One of the most fundamental choices an artist makes when translating an image, a story, an idea, or an emotion into an art object involves the manner and style in which the subject is going to be rendered. When a painter, for example, gazes at a distance landscape that she intends to recreate on a canvass using pigments, brushes, and knives, what governs her thought process and technical execution? Is she attempting to ensure that when a viewer looks at her painting it resembles, as closely as humanly possible, the landscape that she herself observes with her naked eye? Will the painting's perspective, composition, color scheme, and detail be a “lifelike” recreation of what she actually sees, or will she embellish the painting by using colors and/ or details that are not actually present in the real-life location? Will she omit or stylize certain features of the geography so that looking at the painting will necessarily be a wildly different experience than looking at the original subject matter on which it is based? Or will she insist that her painting be a faithful, photographic facsimile of the reality as she sees and experiences it?

These questions strike at the heart of the artistic process, as they force the artist and her audience to contemplate both the intent of the artwork and the manner by which we guide our engagement with it, as well as how we assess its success or failure in achieving its goals.

Realism and Abstraction represent two distinct, often oppositional modes of artistic expression, each based upon a particular set of aesthetic assumptions and philosophical inclinations. While both Realism and Abstraction can be juxtaposed and/ or blended together in one given artwork, their idiosyncratic characteristics compel different responses from audiences.

REALISM

As an artistic movement, Realism first gained prominence in France in the nineteenth century. Painters like Gustave Courbet (1819– 1877) and Jean-François Millet (1814– 1875) eschewed both the staid Neo-Classicism that had dominated French culture for over two centuries and the over-the-top sensationalism and exaggerated exoticism that marked the still-revolutionary Romantic movement that aimed to displace it.