Harriton Carved Glass

Long-lived painter Abraham Harriton (1893-1986) was born in Bucharest, Romania. He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York City from 1908 to 1915 under noted artists Kenyon Cox, Emil Carlsen and George DeForest Brush. He won many awards as a student at the Academy, and became a teacher himself. Harriton was a modernist and Social Realist who worked with the WPA in New York during the 1930's. But his work went through many phases, including influence by Albert Pinkham Ryder, and a Classicism in landscapes, portraits, figure compositions, marine paintings and allegories. Harriton wrote a book on Renaissance masters' techniques in under-painting and glazing. His own work, though modern, reflected his traditional concerns. Harriton received the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He exhibited in major exhibitions, including the Panama-Pacific Worlds Fair, the National Academy of Design, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York World's Fair Exhibition of Contemporary Art, 1939, Corcoran Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Arts Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among other museums and private collections, Harriton's work is represented in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshorn Museum, Oakland Art Museum and the Addison Gallery of American Art.

Realist art attempts to portray its subject matter without artifice. Similar to naturalism, authentic realist paintings and prints see an integration of true-to-life colors, meticulous detail and linear perspectives for accurate portrayals of the world. 

Work that involves illusionistic techniques of realism dates back to the classical world, such as the deceptive trompe l’oeil used since ancient Greece. Art like this became especially popular in the 17th century when Dutch artists like Evert Collier painted objects that appeared real enough to touch. Realism as an artistic movement, however, usually refers to 19th-century French realist artists such as Honoré Daumier exploring social and political issues in biting lithographic prints, while the likes of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet painting people — particularly the working class — with all their imperfections, navigating everyday urban life. This was a response to the dominant academic art tradition that favored grand paintings of myth and history. 

By the turn of the 20th century, European artists, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were experimenting with nearly photographic realism in their work, as seen in the attention to every botanical attribute of the flowers surrounding the drowned Ophelia painted by English artist John Everett Millais.

Although abstraction was the guiding style of 20th-century art, the realism trend in American modern art endured in Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and other artists’ depictions of the complexities of the human experience. In the late 1960s, Photorealism emerged with artists like Chuck Close and Richard Estes giving their paintings the precision of a frame of film.

Contemporary artists such as Jordan Casteel, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Aliza Nisenbaum are now using the unvarnished realist approach for honest representations of people and their worlds. Alongside traditional mediums, technology such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence and immersive installations are helping artists create new sensations of realism in art.

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