Julian Bell: Realism in Twenty-First-Century Painting

Realist painting maintains a small niche in the contemporary art fair, but to mention realism today is to engage with questions about rival media. Maybe the representation of 'contemporary reality' belongs more properly to the digital, the photographic, the time-based and the three-dimensional? Julian Bell looks at the range of attitudes that contemporary painters from various countries bring to this situation - from rueful acceptance, to bold reassertion of the primacy of paint.