Art with substantive realist resonance derives much of its impact from a capacity to visualize and bring to mind realities, social as well as more straightforwardly materialist, that matter to the larger world in which an artist lived. The present study addresses the temporal and imaginative complexities integral to the constitution of any realist art that has genuine traction. In so doing, it brings to the fore the alternatives that realist painting, particularly its “classic” nineteenth-century versions, offer to modern, and above all modernist, conceptions of realism as holding up for view a stilled moment from the ever-ongoing, ever-shifting, and on occasion rupturing dynamics of time. The analysis draws on literary theorizing of the temporalities of modern realism by figures such as Frederic Jameson.

John Ruskin does not make much use of the term ‘realism’ to describe J. M. W. Turner’s art in Modern Painters (1843–1860) but in The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism (1878), looking back over his earlier, sprawling, five-volume treatise, Ruskin says that his work there revealed Turner to have been a ‘realist’. Avoiding broader histories of that most nineteenth century of art terms, this essay begins by taking Ruskin at his word. Close readings of the passages on Turner in Modern Painters will show how there is indeed a kind of nascent realism being theorised by Ruskin, one that includes but extends beyond the well-trodden territories of industrialisation, and social and environmental tumult. The essay will show how there are two main, intertwined strands of Ruskin’s examination of Turner’s imaginative realism, the phenomenological and the ecological. Temporality overarches and frames Ruskin’s analysis in Modern Painters in ways that shed light on realism’s fundamental procedures as an attitude in art practice and art criticism. In particular, the essay considers how Ruskin’s emerging concept of realism negotiates individual and collective memory. In doing so, the essay offers up implications that might be taken into a thorough re-evaluation of the history of nineteenth-century painting in Britain in relation to the emerging art term ‘realism’ and its use by one of the period’s most prominent art writers.

The German artist Carl Grossberg produced pictures of machinery and architecture from the 1910s until his death in 1940. Precise, realist, yet often dreamlike, his pictures – associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit – are presented here as dynamic responses not only to recent artistic developments but also to key questions about manual and intellectual labor in an environment increasingly given to technological rationalization. Because Grossberg’s detailed pictures rarely portray humans, his work has been said to affirm the prerogatives of Weimar-era capital and to simply catalogue its dehumanizing effects. But he instead reveals the inadequacy of such critical analytics, crafting a realism based on an unstable synthesis of old and new techniques, of human and technological capacities.