Concept
Social realism
Overview
Social realism is work produced by painters, printmakers, photographers, writers, filmmakers and some musicians that aims to draw attention to the real socio-political conditions of the working class as a means to critique the power structures behind these conditions. While the movement's characteristics vary from nation to nation, it almost always uses a form of descriptive or critical realism.
The term is sometimes more narrowly used for an American art movement that flourished in the interwar period as a reaction to the hardships and problems suffered by common people after the Great Crash. In order to make their art more accessible to a wider audience, artists turned to realist portrayals of anonymous workers as well as celebrities as heroic symbols of strength in the face of adversity. The goal of the artists in doing so was political as they wished to expose the deteriorating conditions of the poor and working classes and hold the existing governmental and social systems accountable.
Social realism should not be confused with socialist realism, the official Soviet art form that was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934 and was later adopted by allied Communist parties worldwide. It is also different from realism as it not only presents conditions of the poor, but does so by conveying the tensions between two opposing forces, such as between farmers and their feudal lord. However, sometimes the terms social realism and socialist realism are used interchangeably.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer. In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is…
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
States what Social realism is.
Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this…
Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
States what Social realism is.
At the present time--interrupted for the moment by the war--a great revolution in the art of painting is in progress throughout the world. Its centres are Paris and Italy and London and Munich, and its origin in the far east, in China and Japan. There are two sides as in every revolution, the Conservatives and the Revolutionists.
Alfred North Whitehead, The organisation of thought, educational and scientific
Close in meaning to Social realism; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Social realism
Related ideas
- Washington, D.C.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Vladimir Lenin
- Industrial Revolution
- Joseph Stalin
- National Health Service
- Leon Trotsky
- Latin America
- Painting
- Marxism
- Great Depression
- New Deal
- Gustave Courbet
- Propaganda
- Photography
- Patriotism
- Russia
- Romanticism
- Soviet Union
- Socialism
- United Kingdom
- Brazil
- Mexico
- Working class
Place in the tradition
Part of Modernism.