Art: The Realist as Corn God

ARCHAIC cultural rites do survive in New York. One of them is the fertility festival. The Corn God is chosen; he reigns for a year, credited with power, laden with honors and trophies. Then, at winter solstice, he is killed. A new Corn God takes his place. This cumbersome cycle was once thought to ensure the growth of crops. Today it is mainly practiced in Manhattan’s art world. Discovering—or inventing—a new Corn God every year is a basic market strategy, since art consumers, strung out on the disintegrating pluralism of American art in the early ’70s, constantly need fresh inspiration. The newest beneficiary and victim of this method is realist art.

The fantasy is that a realist movement exists in America—in the sense that Cubism, for instance, was a coherent movement with defined aims. The word movement, in fact, is mere packaging: a bogus form of authentication aimed at nervous collectors who demand instant history. In reality, the scenario is very complex. No generalizations hold true all the way across it, and the strongest realists—like Alfred Leslie and Philip Pearlstein—produce work that would have commanding authority whatever the current fashion.

The Bundle. At one end of this spectrum sits a neatly bundled phenomenon called Radical Realism or, to give it the name of a new show consecrating it at the Janis Gallery, “Sharp-Focus Realism.” Well before the opening, it was clear that the show’s promoters expected the style to have the same razzy, traumatic effect on New York taste that Pop art had in 1962—and that they were ready to use the same kind of ballyhoo to ensure it. In a way, this was fitting. The creation is Pop’s son.

The characteristics of the style are extreme, deadpan literalness of image, generally repainted from photos with an airbrush, immaculate precision of surface, and a taste for mechanical subjects such as cars, fire trucks and long expanses of shiny kitchenware. The average result is an almost unimaginably stupid and passive materialism—the boredom of Warhol’s silk-screened photos without their threat and bite. Thus, confronted for the nth time with another perfect rendering of reflections on the chrome gizzard of a Harley-Davidson or the pastille skin of a Volkswagen, one is apt to recall Truman Capote’s sneer (about another medium) that “this isn’t writing, it’s typing.”

Yet a minority of airbrush realists do explore one important problem of naturalism: how much information can a painted surface carry, and when does it start usurping the denseness of reality itself? California Artist Richard McLean’s Rustler Charger (done from a black-and-white photo in a horse magazine) contains an unassimilable welter of detail, from the pebbles on the ground to the stitching on the girl’s pants to the last speckle on the horse’s coat. But, says McLean, 37, “it’s not just a blown-up photo. I try to get a more heightened sense of reality, to make it a more startling and palpable thing to react to than a photograph is. Those people on the horse are more real to you than they would be if you went out and saw them standing in real life in a field.”

Though McLean’s earnest visual pedantry does not bear out the last claim, Chuck Close’s portrait heads do. Close, 31, studied painting at Yale—but was soon worried by the automatic reflexes of handwriting and color that went into his work. “It seemed dumb and unthinking,” he explains. “I was using pat solutions. So I wondered, what would happen if I eliminate my gestures, my good color sense?” Close threw out his brushes and tubes, bought an airbrush, and set to work on a series of immense (8 ft. tall) heads.

The method he used to paint Susan, 1971, was meticulously impersonal. First, a color photo was broken down by a commercial printer into three color-separation sheets, red, yellow and blue. Using these as a guide, Close reproduced the separations on canvas with an airbrush. “I only use three primaries, so the nice thing is I can’t have favorite colors. The scale has to be huge for the amount of information I want to convey. I wanted to treat the face as topography, not portraiture—as if you’re moving over a landscape, with every pore and wrinkle given equal value.”

Indispensable Tool. Not all realists, however, use photographic sources to such deliberately unpoetic ends. Richard Estes, 35, has emerged since his first exhibition in 1968 as the most gifted recorder of American cityscape: a chrome-faced escalator plunges eerily downward as if to some dreadful and sanitary», limbo, the façades of commercial buildings (as in Cafeteria, 1969) become a maze of glittering planes in which figures swim, refracted among transparencies. For Estes, a camera is an indispensable tool for stabilizing this flux of movement in all its ambiguous clarity. “Taking the photograph,” he says, “is as important as painting the picture. The same spot is always changing on the street. But the difference between art and life is that art is constant. There’s no time limit on a nice still photo. It has no beginning or end—it just exists.” The hard, lucid design of Estes’ work, together with its traditional technique—his apparently photographic realism is really a composite, full of nuances and adjustments—sets him to the right of the Radical Realists.

One of the unforeseen aspects of recent realism has been its migration into sculpture. At times this produces images not far above the level of ingenious waxwork—thus John de Andrea’s perky nudes, exact down to the last curl of pubic hair. But the one shot that hyperrealist sculpture has in its locker is a disturbing sense of presence, and this, Duane Hanson’s tableaux exploit to the fullest degree. His Bowery Bums, all rags and filthy, mottled flesh, lying in an appalling detritus of empty bottles and scunge, is one of the most grossly truthful pieces of social observation in American art.

But the fact remains that the best figurative painting in America has no relation to Pop art. It is still, in general, done by the “humanist” and historically inspired artists who lived through the Abstract Expressionist experience and came out on the other side. Their work keeps a relaxed, articulate contact with the great tradition of figurative painting. Representative of these are Philip Pearlstein, Alfred Leslie and—a more recent and conservative addition—William Bailey.

It would be hard to think of a less “American” painter than Bailey, 41, who teaches at Yale, where he had earlier studied under Josef Albers. Modest in scale and completely unrhetorical, his pictures seem European—the work, perhaps, of a less mature Balthus, minus the overtones of perverse eroticism. Their strength lies partly in the extreme discipline of organization that Bailey can muster. He is a perfectionist, so much so that the right hand of the girl in Listener had to be scraped off and repainted “about 100 times” before he was satisfied with it (perhaps he shouldn’t have been). His subjects, whether eggs and cups on a table or a seated nude, are bathed in a continuous, golden flow of subdued light; Bailey’s world is unspecific in nearly everything except the insistent, forming pressure of his drawing. Corners meet and windows describe their rectangles with the cool inevitability of geometric abstraction. And its idealist, detached tone is very different from the concrete vigor of the man who must be, by now, America’s leading realist: Philip Pearlstein.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1924, Pearlstein gravitated to New York, where he rapidly became involved with the dominant orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism. But in 1958, after a visit to Italy, he began to realize that he was still at bottom a realist draftsman. “I did not mean to become the kind of naive or modest painter of nice pictures the word realist seems to lead people to expect. I meant to create strong, aggressive paintings that would compete with the best of abstraction.”

Two Female Models on Apache Rug is painted with a kind of weighty probity that Courbet would have approved. Nothing is fudged or romanticized; all the attention is focused on an absolute truth of contour, the precise sensation of bunched, knotted or slack muscle, the laconic interplay between the cold skin and the darting, vivid pat terns of the fabric. No artist of Pearlstein’s generation has so brave ly confronted the basic issues of realism—how to hold the utmost concreteness of three-dimensional volume within the strongest two-dimensional pattern. The vigorously modeled limbs and trunks of his subjects create a pictorial energy that, like the black scaffolding of Kline’s brush marks, burst through the edges of the canvas. Pearlstein scorns using photographs. “It never occurred to me,” he says, “that people would work from photos—because I never had any difficulty drawing or painting.”

Right Angle. Painter Alfred Leslie is even blunter in his rejection of photographic aids. “In the 20th century,” he says, “our reality comes through instrumentation. People believe things only when the things have been qualified by technology. So you can be convicted in court by a photo taken of you, even though 20 people say you were 100 miles away. This is because people feel that a photograph has more truth than personal testimony.” Leslie’s pictorial pragmatism is such that, for a current painting of the death of his poet friend Frank O’Hara (who was run over by a Jeep on the beach at Fire Island in 1966), he had a whole Jeep lifted in through his studio window and chocked up, six feet in the air, to get the angle right.

A second-generation Abstract Expressionist like Pearlstein, Leslie turned to figure painting in the early ’60s. His technique as a draftsman is formidable, sharing Pearlstein’s plain speech and relentless grip. Your Kindness is an idiosyncratic companion piece to David’s famous Death of Marat, with Leslie’s wife Constance West dressed as Charlotte Corday and holding the letter that got her access to Marat’s bathroom. It is an exhilarating picture, with its firm amplitude of shapes and stripes. Leslie thinks of his work in partly ethical terms. “I think,” he reflects, “it was Balzac who said that when art begins to decay it is always realism that comes to the rescue. This is why we must fight for the restoration of the realistic painter’s rights—why I feel that I have to paint from life, to restore, at least in myself, the power to see things at first hand. There is a direct relationship between what we see and the quality of life.”