Andrew Graham-Dixon on crude bat-tle lines in 'The Pursuit of the Real' at the Barbican Art Gallery

REALISM, wrote the French art critic Edmond Duranty in 1856, is ''the opposite of a school. To speak of a 'school' of realism is nonsense: realism is a frank and total expression of an individuality that attacks precisely the conventions and limitations of any kind of school.''

''The Pursuit of the Real'', which opens at the Barbican Art Gallery on Thursday, is an exhibition that begs to differ. Curated by Timothy Wilcox for Manchester City Art Gallery (where it was seen earlier this year), this is a show that argues for the existence of a coherent school of realism in British art since the turn of the century.

The attempt is ambitious - the Royal Academy's 1987 blockbuster, ''British Art in the Twentieth Century'', found little such coherence in the subject, preferring, for the most part, to celebrate a sequence of idiosyn-cratic and unalterably disparate achievements - but not, it has to be said, entirely successful. Foundering on the evident heterogeneity of the artists it has yoked together, the nature of its failure is at least revealing. ''Realism'' turns out to be as knottily problematic, as subject to debate and revision, as Duranty had sug-gested.

''The Pursuit of the Real'' takes you from Walter Sickert (b.1860) to John Wonnacott (b.1940), but a comparison of the work in its first and last galleries should be enough to demonstrate that what you are wit-nessing is anything but the ''belief in the common heritage'' insisted upon by the show's catalogue. When Sickert paints his Le Lit de Cuivre in 1906, a nude in dingy bedsit circumstances rendered in viscous paint the colours of tarnished copper, he offers tangible evidence for his belief that ''the plastic arts...

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