Vente de tableaux et peintures célèbres du mouvement Réalisme américain

American Realism brings together painters who, from the late 19th century to the mid-20th, depicted the United States as they saw it: fast-growing cities, the countryside, ports, workers and the ordinary places of modern life. Without forming an organised group, they sought to build a truly American kind of painting.

The movement accompanied the country’s profound transformations. Industrialisation, the arrival of millions of immigrants and the first skyscrapers changed the face of America, and painters chose to record it without idealising it. Their style remained figurative and legible, attentive to light, gesture and the atmosphere of places. Many began as newspaper illustrators, which explains their taste for direct observation and scenes captured from life.

Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins led the way after the Civil War, returning from stays in Paris at a time when the Realism of Gustave Courbet was shaking up academic painting. Homer painted the coastal landscapes of Maine, Eakins the rowers and operating theatres of Philadelphia. In the early 20th century, Robert Henri, John Sloan and George Bellows turned to New York, its working-class streets, its bars and its boxing matches, to the point of being nicknamed the Ashcan School.

Edward Hopper, a pupil of Henri, is its most famous figure. Influenced by the framing of Edgar Degas, which he discovered in Paris, he painted deserted façades, petrol stations and late-night diners, as in ‘Nighthawks’ of 1942, where a few silent figures wait under a harsh light. His compositions, close to cinema, still inspire many film-makers.

During the Depression of the 1930s, Grant Wood celebrated rural America with ‘American Gothic’, while Ben Shahn and Reginald Marsh adopted a more social vein. After 1945, abstract art dominated New York, but Andrew Wyeth, with ‘Christina’s World’, and later the Photorealist painters carried on this attention to everyday American life.