On Art

...On Art RETURN OF REALISM BY JAMES R MELLOW T ^ here is a sense in which all representational painting is illustration al It illustrates on the two-dimensional shape of a canvas what the viewer knows properly belongs to his own three-dimensional world It resorts as well to lllusiomsm, creating the impression of solid objects in an entirely fictional space Like illustration, lllusiomsm is a dirty word in the modernist lexicon From Courbet and Cezanne on, painting has elected to assert its integrity, calling attention to its essential material character—that is, a surface covered with pigment?even before calling attention to its depicted subject matter And from Courbet and Cezanne on, the logic of this development has inexorably led to the present state, where the figure in its setting has become persona non grata, an anachronism, a pander to derriere-garde public taste With Mondnan, Kandmsky and Jackson Pollock, the necessity for illustration and lllusiomsm was virtually eliminated Painting became purely abstract and self-contained The figure and its mise en scene, its table and chairs, its plate of apples or its romantic landscape, was banished as a fitting subject for any painting that subscribed to being modern Of course, a good many figurative artists are still at work—and many of them quite respectable painters Yet the caste system still applies to figurative painting, it simply does not command the respect or the consideration that greets each new development in abstraction The advent of Pop Art in the early '60s gave some evidence that this situation might be changing, since Pop made a fetish of the figure Reacting agamst Abstract Expressionism, it broke the taboo concerning recognizable subject matter and installed Campbell's Soup cans and Chiquita Banana girls as the totems of a new artistic clan It turned the supermarket into a temple, its deities were brand names Pop artists, therefore, were markedly different from those representational painters who drew their subjects from life rather than from the glossy advertising pages of magazines Nevertheless, their revolt did raise new hopes for figurative painting Admittedly, this is an oversimplified account, but it does suggest the promissory status of representational painting one should keep in mind when viewing the Whitney Museum's current exhibition, "22 Realists " Unfortunately, the Whitney show, selected by associate curator James Monte, does more to becloud the issues than to clarify them It includes a handful of works by each of the 22 artists, with the varieties of realism displayed ranging from Philip Pearlstein's clinically observed nudes to Paul Staiger's ll-lustrational paintings of Mayflower moving vans There is a certain audacity m the museum's having undertaken to mount an exhibition on this subject in the first place The Whitney rushed in where its sister msttrutions —with vanguard reputations to uphold—have long feared to tread While attempting this move with a modest bit of eclat, however, it has again displayed its remarkable facility for choosing the second-rate and the derivative in service of a thesis This was also the case with its recent painting annual ("Death of the Avant-Garde," NL, January 19) In "22 Realists," we are given Maxwell Hendler's tight little interior views—marvels of photographic precision, no doubt—but the novelty of portraying a television set and the picture on the screen has worn thin—dating back at least 14 years to the early collages of the English Pop Artist Richard Hamilton Similarly, we are given Howard Kan-ovitz instead of Alex Katz, whose lite-size silhouette figures, painted front and back, freed the painted figure entirely from its scenic base Katz circumvented the whole problem of fictional space by putting his painted figures into actual space Kanovitz' people cut-outs are stationed in front of a very realistic, wall-hung canvas depicting a host of art world celebrities (including the artist himself) at a cocktail party It is a witty and self-congratulatory refinement, but the real formal innovation belongs to Katz Moreover, "22 Realists" is a case where some contextual view of recent figurative painting would have been extremely useful Several artists—Fairfield Porter, Balcomb Greene, Ben Benn, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, to name a few—ought to have been included in any exhibition purporting to cover representational painting Missing, too, are the Bay Area school of figurative painters from the late '50s Certainly, Richard Diebenlcorn, one of the California artists whose career has shuttled back and forth between realism and abstraction (he is currently m an abstractionist phase) would have been pertinent And, smce Pop-oriented artists are well represented, why not Richard Lindner's sado-masochistic beauties and brawlers7 One has the feeling that these highly regarded, if not highly touted, artists of an older generation were replaced by younger "discoveries" as a means of hedging against the unfashionableness of the subject, of making it possible to fall back upon the justification of exposing some deserving newer talents While I wouldn't argue against the consideration Monte gives to Pop-related styles—since Pop does represent one aspect of recent figurative pamting—a number of choices seem to have been made not on their merits, but simply to dress up the show a bit and give it a stylish air After bravely deciding to stage an exhibition of realist art, the Whitney seems to have had second thoughts that it might prove too much of a stuffed-shirt affair for even its own stodgy image, and therefore apparently concluded that some new faces and some examples of the far-out were very much m order It might have worked, if the museum's idea of the outlandish were not so generally tame This is not to say that "22 Realists" is entirely without merit, there are a respectable number of good and interesting paintings on hand Yet I sometimes suspect that nothmg short of a few really smful displays of outright pornography will ever succeed m shaking up the Whitney or its staid public image s ^ Jince it is impossible to suggest the sexual or the sensual—or the pornographic, for that matter?in terms of pure abstraction, the attractions of the human figure provide one of its strongest claims upon painting Surrealism, for example, had a large appetite for sex and pornography—the stuff dreams supposedly are made on—and that was one of the reasons Surrealism remained tied to recognizable and conventional subject matter In the Whitney show there are several good examples of this phase of figurative painting Unlike Pearlstein's hard, sprawling and somewhat anti-sensual figures, William Bailey's tender girls standing m quiet interiors are nicely evocative Paul Wiesenfeld's two paintings entitled Secrets are also commendable In one, we are given a stuffy mtenor flooded with soft daylight A nude girl is stretched out on a Victorian sofa, reading a magazine In another version, the same scene is presented again, but the shade has been drawn, the table lamp lit and the figure is provocatively absent The sequence in which one reads these pictures may alter the story, but the mood in both cases remams charged with sensuality The same might be said for Sidney Tillim's Furmtute War, a still life of a studio mtenor where a woman's clothing is draped over a piece of furniture and a cigarette has been left burning on the artist's easel These last examples are offered as evidence of how suggestive the figure can be even in its absence Monte has, I think, placed too much emphasis on artists who work directly from photographs Richard Estes, for instance, paints store fronts and hot dog stands with a photographic precision His Nut Store depicts expanses of plate glass with every reflection lovingly accounted for and every item in the display—from single peanuts to stacks of candy bars—rendered with Pop fervor Robert Bechtle prefers the slick and glossy details of automobiles Richard McLean concentrates upon unimaginatively posed publicity stills of racehorses with their jockeys and tramers Malcolm Morley gives us Everyman's Koda-chrome view of special events?such as a child's birthday party?or scemc tourist attractions One attraction, at least, is tinged with political implications—a tounst agency view of South Africa with a huge red cross canceling it out John Clem Clarke, who formerly made large, grainy blow-ups of old-master paintings, has now taken to restaging old-master subjects like The Judgment of Pans, posing contemporary models for his photographs and then projecting them to make large, grainy, modern old masters About these photographic paintings one has the feehng that it is the ugly or banal subject matter that does all the work while the painting techniques—though highly ingenious—are too dead-pan, and finally unrewarding Painters who resort to the photograph neatly side-step the problem of lllusiomsm, operating on the premise that they are depicting a two-dimensional subject But any painter who wants to work senously from the human figure is forced, for reasons that are too long to go into at the moment, to provide a convincing pictonal space for it to inhabit (unless he is a primitive who makes a virtue—a style—of his inability to situate his figures properly) That, I believe, and not its literary associations, is the chief reason the figure became irreconcilable with the progressive development of modern art The good news for the figure, perhaps, is that several of the modernist prohibitions—including the prohibition against fictional depth—are now under attack...