Quote Originally Posted by DemonArchangel
Why realism Adrian?
It's simple: People got sick of the abstract. They don't want to see the abstract anymore, because it's been around for too long.
Isn't that wishful thinking?

Abstract painting has been a huge success throughout the previous century; it appealed to many millions and it brought in millions of bucks in galleries and auctions. But its most important contribution to painting is that it changed our perspective on the process and function of painting.

The realist paintings which I saw yesterday would have been literally unthinkable without the preceding 'abstract century' in which painters broke down reality into its constituent parts in the eye of the beholder: colour, dimensions, shape, surface, context. This tendency has always been as much a part of visual art as realism, going right back to the cave paintings of Lascaux which, in their own way, broke down the animal images into essentials.

I think it is fair to say that Lucian Freud, who is considered the apogee of modern portrait painting, owes as much to the twentieth century as he does to the 17th or 19th centuries. He is certainly in debt to Picasso, whom he knew and worked with, even though he would have loved to just kill that overbearing father-figure.