one national scene.
Defining characteristics
- Everyday, working-class subject matter observed directly rather than idealized
- Attention to the shapes and colors of ordinary daily life: rooms, streets, laborers
- Solid, structured brushwork that builds form in patches of color
- Sober, naturalistic palette and unglamorous light
- Plain, factual compositions with little staging or mythological pretext
- Social undertow: the depicted world carries political and class meaning
Key figures
- Charles Ginner (1878-1952) — Painter whose 1914 New Age manifesto set out neo-realist aims
- Harold Gilman (1876-1919) — Co-founder of British neo-realism, painting domestic interiors of daily life
- Robert Bevan (1866-1925) — Camden Town painter who joined the Cumberland Market Group in 1914
- Candido Portinari (1903-1962) — Brazilian painter who gave neorealist subjects a social and political charge
- Julio Pomar (1926-2018) — Portuguese painter of postwar neorealist work
Example works
- Mrs Mounter at the Breakfast Table — Harold Gilman (1917)
- Retirantes — Candido Portinari (1944)
Sources
- Neorealism (art) - Wikipedia encyclopedia