Realism and idealism in painting

Painting is an art that has for its object to retrace the most beautiful and most elevated terrestrial scenes and, sometimes, simply to imitate Nature by the magic of truth. It is an art that, so to speak, has no limits, above all in your epoch. The art of your days must not be merely personality; it must be, if I may so express myself, the consequence of all that has been in history, and the demands of local color, far from hindering the personality and the originality of the artist, broaden his view, form and purify his taste, and make him create works interesting for art and for those who wish to see in it a fallen civilization and forgotten ideas. The so-called historical painting of your schools is not in keeping with the demands of the century; and — I dare say it — there is more future for an artist in his individual researches into art and into history than in that path on which they say I began to set foot. Only one thing will be able to save the art of your epoch: a new impulse and a new school which, allying the two principles said to be so contrary – realism and idealism — induces the young to understand that if the masters are so called, it is because they lived with Nature and their powerful imagination invented where it was necessary to invent, but obeyed where it was necessary to obey. For persons ignorant of the science of art, dispositions often take the place of knowledge and observation. Thus, in your epoch one sees everywhere men of a truly interesting imagination, it is true, even artists, but not painters.

These will be counted in History only as very ingenious draftsmen. Rapidity in work, the critical appraisal of thought is acquired gradually through study and practice and, despite possessing that immense faculty of painting quickly, it is still necessary to struggle, always to struggle. In your materialist century art — I do not say it from all points of view — fortunately materializes itself alongside the truly astonishing efforts of the celebrated men of modern painting. Why this tendency? That is what I shall indicate in the next communication.

II.

As I said in my last communication, to understand painting well it would be necessary to go, successively, from practice to idea, from idea to practice. Almost all my life was spent in Rome. When I contemplated the works of the masters, I strove to grasp in my spirit the intimate connection, the relations, and the harmony of the most elevated idealism and the truest realism. Rarely did I see a masterpiece that did not unite these two great principles. In them I saw the ideal and the sentiment of expression, alongside a truth so brutal that I said to myself: it is indeed the work of the human spirit; it is indeed the work, conceived and then realized; it is indeed the soul and the body: it is integral life. I saw that the masters of feeble ideas and comprehension were so in their forms, in their colors, in their effects. The expression of their heads was uncertain and that of their movements, banal and without grandeur. A long initiation into Nature is necessary to understand well its secrets, its caprices, and its sublimities. It is not the painter who wills it; besides the work of observation, which is immense, one must struggle in the brain and in the continual practice of art; at a given moment it is necessary to bring to the work one wishes to produce the instincts and the sentiment of things acquired and of things thought; in a word, always those two great principles: soul and body. Nicolas Poussin.

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[see Nicolas Poussin.]