art writ what iz realizm???

‘The obstacle to realism in American painting is that there have been too many kinds, each arising from an individually acquired way of seeing.  Reality, or the sense of  it, depends on a unified style shared by artists and the community.’#


One key issue to address when muscling into the separate realist-abstract affinities, and whether there is 
cross-over’ between the two as made claim by the title, is the political affiliations that affect the representation of the contemporary, daily life depicted by the different types of styles in both.  Whether one agrees that the Abstract Expressionists work could be called ‘realist’ depends on where the ‘realist’ values have changed, and on which ‘reality’ is being represented in the paintings. 
The claim that Tansy makes is from his point that, ‘The problem or question is, which reality?  In a painted picture, is it the depicted reality, or the reality of the picture plane, or the multi-dimensional reality the artist and viewer exist in?#’


The Hegelian concept which displaces representation from ‘reality’ explains both paradoxical assertions of the question, ‘True reality lies beyond immediate sensation and the objects we see everyday.#’   This rather enigmatic ‘spirit of life’# which the realists endeavoured to capture, or essential truth, is similarly found in abstract art- where in critique, similar quasi-religious terms have been used to describe the work of the abstract expressionists, ‘People who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience which I had when I painted them.’#


At the turn of the century, a paradigm shift had occurred in society, which had its effect upon culture and thereupon art.  In a very loose sense, the effect upon the traditional ‘realist’ art which had originated in Paris and from Courbet, was the stretching of the meaning of ‘realist’ work from being a mirror to nature, to a more modern realism which depicted scenes of life in a more ‘active’ sense.  
This change resulted in the pseudonym ‘social-realist’ being attached to the American painters who kept their pictures without narrative, symbolism or moral point but in doing this, were working for a greater change in art completely.   One could look at the social-realists as trying to create an art that was anti-elite, anti-consumerist and which could be understood by those with recompense to art historical schooling.  Glackens, a leading American Realist stated a promising manifesto, ‘The Realists were, in truth, painters adrift in the twentieth century, amiable provincials determined to find joy in life and nobility in character.’#


So how could the Tansey deny his work as realist when it is representational and Lichtenstein claim that the ‘realist’ subject is so broad that even the non-representational pictures of Abstract Expressionists can be seen as ‘Realist’?


Tansy disassociates himself from the realist genre through  a summary which would hold the claim of Lichtenstein to be true, the point of this essay will be to unfold this.  ‘I am not a realist painter.  In the nineteenth century, photography co-opted to traditional function of  realist painters, which was to make faithful renditions of “reality”.  Then the realist project was taken over by modernist abstraction.’# 
Nochlin sums up the basic aim of realism as to ‘give a truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life’# and one can observe Tansey’s point about photography as being shared amongst contemporaries of the social-realists such as the ‘Steiglitz group’, a collective of artists who saw the machination of capitalist modern america as a secession of some painting as it had been known before.  With the dawning of mass-consumerism and mechanisation, and the introduction of the camera, the use of realist painting to shine a mirror back at nature was now defunct.  ‘The first expectation of photography, the reason some supposed painting was finished, was that it would render every detail perfectly.#’ 


If Tansey were arguing that the role of traditional realist painting was now less valuable, then his painting is a contrast to that genre.  Indeed, his paintings are implicit with meaning- something avoided in realist works, he even refers to his work as ‘Iconographical’#   His paintings also depict a time past- ‘Action Painting II’ can be seen as a critique of the abstract expressionists in itself.  Courbet began his   pursuit of realism quoting that ‘I hold that artists of one century basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century.’#  In this painting, the palette is far from the monochromic realist one, but an ethereal green, and here the artist Picasso and braque are painting the metaphorical rising rocket of modernity- both artists of the past century and arguably originators of the modernist movement in America. 


Lichtenstein’s opinion must be based upon the nature of the reality being depicted.  If the realist movement was superseded by the modernists, then the way of looking at art must have changed.  Maybe the point which is Lichtenstein makes is that the Abstract Expressionists are realist painters in the progressed stages of the concerns of realist painting- working at the time of the cold war, ‘in times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant.’ 


By the time of the Abstract Expressionists, a shift in how reality was perceived had occurred, and on whose perception was important- painting was a more individualistic enterprise, democratic in the shift from attention being paid to the experience of the action of painting to transfer the sense of ‘reality’.  
With the introduction of modernism, the two-dimensional painting surface was seen as an object in itself- with various ‘interruptions’ to stop ‘pure-perception’ from painting to observer and ultimately, artist to viewer. 


The traditional school of American realist art, like that of Bellows and Sloane, (And the other original American Realists, who are grouped together from exhibiting this genre at the  ‘The Eight’ exhibition of 1908) with their socialist values# and depicted scenes which were meant to show ‘the raw, physical impact of modern life’#, the experience of modern life was seen as less valuable when painted in a descriptive way.  As Lichtenstein states, the same essence of the ‘real truth’ was being painted out, the Abstract Expressionists had ‘belief in the validity of inner experience, its authenticity was considered more true and more real than objective fact and appearance.’#

The value of the individual, the human mind and how it perceived reality, or what is behind described appearance is important to both realist and abstract expressionist.  ‘Intuition provided an avenue of entry, which, as one communed with the life inherent in forms and objects, allowed an endlessly continuous sense of creation within the eye and mind of the beholder.’#
Pollock- a key in the New York School, painted out of the unconscious, but as is argued by Michael Leja, ‘the unconscious should be understood as a construction dependent upon social and historical condition.’#  So even though intuition takes precedence over intellectual process, which is a realist idea, and quite opposite to Tansey’s ordered and unified painting composition.  By this definition, the statement of Lichtenstein could be seen as true- abstract expressionists works are products of their contemporary reality.  Realism in the traditional sense if just more generalised.  ‘Every intelligent modern painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head.  It is his real subject, of which everything he paints is both a homage to and a critique, and everything he says a gloss.’#


‘Therein non-academic and realistic representation is not necessarily truth, whereas truth is more described in the instinct of the artist.  About this point, Lichtenstein and Tansey seem agreed.  Reality under a new shift in western thinking, was being seen as an ongoing process, ‘a flux perceived in immediate experience.’#  


Perception and individual perception is what realism and abstract expressionists share, it seems that abstract expressionism  is the prolonged formulation of what realism set-out to do.  Having realised the limits of the conditions of the medium of painting itself, and the interruptions which affect the viewer’s experience of perception with the transferral of information from a representation of the artists individual perception of a scene, choice of brushstrokes and other factors,  the abstract-expressionists founded an art-type without interruption of this perception.   ‘Realistic, illusionist art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art…modernist painting demonstrates, precisely in its resistance to the sculptural, that it continues the tradition and the themes of tradition, despite all appearances to the contrary#’  


The message taken up by the social-realists, from Tolstoys’ ‘What is Art’ (American edition, 1898) was ‘that an important function of art was to re-create in the viewer the feelings possessed by the artist in the act of creation#.‘  The truth is now to describe to the viewer the feelings of the artist in the act of creation - his own particular truth which was very seated in political and contemporary life.  ‘A great many objects in the world, when presented to our senses, put in motion a complex nervous machinery, which ends in some instinctive appropriate act.’#


It may here be useful TO END with a quote which summarises the problematic of realism and the idea of the realistic that one attaches to it, ‘Realism is often mistakenly conflated against “abstraction” due to the conflation of realism with realistic.’#  

style and the american scene, Harold Rosenberg, the anxious object.
# tansey website point- web address.
# linda nochlin, first chapter
#
# Quote from Phillip Rothko, in Oliver Larkin, p 195 Abstract Expressionism, Oliver Larkin Shapiro,
# p209 American Sculpture and Painting
# http://www.artchive.com/artchive/T/tansey.html
# Linda Nochlin, ‘Realism’ chapter 1...PAGE ???
# Modernism: Challenges and Perspectvies p197
# http://www.artchive.com/artchive/T/tansey.html
# Courbet quotes, p28, ’Realism’ Linda Nochlin
# Sloane was a member of the socialist party from 1912-1916 american art ref…205?
# american art and sculpture p204
# Abstract Expressionists, p8/9
# Early Modernism, p211, american art and sculpture…
# Representing the unconscious, Michael Leja, reading american art, p440
# Quote from R. Motherwell, p195, oliver larkin, Abstract Expressionism, Shapiro pair.
# american scultpure and painting p210
# p…Clement Greenberg, modernist painting. Reading Form- modern art and modernism, ed Harrison and Wood,
# American Art and Sculpture p197
# p70, an essay in aesthetics, roger fry---modern art and modernism, ed Harrison and franscina
# Realism, representation and Surrealism p251

24 August 2011 05:35