Painting: Realer than Real

What, in art, is real? The question is as old as Plato and as new as the Museum of Modern Art’s summer spectacular, called “The Art of the Real.” The museum’s show consists of 33 to total abstractions, on the argument that only objects professing to be nothing but themselves are truly “real.” The older, more obvious and far more common interpretation, of course, is that reality in art is achieved by copying “real life.” Stirred by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, a mini-renaissance of this older school is taking place.

The very mention of photography has long repelled serious easel painters, despite the fact that Corot, Cézanne and Manet all made use of the camera. Corot got the idea for his blurry landscapes from seeing an early silver print. Cézanne used photographs for his self-portraits. Manet painted his famed Execution of Emperor Maximilian from a news photograph.

Two of the most successful modern users of the camera as an aid to painting are the U.S.’s Howard Kanovitz and Britain’s Malcolm Morley, both of whom use photography as a way to probe that old Platonic question. Says Kanovitz: “Certainly the film Rashomon and, more recently, the Warren Commission report illustrate how impossible it is to ‘tell it the way it really is.’ ” Adds Morley: “Realism hasn’t even been dealt with in the 20th century. The Ashcan School were all preachers, and pop artists are busy trying to make their painting abstract.”

Creating Characters. Both painters arrived at film-fashioned realism by the circuitous route of abstract expressionism. A gregarious jazz trombonist who played with Gene Krupa’s band, Kanovitz, 39, was first attracted to art by a fellow musician who was studying painting. The more his sideman talked, the more Kanovitz liked what he heard. He enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, soon moved on to New York, where he got wrapped up in the Greenwich Village group that revolved around Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. He continued to paint abstract expressionist canvases up until 1962, though privately he enjoyed drawing the figure. “Then,” he says, “pop popped.”

Realizing that the figure had a future, Kanovitz abandoned abstraction and went back to his drawing board in earnest. He started clipping magazine pictures, now carries a Pentax camera to snap his own. He likes to think of himself as a film director, casting, arranging and often creating his own characters. The Dance, for example, was inspired by a Derain painting, which was itself inspired by a photograph of off-duty soldiers in a dance hall. Somehow, after the chicken liver and the matzoh-ball soup at a family bar mitzvah, the idea for the painting jelled in Kanovitz’s mind. Any resemblance to Derain—or for that matter, that particular bar mitzvah—is almost coincidental. The head of one lady is mounted on the shoulders of another. Abe Fortas (left background) got in because “his head reminded me of my father.” So did Fannie Hurst (right background), because “she looked like my Aunt Mamie.” Kanovitz himself plays the role of “proud papa,” shown dancing with his wife. If factual fiction, the picture is visually true, a frozen tableau of modern life.

Perceptive Portraiture. Morley, 37, does not take quite those liberties with his photographic reproductons. He switched to realism after friends kept seeing ships in his abstractions. Naturally, he started by painting nearly every ship afloat. Working from photographs and magazine pictures, he projects images onto a canvas divided into grids, fills it in “cell by cell.”

Morley’s portrait grew out of a brunch at the Manhattan apartment of Mickey Ruskin, owner of the restaurant Max’s Kansas City. The yellow of the plates and the children’s shirts combined to produce a pervasive warmth. Yet the figures are sadly isolated—Ruskin clutching his two children, his wife the cat. “It’s perceptive,” admits Ruskin, who has since separated from his wife. “The people in this portrait,” says Morley, “look more like who they are in the painting than they do in real life. That’s where the painting becomes magic.” And, he might have added, that is where realism begins.