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Realism in Europe has gone through many
phases. The earliest realistic works commissioned by either the royalty
of the churches had bible-scenes explored in great details. As this
rested purely on artist’s imagination as how heavenly scenes might look
like, this phase is often referred to as the romanticist phase.
A slightly later development was the
realist school where scenes were depicted with contemporary truth as
perceived by the artist.
In India realism arrived with the British
who needed artists to paint Indian scenes for recording purpose. There
was little scope for romanticism and the early company school painters
painted daily scenes from Indian life without any element of fantasy.
This is where artists like Hemen Majumdar differed as they used realism
to depict life with a mix of fantasy.
Post
independence
artists like Bikash Bhattacharya and then
Sanjay Bhattacharya
took forward the same
tradition. But now artists were getting exposed to new international
ideas like surrealism where techniques remain realistic but the artist
paints purely out of imagination.
Another idea called the
magic realism was
also becoming popular during this time. It made use of realistic
techniques to depict realistic scenes without any distortion. Yet their
remained a subtle irony, or fantasy which was the artist’s own creation.
In the
post-liberalization phase, we are now
witnessing the rise of yet another new genre of art called
pseudo-realism where the scenes remain
realistic but the technique used is that of
abstraction
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