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Day 1 20 REALISM Department of Art History, University of Delaware Gibson, Fall 2007 ARTH 231: AMERICAN ART II: FROM THE GILDED AGE TO THE PRESENT Hills, Realism and Figuration, 275-277, and nos. 104, 105, 106, 108. Put on the Board: the roving point of view; Vanitas >Duane Hanson Tourists 1970 >Chuck Close, Phil, 1979 A resurgence of realism occurred in sculpture and in painting. Moma's 1968 exhib. The Art of the Real, featured earlier works by artists working in this style. The popularity of this "super realism" as its best-known wing was called, shocked the avant-garde of the seventies. They thought realism was gone for good. Before this show, when most people describe an art style as realism, they used the word the way it was used in the 19th and early 20th C.: to refer to "objects and conditions outside a work's formal limits" like >Gustave Courbet Funeral at Ornans, 1849 >John Sloan, Movie 5 cents, 1907 This could mean how things looked, or how society worked, i.e. what was real as opposed to ideal, as in Courbet, a mid-19th c. painter, and John Sloan, as you know. >Naum Gabo, Linear Construction in Space # 4, 1957 But in the mid-20th c., from the constructivist Realistic Manifesto of 1920, one of whose main exponents was the Russian sculptor Naum Gabo, through Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, realism also = material properties of the work of art, staying as they were. ie, paint was paint, and, in the case of Gabo, plastic was plastic, plastic thread was plastic thread --it did not, as it came to do once again through the 70s and into the 80s, in paintings like Alice Neel s The Family, 1970, perform its signifying function. The avant-garde, especially in New York, the stronghold of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, saw to it in the 1950s and the 1960s that continuing realisms were ignored by the mainstream as retardataire. Critics and curators followed suit, simply chosing to ignore the varieties of realism that had been going on under their noses ever since the 1940s. 2 >Alice Neel The Family, 1970 A return to realism, though in a more abstract way, was going on even in New York, though. --In a moment we ll look again at the work of Alice Neel, a contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists, who never stopped doing realism, >Pearlstein, Female Model on Day Bed, 1972 >Flack Queen, 1975-76 and at Richard Pearlstein, who started doing it again in the fifties after trying Abstract Expressionism. We ll finish up with Audrey Flack, who never really abandoned realism, either, but developed a hyper-real airbrush technique to make her paintings glow with almost surrealistically intense color. As Doss notes, however, realism also returned to other places, such as California. So, first, will leave New York, and go west to the Golden State, where artists such as >David Park Campus Scene 1955 >Richard Diebenkorn Untitled, 1956 David Park and Richard Diebenkorn, had returned-- at about the same time-- as Pearlstein from earlier and more abstract styles Paying a great deal more attention to the relation of forms than he did to personalities,, David park painted people like a formalist. Similarly, Diebenkorn s cup on a table seemed at least as much about color, texture and atmosphere as it is about any story about who s drinking tea alone, and why. >Diebenkorn Berkeley # 22, 1954 Just a year before, Diebenkorn s Berkeley # 22, 1954. -- and other paintings, exhibited a hard won abstraction for which he was nationally recognized. Diebenkorn Berkeley # 22, 1954 > Diebenkorn Untitled, 1956 What s surprising to us now, is that this seemed so strange then. --What s the matter with painting abstractly and then going back to figurations? ROBERT COLESCOTT, b. 1925 >Colescott, Grandma and the Frenchman (Identity Crisis),1990 A quarter of a century later, another, more psychosocial but still expressive realism emerged in the work of Robert Colescott. *>Duane Hanson Tourists 1970 >Chuck Close Linda, 1976 3 Despite the inroads made by Super Realism such as you saw in the opening sculpture by Duane Hanson, Tourists, 1970 and the systemic super realism of Chuck Close, whose Linda, 1976, you also see again here, even in the late seventies, abstraction was still king, and anti-narrative modes were still seen by mainstream institutions and critics as retardataire. Robert Colescott, who had studied in France in the late forties and went to Egypt (where he saw the narrative cycles in Egyptian art) in the mid-sixties, understood both painterly painting and story telling. >Colescott, Grandma and the Frenchman (Identity Crisis),1990 In Grandma and the Frenchman (Identity Crisis) Colescott employs in Grandma's face the same kind of fragmentation and multiple viewpoints that were typical of cubism. He also quoted directly Picasso's use of African masks as sources. >Colescott, The Three Graces, Art, Sex, and Death, 1981 Before this, though, he was also inserting race into Greek myth. Here is his version of the Three Graces, whom he identifies as Art, Sex and Death. >Vincent Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885 >Colescott, Eat Dem Taters, 1975 Robert Colescott is most famous for his witty "blackface" revisions of icons of western art. --They call attention to the exclusion of Blacks from art history--the sort of psychosocial apartheid of America's cultural consciousness. White critics--[like Ken Johnson]--are often anxious to escape from a discussion of Colescott's most salient theme--racism >Colescott Mother Earth (African Venus) 1983 Colescott's critique of the racism in art history--which he understands as a construction as well as a reflection of the racism in society--has come to involve other sorts of judgments that have been made in Western art history that now seem equally hard to defend. --The maintenance of a strict division between high and low art, for instance, and the prohibition against humor, as well as the fact that African achievements have been systematically downplayed in the history of this country, are often the targets of his ironic visual comment. >Colescott, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware, 1975 > Emmanuel Leutze, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851 4 By making a comic collision between cultural extremities, Colescott intends to shock his viewers into an awareness of this. >P. H. Polke, George Washington Carver (George Washington Carver was a reknowned scientist and inventor who taught at Tuskeegee Institute for many years. -- A botanist who developed many uses for plants and ways to use the peanut, the sweet potato and the tomato for nutrition that the poor people of Louisiana desperately needed, Carver invented over 500 agricultural processes, but patented only 3. He wanted people to be able to use them to their best advantage. Here, in 1975, Colescott puts him in a boat crossing the Delaware with a crew of unruly racial stereotypes such as Aunt Jemimah and Uncle Ben, highlighting the offensiveness of these representations by their contrast to the friendly but reserved and businesslike demeanor of Carver. This drive to join high and low has been typical of Colescott's work for many years. In his up-and-coming years in the 60s, Colescott saw his choices as either to work in eia style of abstract purism, like Stella, or to work in the ambiguously critical style of pop. He is closer to pop. Colescott's maturation on the West Coast aided his ability to break away from the East Coast hegemony of high modernism. >Robert Arneson, George and Mona in the Baths of Colona, 1976 (the west coast is where funk, such as this version of George Washington and the Mona Lisa, was really popular, for instance) But in the sixties, even in the 'Pop" idiom, to introduce "race" was to ghettoize one's work. --To succeed, it was necessary to make work that would appeal to a 'general"--i.e. white-audience. >Colescott Lightning Lipstick 1994 -A "Latina Blanca" Thinks about the spectrum of "Latina Negritas" in her country as she applies her lipstick >Colescott, Interracial Blues 1984 --the artist is caught between two alternatives: real life versus art; Western Caucasian tradition versus African 5 Most of Colescott's art is about art at the same time that it's about race. --This is because he believes the issues in the art world and society are the same: exclusion and purity versus integration and a more material culture approach. >Julian Schnabel, Vita, 1984 Julian Schnabel, who mixed religious images, broken crockery, and ideas from avantgarde movies with crude painting, often on black velvet, is another, East Coast example of this purposefully anti-elegant mode. During the later seventies and eighties, an intentionally unrefined, emotionally painterly style emerged in the United States and Europe. At first called Bad Painting after the title of a show curated by Marcia Tucker, and "New Image" after the title of another show, there were more exhibitions in this style, some of U.S. painting and some of Europeans, with titles like "New Wave, New York," and "The Pressure to Paint" at the Marlborough Gallery. Colescott was hardly the only one to resort to a kind of false naivete and to parody art world restrictions, such as no copying! Despite his appropriateness for these venues, Colescott was not included in these shows. He finally received recognition in 1997, when his work was chosen to represent the United States in the Venice Bienalle. ALICE NEEL 1900>Neel Stewart Mott, 1961 Neel is most famous for her portraits, although she did paint pictures of landscapes. By the time the eighties rolled around, her paintings, like Colescott s were finally came into style. Went to Phila. Art School for Women; married an art student from a wealthy Cuban family; returned with him to Havana 1926, had a baby girl. 1st solo show in Havana, 1926--portraits of beggars and poor mothers with children, indicative of her subject matter for the rest of her life. She & husband ret. to N.Y.; daughter died of diptheria 1927. 1930, husband took their second daughter, went to Paris to start a new life without Neel. She had a breakdown, tried to commit suicide, was hospitalized. It's often been said that Alice Neel, a contemporary of Rothko, de Kooing, unlike Soyer, Isabel Bishop and Benton, portrayed individuals. She has called herself a collector of souls [this last, Rubenstein 380] 6 --but more recent critics have said she portrayed the society through the individual. in 1935 she moved to Spanish Harlem to live with a Puerto Rican singer-guitar player; parted with him 3 years later, but lived there for the next 25 years. >Neel Well Baby Clinc, 1929 >Neel Nazis Murder Jews, 1937-38 her work there, in the 40s and fifties, was still largely unknown. Abstract Expressionism came into favor, and her work was not interesting to critics or most buyers. >Neel Last Sickness, 1953. Neel said, "Cezanne said, 'I love to paint people who have grown old naturally in the country.' But I'm just the opposite. I love people who are ruined by the city, psychologically and every other way. They're under this terrible strain that modern life imposes. I love to show the results of all that." (to S. Swenson) 2 sons, b. 1939, 1941 in Spanish Harlem. She took care of them in the day, painted at night. (The boys, in a kind of reverse rebellion, became a doctor and a lawyer.) Neel said in same interview in '81 (w. Sally Swenson): "You know what I try to capture when I paint? Not only the person but the whole zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. So that my paintings of the various decades explicate the decades. >Goya, Duke of Wellington "I went to a show of Goya at the Metropolitan Museum maybe 40 or 50 years ago; I remember that wonderful portrait of the Duke of Wellington done by Goya [Goya was Spanish]. He made him more British than any Britisher could have, and I thought that by looking at that picture you know more about what Goya felt about the heroism of England than words could ever express." Artfourm (Oct. 83), 41. --Neel in an interview with Sally Swenson in Lives and Works, Talks with Women Artists, 1981 >Neel Saul Atkins, 1965 Even though Neel was painting through the Pop 60s and the Super Realist seventies, she received little attention. 7 But she was shown in a show of recent Figure Painting in the U.S.A. in 1962, was given a prize. >Neel Richard, 1973 She started painting portraits of N.Y. intellectuals. >Neel, Andy Warhol, 1980 She painted Andy Warhol, for instance. [Skip until I have the slide--Timothy Collins, she said, was a "Wall Street Warrior" (Rubenstein). assured, pent-up energy.] >Neel, Raphael Soyer, 1975-80 >Neel, Ian and Marty, 1971 Neel is often accused of making heads too big. She says, heads are where most of our thinking and and senses are located. They're very important. I don't think I give them too much attention. (to Swenson). >Neel Self Portrait 1975-1980 >Neel Pregnant Margaret Evans 78 Her paintings of nude and especially pregnant women show perhaps most the obviously stresses of life out of control. This is true of most of her portraits, but the ones of pregnant women make this condition explicit. Painterly bravura plus psychological insight plus social comment. Neel says " The artist can be socially committed without lowering his level." Doctoral Address, Moore College of Art (je. 1971), quoted in cindy Nemser Alice Neel: The Woman and Her work (Athens GA: Georgia Mus. of Art, 1975.) PHILIP PEARLSTEIN b. 1924 >Philip Pearlstein Superman, 1952 >Pearlstein, Models in the Studio, 1960 Pearlstein pays less attention to the people he paints than he does to the structure of the painting. He s not interested in narrative, the psychology of the model or viewer, or the political implications of what he represents. He also pays little attention to the paint itself as expressive material. Unlike many of his contemporaries, such as Chuck Close and Audrey Flack, he does not use photographs, but paints directly from the model. >Pearlstein, Two Models in The Studio, 1965. Q.Pearlstein takes a stance against the two tyrannies of abstract painting. What are they? 8 A: (that a painting must be flat, and that the roving point of view must be observed.) As Hills astutely notices, he concentrates mostly on the composition, and like photographers, will cut off heads, feet, etc., if the composition demands it. This is a modernist strategy, one that foregrounds the painting as the primary object, rather than its reference to the world around it. For this reason his paintings have appealed to some relatively formal critics, who are not interested in most realism, because they think the formal decisions by most realists are dictated not by the needs of the painting, but by their feeling for the person being painted or by the social or political point they want to make. (Hills, 277) When a figure painter like himself looks at a naked human body, in the kind of prolonged viewing it takes to make a painting, says Pearlstein in your reading in Hills, if he brings along his remembered anatomy lessons, his vision will be confused. Q. What does Pearlstein say the painter actually sees? ( Figure Painters are not Made in Heaven, Art News 61, Summer 1962, 39, 51-52.) >Pearlstein, Two Female Nudes, 1967. A. a fascinating kaleidoscope of forms; these forms, arranged in a particular position in space, constantly assume other dimensions, says Pearlstein, other contours, and reveal other surfaces with the breathing, twitching, muscular tensing and relaxation of the model, and with the slightest change in viewing position of the observer s eyes. Pearlstein studied art at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, then came to New York in the 1950s and completed an M.A. in art history at N.Y.U. One of his teachers at NYU, the art historian Walter Friedlander said, What are you doing here? We re the enemy! Pearlstein continued to paint, and took a job teaching painting at Brooklyn College. >Pearlstein Uprooted Tree, 1957 In the summer of 1955-56 he went up to Deer Island Maine, and painted what he called some neurotic rocks; He returned to nature in the next couple of years, painting objects in the landscape, as in Uprooted Tree, 1957, in which he saw a sense of violence and, primeval forces. He did this in an expressionist style (influenced in this way by Abstract Expressionism) . In the late fifties he sat in on the figure drawing classes of Mercedes Matter, an abstract painter, who used students, not professional life models. 1959: Showed in the New Images of Man exhibition at MoMA. 9 --mostly, it was agonized images of contemporary man. Cold war was still escalating, people were worried that they might be incinerated at any time. --Pearlstein just couldn t get into it. >Philip Pearlstein Crouching Female Nude w. Mirror , 1971 >Pearlstein, Female Model on a Chair w. Red Rug, 1973 In New York, Philip Pearlstein withdrew from Abstract Expressionism for a much more illusionistic confrontation with the nude figure. >Philip Pearlstein, Crouching Female Nude w. Mirror, 1971 >Pearlstein, Female Model on a Chair w. Red Robe, 1972 These figures seem to be in your space, but they emphatically don't call on you to unite your body with theirs. >Pearlstein Female Model on Red & Black American Bedspread, 1976 In some ways, though Pearlstein is painting realistically-rendered human bodies, he is painting them like a minimalist! AUDREY FLACK b. 1931 >Flack, Vanitas (Marilyn), 1977 The work for which Audrey Flack is best noted is her version of photo-realism, such as the reproduction in color you saw on your screens, Marilyn (Vanitas), 1977, -reproduced in Hills in black and white on p. 281. --this and the rest of this on her early years is from L. Alloway, Audrey Flack, for the show Audrey flack, the Early Years: 19531968, at Armstrong Gallery in New York in 1983. But, more like Neel than like Pearlstein, Flack was always very much interested in the context that determined the lives of not only the people in her paintings but also those of everyone else. She didn t begin to paint in the airbrush style of Marilyn (Vanitas) until she was in her late thirties, around 1969. *>Franz Kline, Cardinal, 1950 >Flack, Still Life w. Flowers (for Franz) 1954 In her early twenties, Flack moved from New Jersey to New York. This was in the early fifties. -- Action Painting was coming into its own among the avant-garde. -- Flack felt that it had set terms that she had to deal with. 10 1951-52: She painted an abstract painting with a blocky black form in the center set against planes that were typical of De Kooning s interiors. Earlier than this, in 1951 and 1952, she had painted hommages to Kline and de Kooning that were actually abstract and in their styles. In this black and white painting of flowers for Kline, a painter who worked only in black and white at that time, Flack demonstrates her willingness to experiment with elements of Kline s method, but also a determination to paint the subject matter that means something to her. Flowers would continue to appear in her paintings. . >Flack, The Memory, 1958 In 1958, Flack paints The Memory, after the sudden death of her father. --agitated strokes of Sepia, black, white and gray paint --she is in a crowded studio, --2 skulls/heads seem to watch the artist or else us --her father? >Flack, Elsa in Rocking Chair, 1960-61 >Flack Grandmother Field, 1963-64 Flack will often after this personalize her paintings by putting into them one of her family. Here is Elsa in Rocking Chair, 1960-61 and Grandmother Field, 1963-64. Q. Do you see a difference in the application of paint here, between 1961 and 1963? A. Obvious brushstrokes in 1961 fade to the use of much smaller strokes in 1963. >Flack, The Dance of Death, 1959 Here Flack approaches the theme of death in another way from how she did in Memory. -The Dance of Death treats this traditional Northern European moral subject, in whose representation she departs from what is still recognizable as the Grand Manner --that is, a classical representational style, realism, that uses nude or draped figures as allegories of the theme, treated here in an expressionistically rendered way. For critic Lawrence Alloway, a critic who wrote about them when, 25 years after she did them Flack dragged them out of a closet in her studio, --These figures of Flack s are somewhere between Rubens, in their fleshiness, and Tintoretto, in their schematic (almost formulaic, instead of individually observed from life). 11 Having the tops of their heads and their feet cut off by the canvas keeps them relatively flat, while the rendering emphatically gives them a three-dimensionality. They re emphatically illsionistic, while somehow their representation strives also for the kind of flatness that is even more crucial for avant-garde painting in the late fifties and early 60s. >Frank Stella Point of Pines, 1959 (Stella s Point of Pines was shown with much success in this year). >Flack, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1962-63 *>Rousseau La Guerre, __ Also, in 1962-63, she painted another ambitious subject from the Book of Revelations, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Color has begun to appear a little more definitely in Flack s work with this painting. Flack s gesturality has grown gentler than it was in Dance of Death, though it s not as understated as it would become in Grandmother Field. Both of these subjects have been treated by artists for centuries, but Flack s treatment of the Four Horsemen in particular, with its composition stacked up against the picture plane rather than spread out into an illusionistic depth of field within the confines of the canvas, shows her willingness to try to work on the subjects she wants in as avant0garde a manner as she can, while still preserving the subject s recognizability to the average viewer. (When I get a pic. Of R s WAR) echoes one of the more modernist paintings of war by an artist known for his precociously rather abstract though untrained manner, the douanier (money collector) Rousseau s La Guerre. >Robert Cottingham, Optic, 1973 >William Beckman, Diana III, 1976 Flack s move into the photo-realism of Marilyn/Vanitas was anything but predictable, however, partly because most photo realists, like Robert Cottingham, Goings, Bechtle, and William Beckman, seem not to worry much about either abstract doxa or the long held rules of genre, which in general said that multi-figure compositions, particularly historical ones, were the noblest expression of art, not only because they usually represented important people and events, but because their complexity made it difficulty for amateurs to even attempt them. Super realists like Beckman, and Photo realists like Cottingham and Bechtle were not supposed to be interested in history, either, but in about trying to reproduce the reality of a present vision, whether the camera s or their own moment-to-moment perception of reality, like Neel and Pearlstein. 12 >Flack, Rockefeller, 1963 >Flack, Teheran Conference, 1963-64 Flack is too interested in the particulars of history in the making to give up realism, still the lingua franca of the majority of people. Here she shows Nelson Rockefeller radiating benevolence and confidence at a typical campaign moment, smiling and talking as he moves, in the paradigm of glad-handing, as Alloway described him, in this painting. On the right is the cast of the Teheran Conference, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin together near the end of World-War II. They look as if they might be presenting a united front, but actually, their relation was based on a three-sided distrust, and therefore, oneupsmanship. >Flack, Davey Moore, 1965 Done in 1965, this painting of Davey Moore deals with a hero approaching his death, though no one knew it at the time the boxer was photographed that he would unexpectedly die a very short time later of injuries received in a fight. All of these last three were done from photographs, as would be paintings done by Flack of movie stars not only such as Marilyn, but also of Carroll Baker and Melina Mercouri. They are linked by their presence as media images that Flack appropriates as readymades and puts into her painted compositions. This is a method she would follow when, at the end of the sixties, she moved into airbrushed paintings such as Marilyn (Vanitas). >Flack, Young Mexican Farmer in Oaxaca Market, 1967-68. In the late sixties, Flack began to take her own photos to paint from, as did Chuck Close, and artists like Bechtle and Cottingham. Here she seems to have superimposed a portrait shapshot over another of the bustling market at Oaxaca on one of her trips. Her greater awareness of light in this picture is an augur of things to come in the concerns that brought her to the airbrush technique and the concerns that you read about which occupied her as she painted works like Marilyn (Vanitas). >Maria Van Oosterwyck, Vanitas, 1668 >Flack, Vanitas (Marilyn), 1977 The subject matter of Flack s airbrushed paintings, with their glowing colors, which the artist calls foamy centered in the seventies around vanitas still lifes. 13 When Flack saw Maria Van Oosterwyck s Vanitas in 1976, she loved it. Flack says she s not a photo realist, though the sets these up and photographs them then paints them, sometimes with the help o an opaque projector. --She is, she says, a superrealist. The sky is never blue enough. The little girl in the painting is her autistic daughter Maria. Flack believes that Marilyn Monroe was a hero, but a tragic hero. In Marilyn(Vanitas) she shows objects historically associated with the Vanitas theme: --human skull --burning candle --calendar these three serve as memento mori, or reminders of death Images of vanity mirrors, lipstick, jewelry are glittering objects of worldliness together with the title, these remind us that luck may still run out.

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