Realist painting has had a persistent and powerful presence in 20th-century art. This book – the first ever comprehensive and critical survey of the subject – demonstrates realism's vibrant, diverse and restlessly changing place in American and European painting, from Eakins, Bellows and Homer through Vuillard, Bonnard, Schiele, Morandi, Hopper and Giacometti, to Balthus, Lucian Freud and David Hockney.
The author provides the historical, artistic and critical contexts in which painting has taken a realist turn and argues that the western tradition of pictorial realism has in fact been renewed and modified through the diverse influences of modernism, political conflict and new visual technologies.