On an art marketplace, the words “realism” and “photorealism” get used almost interchangeably, as shorthand for “this painting looks real.” But the two describe genuinely different movements, separated by more than a century, painted for different reasons, and made by different methods. Realism was a 19th-century French rebellion against artificial, idealized subject matter. Photorealism was a late-20th-century American rebellion against abstraction itself. Knowing where each one came from, and what its artists were actually trying to do, makes the visual differences between them much easier to spot.
Realism emerged in France in the 1840s, and its central figure was the painter Gustave Courbet. Courbet rejected the mythological and historical subjects that French academic painting prized, insisting instead that an artist should paint only what could actually be seen and known firsthand. He put that principle into practice with The Stone Breakers (1849), a life-size depiction of two anonymous laborers, an older man and a younger one, chipping away at rocks along a roadside, their faces turned from the viewer and their clothes patched and worn. He followed it with the even larger A Burial at Ornans (1849–50), which restaged an ordinary provincial funeral in his hometown, populated by dozens of Ornans’ actual residents, at a scale previously reserved for grand historical or religious scenes. Both paintings unsettled the Paris Salon: critics were less offended by bad technique than by the sheer audacity of treating peasants and townsfolk as subjects worthy of history painting’s monumental format.
Courbet had company. Jean-François Millet turned his attention to the physical toil of rural labor, painting peasants gleaning, sowing, and resting with a gravity that made their poverty impossible to romanticize away. Honoré Daumier worked the urban side of the same impulse, using both oil paintings and thousands of satirical lithographs to skewer the pretensions of Parisian bourgeois life and, on occasion, the brutality of the state. What united all three was less a shared style than a shared refusal: Realism defined itself against Romanticism’s taste for emotional drama, exotic settings, and flattering idealization. Its painters chose the unglamorous here-and-now instead, and in doing so made a quietly political statement — that working people, rendered honestly rather than sentimentally, deserved to be looked at.
More than a century later, a different set of painters picked the word “realism” back up, but for almost the opposite reason. By the mid-to-late 1960s, the New York art world had been dominated for nearly two decades by Abstract Expressionism, the gestural, emotionally charged, non-representational painting associated with artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. A younger generation of painters, working mostly in New York and, soon after, California, reacted against that legacy not by returning to painting from life, as Courbet had, but by turning to a very different source: the photograph.
The New York gallerist Louis K. Meisel coined the term “Photorealism” in 1969 to describe this emerging group, and the label stuck. The movement’s international breakthrough came in 1972, when the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann included a cluster of American Photorealists in Documenta 5, the influential exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany, putting painters including Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Robert Bechtle, Ralph Goings, Malcolm Morley, Don Eddy, and Charles Bell in front of a major European audience. Each of the group’s key figures, Audrey Flack among them, settled on a signature subject: Close built monumental portraits from grid-transferred, mugshot-style photographs; Estes rendered gleaming Manhattan storefronts and their tangled reflections; Bechtle painted parked cars and suburban California driveways; Goings favored diners, pickup trucks, and roadside signage; Flack composed jewel-toned still lifes and was among the first in the group to rely heavily on the airbrush; Eddy specialized in the layered reflections of shop and showroom windows; Morley, an early forerunner of the style, painted ocean liners and postcards; and Bell zoomed in on pinball machines, marbles, and candy with obsessive, magnified precision.
What actually defines Photorealism, more than any single subject, is the method. Rather than setting up an easel in front of a landscape or a sitter, these painters worked from a photograph, projecting a slide directly onto the canvas or scaling it up square by square using a grid, then building up the paint, often with an airbrush, until the brush itself all but disappeared from the surface. The point wasn’t just to copy what a camera had recorded, but to reproduce what a camera does to an image: the hot glare of a flash on chrome, the way a lens can render an entire scene in the same crisp focus regardless of distance, and the arbitrary, off-kilter cropping of a snapshot, which slices a bumper or a shoulder off at the frame’s edge instead of composing the scene the way a painter’s eye naturally would.
The two movements share more than a name might suggest: both reject flattery and idealization in favor of optical fidelity, and both ask a viewer to take the surface of the world seriously. But their authorities are different. Realism answers to the observing eye and a social conscience — Courbet, Millet, and Daumier painted what stood in front of them, and chose to stand in front of ordinary lives. Photorealism answers to the camera, and its concerns are largely technical and perceptual rather than social. That difference shows up on the surface of the paintings themselves, and it’s the fastest way to tell them apart in a gallery or scrolling online. Look for uniform focus: if every object in the composition, near and far, is rendered with identical sharpness, that’s the optics of a lens, not a human eye, and it points to Photorealism. Look at any glare or reflection: a mechanically precise, hard-edged highlight on glass or chrome is a photographic effect a Photorealist has faithfully copied, while a Realist painting tends to soften or simplify such details. Look at the paint surface itself: visible brushstrokes and built-up texture suggest direct observation, while a smooth, airbrushed finish with no trace of the hand suggests a photograph as the source. And look at the framing: a composition cropped as if by a camera’s viewfinder, cutting a figure off mid-torso or letting a car’s bumper hang off the canvas edge, is a Photorealist habit that a 19th-century Realist, composing from life, would rarely have had reason to reach for.
If you want to test that eye for yourself, there’s no substitute for looking at real examples side by side. Art Fair carries original paintings in both traditions — its Realism and Photorealism categories sit side by side for exactly this kind of comparison, and are worth browsing together if you want to test your eye against the distinction described here.
