Get Real: An Introduction to Contemporary American Realism
Essay by Viginia Anne Bonito, PhD

Peace, Love, Hip, Cool, Hang Ten, Ten Four, Get Real – these colorful colloquialisms have all too quickly become nostalgic reminders of the jargon which enlivened the American vocabulary of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, they still stand as the verbal codifiers of a new vision of society and of personal freedom, one that clashed, often violently, with tradition and the establishment, and, that permanently transformed the cultural infrastructure of the second half of the twentieth century. In this same moment, America also witnessed the birth of a new art form called Photorealism that, following hot on the heels of the Pop generation, took the art world by storm. As Get Real slipped into conversational language as an admonition regarding societal mores, a group of young artists – relatively independently of one another – were stirring up new styles in art with realism as their guide. With hindsight, at the end of the twentieth century, we are recognizing that realism is taking its place as the power stroke of the art world globally, and that Contemporary American Realism is perhaps its strongest exponent.

A testimony to the indomitable persistence and strength of realism as an art form, the Seavest Collection features work by the leading masters of Post War American Realism, among them, John Baeder, Carolyn Brady, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Janet Fish, Gregory Gillespie, Ralph Goings, Philip Pearlstein, Joseph Raffael, and Larry Rivers.

It is our hope that the selection of highlights from the Collection will grant the pleasure of discovering anew the power of direct visual language as a base from which to develop contemporary iconography and symbols, from which to explore the phenomenon of perception in its broadest sense, and from which to celebrate nature, design, and anima. The practitioners of Contemporary American Realism have turned the tables on Abstraction, Surrealism, the camera yet again, and the traditional use of materials. They were, for the most part, trained in the gamut of pre- and post war abstraction. It is their absorption and transformation of the principals of twentieth-century modernism that, in good part, stamps later twentieth century American Realism with its special look and message. It is hardly a regurgitation of academic verism. It is a welcome and forceful addition to a world already glutted with technological imagery and commercial art. It is the banner of a culture base that seems too often intangible, but that, like the American heartland and the American dream, is very much alive in the pulse and daily routine of the population at large.

Art is vital when it functions as a visual communicator of a particular moment, when it inspires, when it drives and is driven by idea. A route has already begun to be mapped out by exhibitions and critical literature of the past few decades, which have pointed to the return of the New Realism with enthusiasm. In his pithy essay, "Modernism, Postmodernism and the Return of Realism," Kevin Dean reminds us of a quote by Stendhal:

"When art is in trouble, realism comes to the rescue."   (Footnote 1)

The argument about a proper name for the newest realist movement goes something like this:  On the one hand, the term realism can suggest the dogged representation of the material sphere; on the other, it has come to be applied to modernist expressions of psychologically based, i.e. nonvisual, realities.  On another front, the practitioners shy away from Realism as a title (even when joined with adjectival qualifiers) because they do not wish to be perceived as tired hacks rehashing old stuff that critics of politically correct modernism at times make them out to be.  From the early litany of suggested titles, Photorealism seems to have made the biggest impression.  But there are misconceptions associated with this designation that we will take up momentarily.

In its broadest sense realism in art suggests the faithful representation of the visual world.Academicians like Linda Nochlin have contributed significantly in the formulation of an even more precise definition. For Nochlin, the distinguishing feature of realism is "the assertion of the visual perception of things in the world as the necessary basis of the structure of the pictorial field itself." (Footnote 2)

The dialogue is a healthy one; categorization is essential. After all language exists as the essential vehicle that fills the need to formalize and to verbalize ideas. But, at best, even language falls short of precision especially as we reflect, for example, on the many ways there are of expressing the same concept, or, on how language fails in the attempt to communicate real intention, perception, etc., with accuracy. It is the struggle to find and to apply appropriate terminology - dialectic - that gives us the opportunity to discern, to debate and to learn. Sometimes broader categories are more useful than the odd assortment of "isms". One doesn’t have to go as far as Pluralism, which basically says that many styles can exist at once. With hindsight and with the test of the durability of realism as we have closed the twentieth century, this author tends to favor the term Post War American Realism as an umbrella term that serves to encompass - holistically - the gamut of representational art produced in post war America. I favor Contemporary American Realism as the best nomenclature to express the most current work in the process of the production of realist art as it continues to unfold. Realism as it is applied in this title (CAR) is meant to be taken on its simplest level, as that which is not abstraction (abstraction being the expression of a quality apart from an object). Furthermore, the title is meant to serve as codifier not just of distinguishing qualities, but also of geographic placement and position on the historic time line. Clearly, a century out from now "Contemporary" might seem a misnomer. However it is very much a part of our current conversational vocabulary in much the same way that "Modern" was at the beginning of this century, and Renaissance was for the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries in spite of the many realist revivals that have followed.

When we marvel at the resilience of Realism, it is only a short step to recall that philosophers, sages, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have maintained that certain basic needs and drives of Homo Sapiens have changed little since prehistory, the Rift Valley and the caves of Lascaux.

From the tradition of systems of Platonic thought to the writings of Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade, scholars have identified such constants as imagination, archetypes and cycles (expressed for example in the changes of season, and the life cycle) as links within the community of man. (Footnote 3) Joined to the reality of the cyclical nature of things is opposing phenomenon of linearity, of progress, so called, as it has manifested in shifts in life style by different cultures over time. The ever-so-delicately balanced interaction of the circle and the line is exquisitely expressed in the timeless symbol of the Yin / Yang.

The present discussion brings to mind the opening remarks by a favored college Professor to a course I took on Shakespeare.  Professor Wolfe maintained that there are twenty three plots in the English language and the Greeks had all of them.  Would we argue, then, that Shakespeare shouldn’t have reconfigured them, nor the succession of poets and playwrights that have followed?  Creativity is at the heart of our very being, and the artists among us are blessed and degree of talent.

Change, variety and process are also essential elements of the very concept of existence. Realism and abstraction, classicism and anticlassicism will continue to surface, to shift position, to keep the dialogue and interest both lively and alive, and will, hopefully guard the critical and precious balance between the line and the circle. As our pleasure here is to discover the strength and vitality of Realism in later-twentieth-century America, I would like, at this point, to focus on the impulses, past and present, to which it is linked.

Across recorded time, writers on art have documented and extolled the pleasures granted by artists who could imitate nature so perfectly and manipulate it so artfully that their work brought amazement and new insight to viewers. The act of imitation, of aping or copying is expressed by the term mimesis. Mimesis manifests itself in many ways, and is an essential quality of realism. Mimesis is the vehicle by which we learn - to speak, to walk, to socialize, to represent. It is also the vehicle that, in the context of the visual arts and sense of sight, can heighten the viewers’ awareness and ability to see both the natural world and into themselves. When the Renaissance Pope, Julius II, commissioned Michelangelo to design his funerary monument, the sculptor decided, among numerous compositional elements, to place the figures of Slaves on the tomb. The Dying Slave in particular (The Louvre, Paris) was meant as a symbol of the extinction of the arts at the death of so great a patron.

The sculpture is not only an emblem of the power of the sculptor to transform inert, recalcitrant matter - marble - into an image of divine perfection and beauty. It is an emblem, as well, of the mimetic arts by virtue of the strut or support for the waning figure that has the form of an ape holding a mirror. To ape, to mirror, to reflect, that is a critical component of the message of art.

Some of the earliest stories that marvel at just how skilled the artist’s ingenuity, eye, and hand could be are recorded in Pliny the Eld’s Natural History. He tells us of a painting by Zeuxis, a still life, in which the fruit was so realistically described, that birds flew down and pecked at the grapes. He goes on to relate that for as celebrated as Zeuxis’s achievement was, that Zeuxis himself was fooled in much the same fashion as he had fooled the birds by a painting by his colleague Parrhasius. Parrhasius painted a scene from the Trojan wars and then painted a fictive curtain over part of it. Zeuxis, much to his embarrassment, attempted to draw the curtain aside to see the rest of the picture. These examples of entertaining trompe l'oeil demonstrate the pleasures of realism. However, realism served higher aims as well. Moral lessons could be drawn and nobility of the human spirit revealed in much the same manner as through epic poetry and theater.

The preferability of mimetic response to the world at large, and of verisimilitude as the guide for artists, is documented from Pliny and Pausanius to Alberti and Vasari, and by a myriad of other authors, especially as categories for artistic expression expanded from the seventeenth century to the present. (Footnote 4) By the seventeenth century, landscape, still life and genre came fully into their own as categories equally as viable for representation as religious art, history painting and portraiture. The expansive vision of the Romantics, who looked back in time and forwards, who looked to awesome nature and into their inner passions, increased the inventory exponentially; so too, the unique perceptions of the Social Realists and the Photorealists of our own century.

As historical perspective overtakes criticism at the end of the twentieth century, we begin to understand that the thread of realism, even within our own century, remains relatively unbroken. Numerous categories, traditional and modern, are represented by the artists whose work is presented in this selection from the Seavest Collection. Among the distinguishing characteristics of Contemporary American Realism is exploded scale, and high-pitched color, characteristics that speak of the special brand of monumentality, density and intensity of contemporary life. Another essential component that impacts the character of the images is the use of the camera to collect and to record subject matter, and the use of photographs in various ways in the composing and execution of paintings. Contemporary Realist subject matter depends on the impact of our material culture (quantitatively as well as qualitatively) upon our environment. The camera has assumed a key position in the artistic process as an essential tool in the process of capturing the gamut of events that take place on the reflective surfaces of modern materials - glass, polished metal, high-gloss paints, neon lights, etc., or in the arena of contemporary life (here I refer to the popular appeal of photojournalism). The term Photorealism was coined and popularized by Louis K. Meisel in his well-known anthologies primarily because the artists which he included under the title "use the camera and photograph to gather information" and "have the technical ability to make the finished work appear photographic." (Footnote 5) While it is true that, especially in the early stages of the movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it was the intention of the artists to make their paintings look informal and like snapshots, it is also important to note that artists' relationship with the camera extends as far back, at least, as the 17th century.

It should be recalled, at this juncture, that perspective systems were the basis, in one form or another, of realist movements from Antiquity onwards; they lend the ability to organize or cleverly manipulate spatial recessions. Most perspective systems depend on an understanding of optics and it is important to note in the context of our discussion, that they are based on monocular vision. In an early experiment with vanishing lines and perspective, Filippo Brunelleschi, the Renaissance architect, produced an experiment that is related to Alberti’s formulation of a one point perspective system and that, uncannily, is similar to the technology of the camera. He painted an image of the Baptistry of Florence on a wooden panel, the dimensions of which were half a braccio square (that is, half an arms length). He cut a pin hole cut into it at exactly where the vanishing point would be. The viewer was meant to look through the pin hole from the back of the panel at a mirrored surface into which the picture was reflected, held at arms length (one braccio) from that panel. The impression was exactly as if looking directly at the building. (Footnote 6) By the 1630s, there is documentation that convex lenses (a form of wide angle lenses) were added to gridded frames (already a venerable painters’ device) to transfer information from the subject to be represented (for example, alla prima or from a finished compositional draft) to the canvas. From that century on, the combination of lens and grid helped in the development of expansive, painted panoramas and city views. With the discovery of the camera obscura and its associated uses a yet broader, new range of optical/pictorial effects became apparent - accentuated perspectives, heightened colors, contrasts of light and dark, and halation of highlights. (Footnote 7) It is useful to recall, in the context of this discussion, that the primary definition of the word camera, even in English, is chamber and that it derives from the Greek, kamara, vaulted chamber or room (in other words, geometrically bounded inhabitable space).

From its inception, the "camera" has exchanged sometimes flirtatious and sometimes heated repartee with the fine arts, especially as each has impacted our understanding and ability to replicate - to capture the world about us through the sense of sight. The advances made on the camera obscura, particularly by Daguerre and Niepce in the early 1820s and 30s, through the addition of a shutter, light sensitive film and a viewing system, opened a new chapter for the camera and for its dialogue with the fine arts. From the moment of its introduction into the public domain, the modern-day camera soon became a cherished instrument of professionals and amateurs alike.

The camera and its resultant product, the photograph rivaled the most skilled painter’s ability to depict the natural world, presenting extraordinary challenges to painters, especially from a technical standpoint. For example, in the hands of such pioneers in the arena of photography as Henri Cartier Bresson and Bernice Abbott, photojournalism and social realism were established as "art forms." With the contribution of penetrating images and with the capacityto capture fleeting expressions and meaning beneath outward appearances, whether of depressed societies, or, of scientific phenomena such as magnetism and motion, the camera further advanced the realm of visual imagery placing a formidable challenge to the fine arts to address the hard issues in society, the world of ephemera and of that which not visible to the naked eye.(Footnote 8)

It is exactly the camera’s ability to capture reflection, action, special light effects, and ephemera virtually instantaneously that has made it the perfect addition to the technical process of producing a Contemporary Realist painting. There is a misconception that Contemporary Realists categorically project slides or photographs onto their canvases, and that their meticulously rendered surfaces are realized by a sort of paint-by-number, fill-in-the-outlines process.

This is far from the case. A few of the Photorealists used projection of images early on, but with the intention of and for the specific purpose of imparting a particularly neutral, rather mechanical look across the picture surface. It is the case, as the essays on each of the individual artists included in this selection will reveal, that most use photographs the way their forebears used ancient sculpture, live models, props or finished drawings, that is, as an aid to developing compositions. Photographs are taken to study framing and composition, to collect large amounts of information that can later be subjected to a reductive process, to study form, light and color under varying circumstances, and to objectify or neutralize subject matter (in the way, for example that commercial photo offset printing does).

We have already made reference, in the limited space of this introduction, to the fact that artists have always depended upon tools and aids in the creation of their images - cartoons, transfer grids, the camera obscura, and so on. The modern photographic processes should be viewed as yet another element that expands the list and brings with it an expanded gamut of imagery. It should be viewed as essential and timely for the fact that it reflects a technology that is contemporary with the creation of that imagery. All great advances in style and art movements across time have depended in good part upon the technology of their moment.

Just as an obvious example, let us reflect upon the impact of the introduction of iron implements and weapons (the Iron Age [in the Mediterranean region ca. 1200 BC]) upon the history of societies, the history of architecture and the history of sculpture.

As a tool in the technical process, images of successfully composed and photographed subject matter can be projected directly onto the surface to be painted so that outlines can be transferred. Photos can also serve as an aid in the development of compositions that are then laid down, not by projection, but by hand through more traditional means (grids, for example) onto the picture surface. (Footnote 9) Not withstanding traditional or more "modern" composing and transfer techniques, there is always the moment - once the aids have been employed - when the artist must confront the blank surface and with mind and hand, through line, paint, clay, chisel, etc., transform that surface into an image.

The search for new tools and materials has always been part of the artistic process and the evolution of style. It a search that has accelerated in the twentieth century, and that, in the frenzy of the kaleidoscopic successions (and co-existence) of post war art movements, has not only accelerated but compressed, especially in the face of advanced technologies. If we examine the case of the camera, twentieth century technology contributed to the development of what had been a rudimentary tool for artists into an art form in its own right. With the introduction of the camera as we know it, a new field of artistic endeavor - photography - was identified. The hand of these new artists (photographers) was so far removed from the figural process seemed of little import, to the application of the term art form as applied to the arena of photography. As the computer, for example, now, like a Deus ex machina, enters the arena of art can we envision the hand of the artist dropping completely out of the equation in the near future? A corollary inquiry might be "For art to be modern, does it mean that the materials need to be as well?" In fact, from its slow ascendancy to primary support for painting by the early sixteenth century, through its tortuous descent in the hands of Minimalism and Structuralism, to the deathblow struck it by Conceptualism, the significance of the canvas too (and the media and materials of traditional pictorial illusionism) has followed the ebbs and flows of Realism.

By definition, art means skill; craftsmanship; the human ability to make things - the hand is implied. The reductive aspects of post painterly abstraction - Pop Art, Structuralism, Minimalism, Conceptualism - have neutralized the tracks or marks of the artists’ hand (in one way or another, his presence), and, at the same time, have forced the so-called ineffable (illusionsim) virtually out of the realm of Art.

A sort of dissection or, breakdown into components of the stratigraphy of a pictorial surface has taken place, as a component of modernism, to "illuminate,"or, to assert the various material components and conventions of traditional painting. For example, Ad Reinhardt adopted only the black square as the ultimate picture. Robert Ryman, who "didn’t want anything in his paintings that didn’t need to be there" took white to be the point of no return for pictorial art. Joseph Kosuth, aligning with semiotics, went so far as to investigate the mechanism of meaning, essence and idea through assemblages of actual objects, photographs and language. Yet even so radical a reductivist as Ryman has as his ultimate reference point a thought closely aligned with the age old definition of art - the making of things; the hand - as expressed in his perhaps most oft quoted statement. "There is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint. The how of painting has always been the image - the end product." (Footnote 10)

If we recall our art history surveys, we might remember that the specific materials wood, canvas and paper (and the associated media - tempera, oil, graphite, pastel, etc.) were re-introduced in Western Europe in the Proto- and Renaissance periods and that they played a key role both in the resurgence of painting as a primary art form and in the slow ascent of pictorial illusionism.

From the fourteenth through the mid-twentieth century, these materials have served relatively unchallenged as the support for and, in service to, the visual domain - as windows onto the natural world or into the mind, soul and psyche. As words are to poets, these materials are to artists; they are the special province of the artists in the transformation of ideas into pictorial language. These materials have ridden the wave of shifts of style, and have withstood endless permutations and combinations. They have in some ways been improved upon, or at least expanded, in this century (for example, by the introduction of classes of materials such as synthetic resins and polymers).

But to return to the question of the challenge posed by the concept of modernity, for contemporary artists (as it has been across time) it seems not to lie exclusively in the search for new tools and materials, but in the search for expression and idea. At this moment in time a virtually endless range of materials is available to select from to suit the gamut of expressive language, but in the realm of Realism those simple, uncontrived materials which have faithfully served the ineffables of illusionism still stand.

Courage is necessary whatever path is chosen, whether it is in the search for the new expressive potential of technological materials, in the use of traditional materials - and, in the face of the great masters of the past - to forge new, exciting, timely and powerful imagery based on verisimilitude.

With Contemporary American Realism firmly established as an art movement, it is appropriate to consider its most immediate sources as well. (Footnote 11) Pop Art is often awarded the place of honor but, not surprisingly, just as there is lively debate regarding the viability of the term "realism", there are different camps on the impact of Pop Art as a source for the new realism.

Some point to the reintroduction of the figure or, object as the important contribution of Pop Art. Others would assert that the impersonal, neutral, commercial aspect of Pop Art - the emphasis on packaging, labeling and advertising displays - laid the groundwork for the appropriation of the sort of informal subject matter common to Contemporary Realism. The fact that the subject in Pop Art is usually at leastonce removed from its actual state of being, is seen as an important step towards those Photorealist paintings that come closest to appearing like snap shots. However, another step needed to be taken to fully launch the new realism, referred to in the mid 70s as Super Realism. That step was taken by a handful of artists but, among them, Malcolm Morley stands apart. Morley introduced paintings that appeared to be blown up reproductions of picture post cards, calendar views and travel brochures, in other words paintings of pictures, rather than of the actual places or objects. Though these paintings were still tied to a concept that in essence was the reproduction of a commercially produced item (i.e. paintings of printed pictures - postcards, calendar photos, etc.), it was their startling realism that struck a chord waiting to be sounded. (Footnote 12)

As we begin to process the fact that many of the older practitioners of Contemporary American Realism were trained in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, into our general understanding of the style as it is evolving, we become more and more aware of the vital link between pre- and post war modernism (including Op Art and Minimalism) and this new brand of realism. The impact of Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann as teachers, perhaps even more so than as artists, must also be more carefully considered. Impressionism, Post Impressionism and Modern Art, interest in perception and in the science and physiology of sight, in the impact of psychology, sociology, anthropology, primitive cultures, found objects, commercial art forms, the glut of mass production - the list goes on - have informed and been richly mined by Contemporary American Realists.

I would like here to offer one final thought regarding realism as a continuingly viable outlet of artistic production. In a very insightful commentary about seventeenth century Dutch art, Arthur Wheelock noted that a nineteeth-century devotee, Eugene Fromentin wrote that it "attempts to imitate what is, to make what is imitated charming, to clearly express simple, lively and true sensations...It has for law, sincerity, for obligation, truth." (Footnote 13)

Fromentin’s romantic notion is, however, quite at odds with the definition of painting given by one of the 17th century Dutch artists himself. Samuel Van Hoogstraten, the seventeenth-century painter who also wrote about art, defined painting as "a science that represents all ideas or notions that the entire visible world can give, and deceives the eye with outlines and colors." (Footnote 14)
Van Hoogstraten, here, echoed the words of many otherartists and writers about art from Antiquity to the present: Art is a fiction guided by idea and artifice, generated by creativity and, communicated with skill.

This statement and the essays on the individual artists represented on the Seavest Collection Website are revised versions of the introduction and essays that appear in a catalogue, Get Real: Contemporary American Realism from the Seavest Collection, published by the Duke University Museum of Art in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name. (Exhibition dates April 4 - July 6, 1997; publication date of the catalogue 1998). The exhibition provided the opportunity to examine anew, through the holdings of the Seavest Collection, the nature of Contemporary American Realism, from its sources, to its practitioners, to its place in the history of realist movements. What underpins the drive to verisimilitude? to visual commentary? to mute poetry? to the making of monuments? While Contemporary American Realism seems still to be the prodigal child of the Museum world, serious Galleries and collectors have been the mainstay of the artists (as has always been their role, historically, in the nurturing of new art movements). It is through the Galleries that initial screening takes place, and that particular artists’ work is fostered and promoted (both through support and advertising). The Galleries are strongholds of a sort, barometers of shifts of style. In the realm of Contemporary American Realism a number of Galleries – including, among others, OK Harris Works of Art,, Louis K. Meisel Gallery, the Staempfli Gallery, the Allan Stone Gallery, the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, the Marlborough Gallery – have played this critical role.

The Seavest Collection stands as one of the most prestigious collections of Contemporary American Realism. It represents a commitment to art and patronage on the part of a single individual, Richard D. Segal, with the participation and support of his family members, that began in the early 1980s primarily as a response to beautiful things. While the Seavest Collection is, as is always true of collections, representative of personal taste and passion, it has grown exponentially in concept and aims to be a foremost, comprehensive representative of a commanding new "school" of art.

© by Virginia Anne Bonito, revised “Get Real introduction”, April 10, 2000