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Art history in the West forked in the 1800s, splitting into Romanticism and Realism. Realists depict “reality as it is,” with its economic dialectics, materialism, and class struggle. It deals in facts, in science, in things we can prove; it is not ecstatic but pragmatic, political. Realism tells the stories of real people, the factory worker, the industrialist architect, the provincial housewife having an affair. Not fairies, not women who talk to spirits, certainly not witches. The Romantics, on the other hand, turned away from the modern world as a reaction to the ugliness and brutality of the Industrial Revolution. Retreating into the world of folk and fairy tales, into the exotic, “the Oriental”; the Romantics lived in an opium den of avoidance.
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