"Realism Rising: A Look at Four Americans who Defy Modernism," Atelier, May 1993, pp. 46-55, 78-80.

A Look at Four Americans who Defy Modernism

by Jason Edward Kaufman

For more than three millennia Realism ruled Western painting and sculpture. This artistic convention -- loosely defined as the faithful representation of the visual world -- had preserved for us the likenesses of Egyptian queens, Renaissance princes, and Dutch merchants. It had given pictorial form to Roman myth, Christian legend, Medieval ballads, and the visionary imaginings of nineteenth-century Romantics. But its unchallenged hegemony ended a century ago as a wave of scientific and technological advances altered man's conception of the universe and of himself.

Around 1900, such revolutionary perspectives as Einstein's theory of relativity, Freud's conception of the subconscious, and the discoveries of X-rays and atomic radiation uprooted the accepted European models of matter and mind. At the same time, equally dramatic changes were transforming the environment. Suddenly the night blazed with electric lights, voices travelled on the airwaves and through telephone wires, automobiles sped along city streets and planes sailed overhead. The Modern age had begun and the arts, too, were soon to change. Artists began to search for a style appropriate to the new era, and with each successive movement -- from Cubism to Futurism and Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism -- Modernists distanced themselves further from art's Realist past. Their subject became consciousness itself, and Realism survived only as a retrograde undercurrent.

No one would dispute that Modernists succeeded in expanding the means by which ideas are conveyed in art. But the endeavor was not an unqualified success. Abstraction engendered a widening gulf between artist and spectator that culminated with the Formalist exercise called Minimalism. Recognizable imagery inevitably returned, first with Pop Art, then New-Image painting, and Neo-Expressionism. And today, "Post-Modernism" again embraces representation through photographs, the mass media, and manufactured or found objects, albeit in an ironic mode. Straight Realism, however, is still generally considered passe.

The main reason is the Modernist myth of the avant-garde which holds that in order to be worthwhile an artist must be stylistically new. This is a false criterion for distinction in art, and furthermore, it is quite destructive because it regards qualities such as beauty, intellectual content, technical excellence, and spirituality as incidental, and even antithetical, to the all-important gauge of newness. But Modernism and Post-Modernism have gathered such inertia that to challenge their precepts is to estrange oneself from the mainstream.

The situation is compounded by assertions of "artistic freedom" and demands for "political correctness." Critics risk being charged with insensitivity to issues associated with the artist, not with the work of art. All kinds of agendas have become more important than the merit of the presentation itself. The first rule is that all art and each artist is just as good as any other. But the haste with which visitors fly through so many Modernist and Post-Modernist exhibitions is an overt indication that much of this art fails to engage and satisfy its audience.

One cannot help but wonder whether something was not lost with the overthrow of Realism. Why do the Old Masters continue to attract crowds? Not just because they are rare and valuable antiques, but because we still admire their technical achievement and formal and compositional beauty. We still take pleasure in comprehending their narrative, historical, and allegorical content. Why should these same qualities in contemporary representational painting be discarded as unprogressive and unimportant? Are there no contemporary artists as skilled as the Old Masters?

It is often hard to know. Realism isn't talked about much in the influential circles of the contemporary artworld. Dealers, critics, collectors, peer panels, and curators -- the coterie whose activities help determine what is and what is not currently considered "serious art" -- have discredited Realist painting. The notion that representational painting is passé or reactionary is so ingrained as to be an artworld cliche. Major museums tend to avoid contemporary American Realism as do all but a handful of galleries. Textbooks omit it and the media almost always ignore it. Government agencies categorically deny grants for Realist art and university fine-art programs have abandoned teaching it. One would think American Realism didn't even exist. Yet, despite its decimation Realist painting has not disappeared.

If any American artist symbolizes the persistence of Realism during the Modern era, it is Andrew Wyeth (born 1917). As a watercolorist he carried the legacy of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent into the twentieth century. And he is no less talented with tempera and dry brush. Had Dürer painted American farm scenes they might look something like Wyeth's. Erickson's Barn, a watercolor from 1968, is a case in point. The pale gray clapboards, the overcast sky, and the beautiful green pine tree are typical of his masterly arrangement of compositional elements and precise handling of the delicate tonal medium.

Though he is known mainly for his naturalistic landscapes made near his homes in Pennsylvania and Maine, Wyeth also paints figures. His meticulous technique can produce a startlingly accurate "photographic" evocation of his sitter. Yet, this scrutiny rarely conveys a human range of emotions. Despite his fantastic technical control, his figures often appear vacant and a little cold, as if they were still-life objects. The almost intrusive perspicacity of a work such as Heat Lightning (1977) barely cloaks the fact that this woman is stripped of the complexity and depth of her personality. It is in landscape, not the figure, that Wyeth distinguishes himself.

Wyeth is one of very few living Realists represented in the collections of most major American museums, and he has enjoyed wide exposure abroad as well, in both Europe and Japan. In 1974 he had exhibitions in the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto, and in 1984 he had a show at the Funabashi Gallery, Tokyo. In fact, the market for Wyeth has been heavily supported by Japanese collectors. After the more than 240 "Helga" paintings and studies made a splash on their American tour in 1987-88, they were purchased en bloc by a Japanese collector, supposedly for $40 million. There have been single pictures in tempera that have sold in privately for more than $1 million, making Wyeth the highest priced American Realist.

One of the outstanding Realists of the next generation, Richard Maury (born 1935), has resided in Florence since 1960. His still lifes and genre scenes recall the works of Vermeer, an artist whose inspiration is everywhere present in Maury's work. Indeed, like a living Old Master, he works up his compositions from pencil drawings, transfers them to gessoed canvas laid down on a wooden panel, then slowly applies oil glazes. Such craftsmanship, virtually extinct in our age, produces objects whose physical quality enhances their visual beauty.

In a monumental full-length portrait of a Standing Nude (1987), the woman stands on a patterned rug beside a letter-strewn desk, a well worn door, and a low bed. Everything about the figure is lifelike, from her anatomical proportions and relaxed carriage to her almost tangible skin. But the deftness of Maury's brushwork goes more than skin deep, for we sense also the model's drifting attention and slight anxiousness.

An intricate composition such as Lantern (1989) combines an elaborate still life, a half-length figure, and a spacious interior. Strict accuracy in drawing and modeling, and meticulous fidelity to surface textures and colors lend a characteristically crisp lucidity to the various glass, wood, and ceramic objects. The diffuse sunlight gives palpable depth to the atmosphere, providing the sensation that the viewer's space extends into the canvas. When painting is perfected to this degree the result has an elevating, almost transcendent quality that induces us to examine the ordinary with renewed fascination. Though he has yet to achieve wide renown, Maury's work is in the Metropolitan as well as numerous private collections. His commercial representative is Gerold Wunderlich & Company of New York.

Perhaps the most radical of America's contemporary Realists is Gregory Gillespie (born 1936). Working in oils and a kind of acrylic on gessoed board, he has perfected a trompe-l'oeil technique that Dürer, Holbein, and van Eyck would admire. His voluptuous Still-life with Eggplants (1983) provides evidence of that expertise, as does his remarkable virtuoso portrait of the painter William Beckman (1992). But Gillespie's brand of Realism is peculiarly "Modern" because it embraces elements of the surreal and the abstract.

In some paintings he drifts nearly entirely free from Realism. Mask/Landscape (1979/90), for instance, shows a toothy, three-eyed Balinese mask in front of a phantasmagoric landscape with a mysterious shrine on a seaside knoll. The only Realist passage is the sharp-focus face of the cartoonish figure on the left. More typically, however, the ratio of real and unreal is reversed. A 1985 self-portrait contains an array of keenly observed details, but the verisimilitude is interrupted by conspicuous excursions into the surreal: a diminutive monochrome homunculus, representing the artist as a child, hovers by Gillespie's knee, and a pixie-sized portrait of his wife, no taller than an apple, leans against a vase on the foreground table. This weirdness -- some call it "Magic Realism" -- can be a little unsettling and at least one writer has interpreted it as lurking madness.

Indeed, Gillespie has confessed a fear of following his manic depressive mother into an institution. "You can't help thinking it could happen to you," he says. Yet, the character revealed in his vast almost Rembrandtesque array of self-portraits seems more complex than unstable -- despite the fact that a sense of the bizarre inescapably intervenes. His excellent full-length Self-portrait at 54 (1991), for example, seems jovial and self-contained, although the prominently placed sledge hammer in the far corner invites a violent reading. One gets the sense he is only kidding. "As far as that feeling of the half-mad that creeps in sometimes," he explains, "I think it is something like a basic theme -- instability or potential chaos." Such a theme manifests an unusually high level of awareness, not insanity. Gillespie's work has been acquired by many of the country's top museums and was the subject of an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in 1977. He is represented by Forum Gallery in New York.

Whereas Wyeth and Maury paint their surroundings, and Gillespie mixes the objective world with flashes of inner thought, a young Realist, Vincent Desiderio (born 1955), employs Realism in an allegorical mode. An experience in Italy led him in 1984 to give up abstraction to paint like an Old Master, emulating Ribera, the Caravaggisti, Velázquez, and Gericault. His dimly lit dreamlike scenes, on view at Marlborough Gallery in New York, are characterized by a subdued palette that evokes the yellowed varnish of seventeenth-century oils. He often works on a grand scale, creating three-part figurative tableaux up to 35-feet across. The main theme of these triptychs has been a critique of Modernism.

In Expulsion (1992), for example, Adam and Eve flank not Eden, but a view of Picasso's empty Provencal studio in Chateau de Vauvenargues. This same studio figures in another triptych, the mural-sized Romance and Reunion (1992), where it serves as the setting for a seance in which seven candle-lit figures try to conjure Picasso's spirit. The side canvas on the left shows a small boy in bed with his ear to the wall, and on the right, his parents having sex. The relationship to the seance is less than clear. Desiderio says the triptych deals with curiosity about one's forebears and the inevitable confusions of history.

Lately, Desiderio's art-historical/philosophical bent has been overwhelmed by a personal tragedy. His elder son, Sam, was born hydrocephalic, and at the age of four suffered a disabling stroke following an operation to drain fluid from the brain case. Only now, after two years in the hospital, will he return home with a full-time nurse. According to the artist, "Sam's injury took me out of the purely theoretical realm and pressured me to deal with something truly authentic."

Yet, Desiderio has persisted in submerging this authenticity in muddled comments on the state of art history. The title of the triptych Merciless Master (1991) refers to deKooning's epithet for Mondrian, but this work has nothing to do with art history. It is utterly dominated by the right-hand panel, a doctor's-eye view of the artist's injured son. Shown helpless and unaware in the tilted hospital bed, his mauve lips loosely parted, the eyelids hanging shut, his left arm contorted lifelessly, the portrait is like a Pietà. The dignity of Sam's struggle, so movingly apprehended in this painting, is compromised by its pawnlike employment in Desiderio's intellectual games. The other panels are subsumed by this moving canvas. Thus, the couple sprawled in the central canvas suggest parents collapsed from worry and exhaustion, and the blind swineherd on the left embodies their fruitless search for answers.

The beautifully painted Savant (1992) is like an answered prayer. In this independent canvas Sam is healthier, with redder complexion and longer hair, comfortably seated on a couch with his napping grandfather. In stark contrast to the sober suffering of the earlier portraits, this domestic scene conveys joy. Sam's eyes are wide open and ecstatic, yet with a look of self-possession and inner awareness. He even seems to smile faintly. What a relief after the grim hospital images. Despite the oxygen tank, its blue plastic hose snaking through the boy's legs and up to his trachea, Sam's seraphic glow is an uplifting revelation that promises hope.

Such pathos cannot be articulated by abstraction, nor by art historical puns, nor by the irony and political agit-prop of Post-Modernism. Far from outmoded, the best Realism insists, as does prolonged contemplation of reality itself, that there is more to be seen than meets the eye. We should be wary when Modernists unilaterally disparage Realist art, declaring their work alone as original and authentic. In the words of Eugène Delacroix, "Realism is the grand expedient that innovators use to revive the interest of an indifferent public, at periods when schools that are lifeless and inclined to mannerism do nothing but repeat the rounds of the same inventions. Suddenly a return to nature is proclaimed by an artist who claims to be inspired."

Jason Edward Kaufman ©