Art

...Although her surfaces are no less spectacular than those of Estes, by making her subject the trash of the city she gets to the heart of a throwaway society...

...This is the line taken in the most impressive shows to date'of the New Realism: the San Antonio Museum of Art's 1981 exhibit, Real, Really Real, Super Real, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts' Contemporary American Realism Since 1970 (from now through July 25 on view at the Oakland Museum in California...

...NICOLAUS MILLS...

...it does not constitute a school or movement in the usual sense...

...No longer is it necessary to ask whether there is a New Realism...

...Here what Leslie has caught is the struggle of his subjects (middle-Americans from an Ohio steel town) to unify their lives, to cross the barriers that in our society separate generations as well as races...

...The isolation of the Indian against the vast flatness of the landscape, his somber expression, his dependence on a passerby for transportation all suggest an American West that has been robbed of its mythic possibilities by war (which the Indian now joins) and an economic system that has not only made the Indian a stranger in his own land but left him without a car of his own...

...It is to be drawn near to his subject by means of close-ups, distanced by arbitrary croppings (which often remove the model's head) and finally made to feel that the details we pay attention to are not a reflection of a real person so much as a painter's virtuoso techniques...

...In The Screams of Kitty Genovese we are shown a scene in which a man hastily puts on his shirt, while a woman, nude from the waist up, sits on her bed, illuminated both by the blue glow from her television and the orange light from a fallen lamp...

...Although the middle ground and background of Hitchhiker are filled with sky and plain, it is the monumental figure of an Indian - a Vietnam vet with the name of his infantry outfit stencilled across his T-shirt-who dominates the scene...

...I'm dealing with "what you see, how you see, how you depict what you see,' 'Pearlstein has written, and when we turn to his work, we see how thoroughly he has stuck to this modernist credo.To look at a Pearlstein nude is not to contemplate a sensual figure, let alone a figure with an inner life...

...By contrast a New Realist such as Jerome Witkin is bent on making his model come alive as someone living in a particular time and place...

...We must cede back to abstract expressionism certain work that has been claimed for American realism over the last fifteen years...

...With John Sloan and the Ash Can school realism meant not only an emphasis on urban life but an interest in the downtrodden, and for the New Deal artists of the 1930s, it was necessary to go a step further...

...To quote Frank Goodyear, curator of the Pennsylvania Academy show: The most essential point that can be made about contemporary American realism may seem simplistic- there is a ' 'new'' realism . . . Pluralistic in its attitudes (there is no one "new" realism) it reflects both a revisionist and an avant-garde bias...

...We see this difference in striking fashion in the modern pastoralism of Neil Welliver and Willard Midgette...

...I'm not painting people...

...The flowering of American realism over the last decade and a half thus brings with it special implications...

...What Estes is concerned with is surface - the reflections from shop windows, the geometry of buildings, the light bouncing from signs and facades, and it is the magic in these banal objects that he conveys...

...It makes it possible to look at contemporary realism in a fashion that is sensitive to its diversity, and it allows a museum to hang a show that contains the best in representational art...

...We only begin to describe it when we note its concern with verisimilitude...

...The price of defining the New Realism in the terms I have just outlined is not to be underestimated...

...The virtue of such an eclectic approach to the New Realism is the leeway it provides...

...A similar set of human concerns gives the landscapes and cityscapes of the New Realism a historical dimension that is missing from realistic abstraction...

...The relevant question is how is the New Realism to be defined given the variety of styles (traditional realism, painterly realism, photo realism, super realism) it seems to include...

...Harlem, where Martin Luther King's portrait lies alongside a Lipton Tea carton and a 7-Up carrier, we are reminded that a throwaway society produced a throwaway psychology...

...We see this emphasis most dramatically in the three panels of Leslie's monumental group portrait, Americans: Youngstown...

...And what the no means in contemporary terms is that we must take a step backwards...

...And in social terms the cost is even higher...

...On the other hand the photo realism of Idelle Weber leads in the opposite direction...

...What gives American realism its special character is its concern with the world beyond the painter's studio, what art historian Linda Nochlin has called the realist's "taste for ordinary experience in a specific time, place, and social context...

...Specifically, we must draw a distinction between two groups of artists who should never have been lumped together under the rubric of New Realism: 1) those whose primary concerns are painterly or abstract and who use recognizable shapes and figures as a tool for getting at these concerns...

...But is this the best way of coming to terms with the complexity of the New Realism...

...2) those whose primary concerns are concretely rendering the world in which they live and for whom recognizable figures and shapes are the embodiment of that world...

...Clearly, the amount of disagreement and the fact that so many of the artists involved disapprove theoretically of each other's work militates against any consensus...

...It is this tension that makes the touching his subjects do, the way they stand next to each other and often dress alike so revealing, and at the same time it lets us see that, as they pose for the artist, what they have on their minds is a concern for each other that extends beyond the bounds of the picture in which they appear...

...It is the flatness of Katz's portraits that is striking, and what our attention is called to is not the identity of his subjects but a traditional problem in abstract art - the assimilation of the figure into the surface of the canvas...

...We are made to forget that, while the New Realists may not wear their hearts on their sleeves, they have-be it in the form of an Indian army veteran hitchhiking across the West, a picture of Martin Luther King in the garbage of a Harlem Street, a beautiful young woman who sits on her bed as her lover hastily dresses-permanently captured the scope of the alienation that has pervaded every facet of American life since the middle 1960s...

...In Katz's portraits likeness is an important element, but the likenesses that Katz offers (even of himself) are likenesses in which detail is missing...

...For Welliver, the Maine woods he paints are a place of timeless beauty, and in rendering them what he adds by his emphasis on brush stroke and pigment is his vision of the artist as medium: the person who makes the beauty of the woods accessible to those who have not experienced it first hand...

...For both artists, the techniques of photo realism are crucial, but in the realistic abstraction of Richard Estes, it is essentially tangential that the sanitized New York he paints should be New York in the 1970s...

...If one is keeping score, it means that some of the best artists now working in America cannot be gathered under the banner of realism...

...This social vision is apparent in the post-Civil War work of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer, which abandoned the romanticism of earlier American art to focus on the detailed representation of day-to-day life, and in our own century the realists' concern with being part of their time has been even more conspicuous...

...A parallel artistic situation exists in the portrait work of Alex Katz and Alfred Leslie...

...In a Willard Midgette landscape such as Hitchhiker, history, on the other hand, is everything, and the role of the artist as a transmitter of timeless beauty is something we do not think about...

...In Weber's work our angle of vision is always downward, and particularly in such paintings as East 127th St...

...It marks not only the end of abstract art as the ruling force on the American art scene but the emergence of an art with the capacity to reflect the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s...

...Indeed, we can see the differences between them most sharply when, as with the following artists, we compare them on the basis of the way they approach common subjects: Realistic Abstraction New Realism Nudes Philip Pearlstein Jerome Witkin Portraits Alex Katz Alfred Leslie Cityscapes Richard Estes Idelle Weber Landscapes Neil Welliver Willard Midgette Philip Pearlstein's nudes provide a classic example of an artist using a realistic mode to deal with abstract problems...

...The most common way of dealing with this issue is to avoid it altogether and insist that the New Realism is an amalgam of styles rather than any single style...

...These contrasts are continued in the cityscapes of Richard Estes and Idelle Weber...

...The problem is that there is no middle ground for compromise here...

...If we believe that the New Realism, like the old,, must be seen in terms of a social vision that reflects the world in which its artists live, then the answer is no...

...The woman's sensuality is striking, but equally to the point is all that works against her sensuality in this scene of modern love.We are reminded by the picture's title that the real Kitty Genovese was killed because her cries for help went unheeded, and here too it seems as if the central figure's deepest, human needs (in this case for love) are not about to be answered...

...In technical terms it obscures what is innovative about the New Realism: its adaptation to its own purposes of the visual directness, the oversize scale, the flatness of form, the emphasis on frontality of abstract expressionism...

...When the New Realism is seen in the broad terms that the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy employ, there is no reason to exhibit its second string for the sake of fleshing out a definition of it...

...The differences between these groups of artists are not a matter of their choice of subject but their presentation of subject...

...In Weber's urban world everything, even human life, is in the end made to seem disposable and transient...

...The result is that we cannot separate our interest in the physicality of Witkin's model from the sexual and social narrative with which he has surrounded her...

...By contrast a true New Realist such as Alfred Leslie may emphasize frontality and shallow picture space, but his use of such modernist techniques does not draw attention to himself as an artist but to the inner life of whomever he is painting...

...An inflated view of the New Realism is finally trivializing...

...For painters such as Ben Shahn and Philip Evergood, it was not enough to document the lives of the poor, it was essential to put their struggles into political focus...