Super-Realism’s second-class citizenship is due in part to the fact that it lacks the intellectual underpinnings that made Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art so appealing to critics, who, in the wake of Clement Greenberg, placed heavy emphasis on theory. Estes certainly did not help the cause of Photorealism by maintaining that there was no social statement underlying his textureless, airless, peopleless images. Working from multiple photographs of a single New York street scene, Estes created extremely complex compositions, often further complicated by reflections in store windows. He adamantly declared that these pictures were exactly what they appeared to be, dazzlingly dense formalist exercises. Bell’s wonderfully colored, deeply saturated gumball machines, Baeder’s sleek diners and Cottingham’s glaring neon signs did nothing to dispel the perception that Super-Realism was nothing more than eye candy, images that appealed to a growing infatuation with American vernacular culture.

A handful of artists, like Hanson, generally included in the Photorealist circle did indeed have a social agenda, although their work has not fared much better. Bechtle’s images of California’s suburban sprawl and car culture subtly comment on the vacuity and ungainliness of contemporary consumerism, as well as middle-class aspirations, while Audrey Flack’s vanitas still lifes set on a dressing table reflect the concerns of the feminist movement that emerged with the publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique. The array of cosmetics on Flack’s dressing table are easily read as the tools that transform a woman into a desirable American stereotype, one that was projected in magazines, movies and television. Like Estes and Hanson, Flack appears in most survey books of the period, and the appeal of her work is based as much on her subject matter, which is often placed in a feminist context, as on her Photorealist technique.

There is, however, a handful of Photorealist artists from the 1960s who have drawn the full support of the both the art market and the critics. Revealingly, these painters, who include Chuck Close, Malcolm Morley and Gerhard Richter, are today not generally associated with the core group of Photorealists mentioned above, most of whom over the decades have been championed by the Louis K. Meisel Gallery and Ivan Karp of the OK Harris Gallery, both in New York. At first, the 1960s paintings by Close and Morley were often discussed in conjunction with the movement, because of the look of their early work. Richter, who is German and worked in Düsseldorf (today in Cologne), was for the most part unknown in America until the 1980s, when he was hailed as one of the great artists of his generation. What is most revealing is the later work of all three artists went well beyond Photorealism and their concerns, even in the 1960s, were quite different from those of the core group of Photorealists.

Unlike the traditional Super-Realists, these artists draw more heavily on the postmodern questions raised by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the 1950s, issues that go back to Duchamp, such as: “What is art?” ”What is painting?” “How does art take on meaning?” and “Who is the author of a work of art?” At first glance, Close appears to a card-carrying Photorealist. But just the enormous scale of his paintings—some of them 9 feet tall—influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting, separates him from the other Super-Realists, whose pictures can be described as traditional easel paintings.

Operating like a conceptual artist and even like a minimalist, Close made his art based on a set of a priori rules. He made black-and-white mug-shot photos of himself or his friends, selected an image from the several he took of one person and then proceeded to methodically transfer the image from photo to canvas by scoring both photo and canvas into small grids. Using an airbrush, he meticulously painted one grid at a time, copying every detail, including physical blemishes and the out-of-focus passages that he came across in the photo. Because of the process, Close could have made his painting upside down or even without working on continuous squares. In effect, he removed himself from the issue of style, since his style was predetermined by the photograph. His so-called Super-Realist painting was about process more than it was about the sitter, since his enormous “heads” contained no revealing information about personality or the sitter’s background. He forces us to ask, “How did Close make this painting?” Like Jasper Johns in his flag paintings and Lichtenstein in his Benday dot cartoons, Close was analyzing how an image is made, how a picture is nothing more than a language that consists of putting paint on canvas.