Temporality and the Politics of Class in Nineteenth-Century Realism

  • Alex Potts (Autor/in)

    Alex Potts is author of Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (1994 and 2000), The Sculptural Imagination. Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000), and Experiments in Modern Realism. World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art (2013). He was co-editor of Modern Sculpture Reader (2007 / 2012) and has written widely on modern and contemporary sculpture. Currently he is completing a book on naturalist depiction of labour and the social in later nineteenth-century art. Recent publications include the articles Temporality in Modern Sculpture; Social Theory and the Realist Impulse in Nineteenth-Century Art; Impressionism and Naturalism in Germany. The Competing Aesthetic and Ideological Imperatives of a Modern Art; The Aesthetics and Politics of Pictorial Realism in Peter Weiss’s Writing; and The Social, Real and Imagined, in Stanley Spencer’s Figurative Art. He taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he was Max Loehr Collegiate Professor in the History of Art.

Identifier (Artikel)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/xxi.2025.3.113434

Abstract

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.

Statistiken

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Veröffentlicht
2025-12-16
Ausgabe
Bd. 6 Nr. 3 (2025): 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur
Rubrik
Articles - Beiträge
Sprache
en
Schlagworte
Realismus, Zeitlichkeit, Imagination
Zitationsvorschlag
Potts, A. (2025). Temporality and the Politics of Class in Nineteenth-Century Realism. 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual, 6(3), 305–338. https://doi.org/10.11588/xxi.2025.3.113434

Lizenz

Creative-Commons-Lizenz
Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Nicht-kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International.