Art: They Paint; You Recognize

In the previous reigning style of U.S. art, abstract expressionism, artists ventured so deeply into their own minds that what was considered to be art was what looked least like the external world. Some was fresh, some was fraud, some was Freud, and quite a lot of it was an artistic withdrawal syndrome, a turning away from the calamitous Depression that the social realism of the 1930s pitilessly explored, and from the war that followed. But the young abstract expressionists showing this year are few and—by comparison with such “Old Masters” as Pollock, Kline and De Kooning—lackluster. By the evidence of what is on view in Manhattan, the nation’s art center, the liveliest artists and galleries prize realism, not social, not photographic, not academic, but in new guises.

The trends are many, as evidenced by four dissimilar artists showing this week—Wayne Thiebaud, George Segal, Fairfield Porter and Sidney Goodman. Yet they all agree that their realism is in no sense a return to the past.

Thiebaud, 43, won notoriety in the first flush of Pop art because he painted still lifes of cakes, pies and other frosted delights. Although he was as much concerned with Russian icons (“I see myself as a very conservative artist connected with tradition”), he rapidly became known as the laureate of the lunch counter.

At times, Thiebaud has been a gag cartoonist, a cinema director, and an advertising art director. Now he teaches painting at the University of California’s Davis campus. “New realism,” says Thiebaud, “certainly relates to advertising art—cropping, directness, noninvolvement with the product. Abstract expressionism said you had to be involved, to search for individual consciousness and sensibility. The new realists, or Pop artists, say it’s possible to be cool, not have a personal feeling for the object. The new artist is saying maybe you can do your art with ease, without any involvement at all.”

The frontality of Thiebaud’s figures (see opposite page) outdoes that of the Sphinx. Each personage—a hulking pro football player, symmetrical in size and numeration, or Thiebaud’s wife posing as a bather with a double-dip strawberry ice-cream cone—juts forward like a sculptured relief from a general porcelain-white background. The whiteness helps isolate the image; the garish fluorescent lighting that commercialism loves bathes everything in its frigid glare. Thiebaud makes long, curling highlights out of polychromatic contours that do not exist outside the eye:

a cordovan shoe glows red and blue along its welt, the arches of bare feet purple in the corrosive illumination that gives simple poses a seductive superreality. His images are lush with cosmetic painterliness; his white backgrounds are impastos of frosting.

“Realism depends on your assumptions, how you sense it,” says Thiebaud. “For rne, it’s the evidence of what happens in a clean, well-lighted white space, or what happens to reality divested of its literary conditions.” His figures dawdle endlessly with their food, hesitant whether to spring to life or to remain contentedly paint.

Segal, 38, tried but could not take on the inward passions of abstract expressionism. “I was too sensual to turn inside,” he says. “I was driving myself crazy as an art student. One teacher agreed and even called me schizophrenic.” Now Segal takes a short cut to sculptures; he makes splint personalities by making thin-walled plaster molds of his friends, blurring and refining the wet plaster to his purposes. With his unconventional technique, Segal found a new reality emerging while the plaster set. “To hold a pose for 40 minutes,” says he, “you can’t be in a social or artificial posture. Then the body reveals certain truths about itself.” Idealization, he found, disappeared in favor of the sheer fatigue of his models.

Segal’s spooky similars, now populating Manhattan’s Green Gallery, would have earned him a burning for wizardry during the Inquisition. His pale zombies “present the mystery of a human being,” he says. Like the remains of Pompeians preserved in volcanic ash, they dispute the border line between art and life. Often Segal’s mummies occupy an environment with real objects—a car door, a Coke machine, or a false house front. For a future sculpture, he recently bought a genuine phone booth and took it to his studio, which is on a New Jersey chicken farm that he went bankrupt running. Authentic environments with plaster people raise “questions about the nature of the real object, and of relationships between human beings.

Four people on a bus—how do they relate to each other? It’s no accident that the subject matter of so-called new realism is concerned with the intimacy of daily life—your relationship to the food on your breakfast table and to the woman across the table.”

Porter, 56, Harvard-trained art historian, critic and poet, has lived quite comfortably alongside abstraction, profiting from its lessons although he was obscured by its critical acclaim. A major influence on his art was Willem de Kooning, who urged him to paint the whole of his canvas rather than isolated images. Porter does, spreading across his works languid, idyllic colors that seem to be dreams of bygone childhood.

His orange, grey, brown and blue paintings in Manhattan’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery are intimate scenes: Mildred Lamar Hooking a Rug is as innocent as a colonial primitive; his children in a room or walking on the lawn are devoid of inward psychology or narrative in a marriage of abstract and realistic techniques. He achieves what he calls “an ambiguity between a realistic shape and a painting shape.” In The Kittiwake and the John Walton, a Maine seascape of two boats, a hull and its shadow are equal pale blues that bobble on a pink sea. It is reality, but a reality that tells how light behaves at sunset and how the artist transforms it into a lustrous image lacking any intimations of nostalgia.

Goodman, 28, art teacher at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art says: “What I want to do concerns more than just shapes, forms and colors with no relation to a subject. There wasn’t enough life in abstract art for me.” The life that he paints seems to have a pretty tenuous grip on itself. In a show of 23 recent works that opened last week in Manhattan’s Terry Dintenfass Gallery, Goodman’s three-panel Trilogy suggests a man who enters a closet and hangs himself. His realism is obtuse, his figures often secret sharers in politely observed crimes or Baconesque participants in some gory exercise. Often he veils or blurs his figures. They seem to enact Dante’s Inferno in modern dress, where the condemned of the sixth circle knew the eternal future and remembered the past but had no sense of their present horror. In the drama, they fulfill Goodman’s ideals of stillness and deadly substance within a stagelike space that he derives from such of his idols as Masaccio, Velásquez and Rembrandt.

What these artists create is only examples of reawakening realism. Yet they signal a change of mood. Realism, as opposed to abstraction, recognizes the external world and asserts the place of man and the objects that he makes within it. Sir Herbert Read, the British art critic, thought that realism is “an expression of confidence in, and sympathy for, the organic processes of life.” Contemporary realists play it too cool for words like confidence and sympathy, but, almost reluctantly, they seem to be at least in touch with life.