ABSTRACT
It is a sign of the neglected state of realist esthetics that realism has been so often discussed in terms of dumb acts of imitation. Time and again the image of a mirror or of a window is applied to realist painting, which has the result of reducing the activity of the artist to passive copying or replication. A version of this notion underlies Matisse's “photography has very clearly determined the distinction between painting as a transcription of feelings, and descriptive painting. Descriptive painting has become useless.” Since documentary photography records the world, he argues, it is against the principle of economy for painters to do slowly what a photographer can do quickly. The point is however that verisimilitude is not achieved by a reflex to the world; in a painting verisimilitude is earned as seriously as formal and expressive properties. Realist paintings and sculptures are the result of selection; they represent a web of decisions. Meyer Schapiro has pointed out: “There is no passive ‘photographic’ representation,” there must always be “ordering principles and expressive means.” Thus when we look at a realist work we are not getting the scene in clear, to use the term cryptographers apply to a message before it is encoded. Realism is as much an encoded art as any outwardly stylized or abstracted form. There is in any case a linguistic difficulty in viewing a work of art as a random sample of events in the world. A work of art is a signifier and events
