Realism in 20th Century Painting

"Most accounts of twentieth-century art tend to play down the persistent and powerful presence of realist painting. However, this book demonstrates that, contrary to received ideas, realism has had a continuous yet vibrant, diverse and restlessly changing place in American and European painting throughout the twentieth century - 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."--BOOK JACKET.