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.

The rural has long functioned as antithesis to the urban as the location of modernity. One of the defining elements of this dichotomy is the different temporalities they relate to, which mark the urban as fast-paced and technologically driven, while the rural appears slow, even “timeless”. In 1930s Czechoslovakia, however, an array of different realisms, defined by their value as a social record, was inscribed in the countryside through photography and film. Exploring the tensions arising in this space in the work of Irena Blühová and Karol Plicka, this essay argues that the fusing of urban and rural temporalities played a defining role in constructions of competing rural realisms. It takes the rural/urban dichotomy as a point of departure to show that its intrinsic, competing constellations forged new rural realisms at the intersection of modernist form, ethnography, and reportage.

After Independence in 1960, postcolonial modernists in Nigeria like Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko began to produce art that merged learned indigenous and global visual traditions into new visual languages for the postcolonial era. Skeptical of the so-called “abstraction” that pervaded the work of this younger generation of artists, first generation modern Nigerian artist Akinọla Laṣekan, self-trained as a painter, illustrator and political cartoonist, continued to insist upon realism as the formal language that would secure an African Renaissance. This essay traces the origins of Laṣekan’s commitment to realism to the earlier writing and practice of pioneer Nigerian colonial modernist Aina Onabolu. It examines the claims that an African Renaissance would be articulated in a visual language that privileged the clarity of form and message – the legibility – offered by realism. The disjunctures of realism, between the future once dreamt of and the realities of history, are played out in this essay’s analysis of relations between painting and photography, and between imagination and naturalism.

Sayre Gomez’s photorealistic works reflect explicitly on the gentrification of historically low-income, non-white areas of Los Angeles, manifesting a pervasive aspect of spectacle, namely, its production of the city as a collection of images that in the last instance resolve to ciphers of property relations. Building on Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle, this essay explores Gomez’s characteristic device, the use of literal or implied scrims to produce layers of spatiality distinguished by their degree of focus. My argument is that the enframement of the city in Gomez’s paintings concretizes Debord’s critique of capitalist spatiality by returning it to the built environment, while also reflecting on the entanglement of spectacle with racial capitalism (unlike most Debordian discourse). Gomez’s highly stylized painterly realism hence does not articulate spectacle as an undifferentiated miasma but rather as the minutely differentiated medium of racial and class distinction.