See also:  [New Realism () (art movement)

Linda Nochlin


Realism Now

Orig pub'd Vassare College Art Gallery, 1968; repub'd in
"Contemporary Esthetcis", Kostalonitz, Promethius Books. ?date?

NOTE: Due to the large size of the paragraphs in her article ;)
            I have used a x.y notaton; x being the para#, y the decimal
            value (percentage) within the paragraph (.25, .50, .75) etc.

The text below is intended to be a "study guide" to the complex
narrative of visual references in her essay.

Realism Now (annotated text)

This is probably one of the most important papers ever written 
in the 20th century (and that covers a *lot* of intellectual territory).
The debate as to exactly where realistic representation  belongs
in the post-post-post-modern (post-9/11) era is one of supreme
significance. Her article was written in 1968 (that CRITICAL year
of revolution through-out the entire world -- Firsr Dr. King was
shot, and then Bobby Kennedy, and these kinds of things were
happening through-out the world; refer to "../../../pdde/history/1968l.html">1968 History



For that reason,  we now present:

REALISM NOW
(the "now" being 1968)

1.1 Ever since Maurice Denis proclaimed in 1890 that a painting was
essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain
order before it was a battlehorse, a nude woman, or an anecdote; 
realism has fought a losing battle for inclusion within the ranks of 

Despite a few minor skirmishes; eg, the  Neue Sachlichkeit () in Germany, and the work
of Balthus () in France, and some American
attempts of noteworthy if provincial intensity. [Anyway] realism
in the sense of creating an accurate, detailed, and recognisable 
simulacruum of visual experience,
has been relegated to the limbo of philistinism: The propaganda machines
of Soviet party hacks [re: 1968] or the sentimental platitudes of 
Saturday Evening Post covers. [ref: ?artists?] .

In the great leap forward march of modernism, that gradual stripping 
from visual art of all extravisual meaning, whether literary or 
symbolic, to paraphrase Barbara Rose, that rejection from painting
of all that is non-pictorial, that reduction pf art to its literal qualities;
ie, in painting to the flatness and shape of the canvas itself. It would
seem realism is indeed aside from the point, retardataire, or
at the very least, sentimentally revisionist. 

Wistful attempts at "getting the human figure back into painting", such as
MOMA (NY)'s "New Images of Man" exhibition of 1959,
supported by a heavy dose of popularised existentialism, only seemed 
to underline the point: Despite a horatatory introduction by Paul Tillich
and a commendible effort to equate smeared contours with modern 
angst or calculated grotesquerie with contemporary alienation, the
"new images" turned out for the most prt to be not very different from
the old expressionism, and modernism marched on its reductive course
with Barnett Newman, [Ad Reinhardt,
Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella in the vanguard.


To this view of modernism as a ">teleological progression toward more
and more purely optical values in painting, the emergence of pop as a major
force in the early sixties [1960d] seemed to offer tghe first un-deniable 
challenge. Yet, after the intial shock of confronting recognisable motifs drawn
from contemporary life on the canvas had worn off, pop scale, coolness of tone
and pictorial handling, its emphasis on surface and brilliant color, its flatness of
form and emotion, and its use of ready-made imagry rather than direct
perception made it assimilable to the modernist aesthetic postion. 
Indeed, many of the qualities of pop have been correctly, if at times 
grudgingly, equated with those of cool or hardl-edge abstraction.


How, then do the new realists fit into the contemporary art scene? Or, one
might ask, is it possible for a realist to be new at all in the second half of
the 20th [195x-]c century? The answer to the second question is, as the
exhibition revelas, an un-qualified yes. If pop drove the opening wedge 
into the entrenched view of modernism as a necessary and contiguous
progresion starting with Paul Cezanne and ending
with Frank Stella (a progression that requires
a bit of internal juggling to maintain its consistency, in order to 
dissociate the pure abstraction of Kasimir Malevich,
who had worked uncomfortably close to the beginning of this unfolding
of the reductive spirit
from that of Newman or Ad Reinhardt, who 
were situated with greater chronological convenience near its end term), 
then the new realism has exploded the modernist myth entirely. Despite
the patronising attempts of some critics to consign the new realism to
the peripheries of the contermporary art world, for example Philip 
Leider that the work of Philip Pearlstein, Lennart Anderson,
Jack Beal, Alex Katz is "irrelevant to our fears 
and hopes for the best modern art" or at most "a respectable minor art", or
Hilton Kramer's dismissal of a recent Alex Kats
show as "the pictorial equivalent of vers de societe", it has become
increasingly clear during the course of the last two years that the new realism,
far from being an aberation or a throwback in contemporary art, is a major
innovating impulse. Its precise quality of novelty, it would seem to me, lies
more in its connexion with photography, with new directions in that most 
contemporary of all media, the film, or even 
with the advanced novel, than in its relation to traditional realist painting.


Yet if one rejects the narrow, abstractionist aesthetic teleology as the
proper framework for viewing the new realism, one must by no means
ignore the central role played by recent abstract painting itself in the 
formulation of the new realist style. The largness of scale, the constant
awareneww of the field-like flatness of the pictorial surface, the concern
with measurement, space, and interval, the cool, urban tone, with its
affiration of the picture qua picture as a literal fact, the rejection of 
expressive brushwork, or, if it exists, the tendency toward bracketing
its evocative implications through irony or over-emphasis. All of these
elements bring the work of the new realists closer to the spirit of 
contemporary abstraction and serve to disassociate it irrevocably 
from the meretricious mini-platitudes of a self-styled "old" realist
like Andrew Wyeth. The ladies of the
suburban art-study clubs, who in recent years have dutifully gulped 
down doses of Frank Stella and Andy Warhol
while secretly yearning for "something nice" that they can "recognise", 
are not getting the answer to their prayers in Pearlstein's nudes,
or Gabriel Laderman's landscapes.


It is no mere coincidence that many of the new realists came to their 
present position after an earlier involvement with abstract art, and 
their concern with what might be considered purely formal problems
remains constant. For Alex Katz, working on the tense borderline 
between the generalising conventions of ready-made imagery and 
the concrete subtleties of immediate perception, the compositional 
problems presented by expanded scale -- overlaping of volumes, 
cropping the whole idea of gesture, "how things move to each other
across a surface" -- are major pre-occupations.  Philip Pearlstein, a
former abstract expressionist, resolutely denies any evocation or
expressive intention in his nudes or portraits, asserts that he is
interested only in the problems of painting, and, like Flaubert in the
nineteenth century century, who dreamed of writing a novel about 
nothing at all, conceives of his enterprise as "the perfection of nothings".
Yvonne Jacquette tells us that the ***James Bond Car Painting***************
is "part of a series
concerning the space between objects"; Sidney Tillim seems primarily
concerned with the inter-relation of volume within a compressed
pictorial space; and the expressed aim of Neil Welliver
a former student of Josef Albers, Burgoyne Diller, and
Conrad Marca-Relli, is to "make a 'natural' painting
as fluid as a de Kooning." What is therefore the distinguishing feature
of the new realism is not some phony super-imposition of humanist
values onto old formulas, but rather the assertion of the visual 
perception of things in the world as the necessary basis of the 
structure of the pictorial field itself; indeed, not since the 
impressionists, has there been a group so concerned with the 
problems of vision and their solution in terms of pictorial notation
and construction. In making this assertion, they are at once 
re-introducing an element that, from the Renaisance to the
twentieth century, had always been considered an irreducible 
property of the purely pictorial itself -- that is, the recording of
perceptual data -- and at the same time, pointing out the increidibly
changed nature of perception itself in the second half of the twentieth
century. Whether this perception is direct, or mediated by the 
mechanical apparatus of the camera, as it is for so many of our
artists, is irrelevant to the major issue. The very fact that Pearlstein,
who neer uses photographs, but always works from the live model,
was "accused" of relying upon them at a recent panel discussion is
a good case in point. Instead of using photographs, Pearlstein has, 
as far as possible, transformed himself into a camera, and has 
assimilated many of the many of the characteristics normally 
associated with photography, such as arbitrary cropping, the
close-up, and radical disjunction of scale, to his painting style.


The act of perception is itself total, condition both in its mode and    --What about context, b/g, history,
in its content by time, place, and concrete situation. While it may         eviron, etc,
be willfully objective -- and realists have traditionally tried to
divest themselves of personal and cultural impedimenta -- it 
can not occur in a vacuum; it is this that makes the new realism
so new and so completely of our time. Courbet's nudes
could never have looked like Pearlstein's or Beal's or Leslie's   ????leslie????
How could they, since they were painted before the invention of 
the close-up, the flood lamp, or phenomenology? Laderman's 
West Side Highway landscpae could never have been painted
by Pisarro, even though both 
were scrupulously recording visual facts, not merely because
the West Side Highway did not exist when and where Pisarro
was painting, but because Picturamic Postcard Vues and 
concepts like alienation and distancing were unavailable
as well. Nor could John Button actually have seen
his girl on the beach in that particular way if Mark Rothko had never
painted or Andy Warhol had not made his "My Hustler.
Richard Estes' New York seems light-years away from that of 
John Sloan or the Ash Canschool. Would the stringently
controlled reflections in Cocoanut Custard, based on the objective recording
of the camera lens, have come out that way if there had not been a 
Mondrian or hard-edged abstraction?
Or has New York itself become harder-edged in the last 50 or 60 years?
For Sloan, as for Edouard Manet, reflection immediately implied
diffusion and blurring of the image on the canvas. (Think of the 
shimmering, hazy mirror mirage in the background of the "Bar
at the Folies-Bergere). For Estes, who relies on the photographic 
enlargement of reflections is too fuzzy. Estes sez, "Perhaps the
more you show the way things look, the less you show how they
are or how we think that they are." He muses, concerned with 
converying the non-coincidence of the tactile and the visual
reality.


Even in what might be considered a relatively neutral realm of
subject matter, the still life, the impress of the immediate present
makes itself felt. It is not merely the choice of subject that is
contemporary -- although the James Bond car, the 
New York drain pipe???, the Triple-Decker Hospital bed-??? are 
particularly of the moment, and the interest in these painters 
in the theme of garbage or wastepaper may perhaps be 
related to a similar concentration on refuse, astutely pointed
out by Siegfried Kracauer, in the medium of the film
-- but the choice of vantage point, of cropping, and the deliberate 
removal of compositional focus. Although, the oblique view, the 
cutoff, and asymmetrical compostion were exploited by the
impressionists to convey a sense of the fleeting, the
momentary suggested by the firm, un-broken contours and
deadpan, descriptive surfaces of the canvases of Jacquette.
Tillim, or Nesbitt. Their close-up
vantage point, radical cropping, and randomness of distribution 
are related to the dispassionate intimacy of the television screen
and that rejection of an a priori order and an 
a posteriori significance associated with 
Alain Robbe-Grillet and the new novel as well
as the as with the French new wave cinema. Indeed, 
Robbe-Grillet's call to arms, "Let it be first of all by their 
presence to prevail over whatever explanitory theory may
try to enclose them in a system of references. ... Gestures
and objects will be there before being something; and they
will still be there afterwards, hard, unl-alterable, eternally
present, mocking their own 'meaning'." -- this credo could
serve as the leitmotif of of the new realist
outlook as a whole. William Bailey's "Eggs" establishes itself
in this way, as does Don Nice's "Turnip", wich asserts it
unique vegatable non-significance through sheer scale and 
scrupulous notation of detail. Jerrold Lane's observation
that Bailey's "Eggs" is reminiscent of pittura metafisica "but with no sense
of volume or spatual interval" is very much to the point. It 
is precisely by refusing to impose the artifices of volume
or interval upon his eggs that Bailey removes them from the
realm of the "metaphysical", that is, from
any context other than that of their sheer visual presence.


The world of the familar, the ordinary, the experienced, and the
common-place has traditionally been the realm of realism ever 
since the time of Courbet and Flaubert
and down to that of contemporary fillm, and with it have come
the more or less standard accusations of willful ugliness, of
lack of coherence or discrimination, of over-emphasis on petty
or distracting detail, and concomitant coldness or lack of emotion
or expressivenewss. "Mme. Bovary," wrote one critic at the
time of the novel's appearance in 1857, "represents the obstinacy 
in description.  ... All the details seem to have been counted one by
one, giving the same importance to each. ... THere is no emotion
or feeling in it". [My scathing review here]
Courbet was accused of painting objects just as one might encounter
them, without any compositional linkage, and of reducing art to 
the indiscriminate reproduction of the first subject to come along.
"He makes his stones as important as his stone breakers", complained
one outraged critic of the eponymous painting.
[