super-realistn.adj.

1914 J. London Mutiny of Elsinore xvii. 119 My pristine fictional escape from the Real, making me a philosopher, has bound me absolutely to the wheel of the Real. I, the superrealist, am the only unrealist on board the Elsinore.

1919 V. J. Seligman Salonica Side-show viii. 91 There exists..a school of realistic literature which portrays the life of a humble artisan..and endeavours to atone for the inevitable absence of interest in the subject by supplying a wealth of minute and superfluous detail... The man has yet to be born (a super-realist indeed!) who can extract the kernel of entertainment from the dry shell of an Army Form.

1923 F. A. Waterhouse Random Stud. in Romantic Chaos vii. 167 The typical Maupassant story leaves the impression of absolute reality, of life in the raw, unarranged by art... Maupassant is a realist, and a super-realist.

1969 Life 27 June 44/1 The fidelity with which the Super Realists tender their images is reminiscent of the 17th Century Dutch realist.

1982 G. R. Bach & L. Torbet Time for Caring xv. 137 Many people today are too reality-bound... The opposite of this superrealist is the person who treats every message of the unconscious as though it were literal gospel.

1991 J. Wilton in D. Blandy & K. G. Congdon Pluralistic Approaches to Art Crit. ii. 81/2 By the 1970s a new school of super-realists emerged in California producing work rendered with an almost photographic tendency.

2008 Weekend Austral. (Nexis) 15 Nov. 20 Sceptics—who prefer to call themselves super-realists—argue that it is folly to think there can ever be a comprehensive international agreement.

1925 tr. N. Ségur in Living Age 28 Nov. 457/1 One of the young men whom M. Breton enrolled among the super-realists [Fr. surréalistes], M. Joseph Delteil, had this year a success based on boldness and frank sincerity with his Jeanne d'Arc.

1931 W. Lewis Diabolical Princ. 64 The cultural message of Transition is still further defined by the incorporation of the dreamaesthetic of the Super-realists into a body already reeking with ‘romance’—indeed putrid with the excessive decomposition of that condition.

1947 Mod. Lang. Rev. 42 17 The super-realists of various descriptions have, like Rimbaud and other symbolist poets ‘found sacred the disorder of their intelligence’.

1985 C. W. E. Bigsby Crit. Introd. Twentieth-cent. Amer. Drama III. iii. 159 The use of puppet figures by the Bread and Puppet Theatre, for example, owes as much to Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus Group, to Kurt Schwitters and the Japanese Bunraku theatre as to the super-realists.

1925 N.Y. Times 4 July 3/4 Hostilities developed when members of the super-realist school of writers discovered among the guests Mme. Rachilde..who recently offended their internationalist sentiments.

1945 H. E. Read Coat of Many Colours 110 As a concept it [sc. space] is very evident in the work of a superrealist painter like Dali.

1992 N. F. Weber Patron Saints (1995) 172 He [sc. Chick Austin] also had a newer superrealist style not unlike the mysterious arrangements of imaginary forms painted by Pierre Roy.

2008 M. Eaude Catalonia ix. 126 The absolutely realist detail heightens the super-realist effect of strange shapes and startling juxtapositions.

1945 New Europe Jan. 4/1 Those super-realist politicians who tend at the present time to treat lightly the affairs of the smaller or weaker nations.

1974 Illustr. London News 31 Aug. 68/2 Hepher..has been linked to the American Super Realist artists who work from photographs.

1996 B. Richardson in W. W. Demastes Realism & Amer. Dramatic Trad. i. 11 For the superrealist playwright.., ‘the only way to see the world as it is, is to render it with as little distortion and personal overlay as possible’, writes Carol Gelderman.

2011 Observer (Nexis) 3 July (Review section) 18 Struth realised that he was ‘making big super-realist photographic paintings that just seemed pointless and a bit stupid’.