The Two Sides of Photorealism
April 2008
When Photorealist painting surfaced in the late 1960s, it drew a fair amount of attention from the art world and generated excitement among collectors. In the face of the abstruse abstraction of Minimal and much Post-Minimal art and the heavy theorizing that surrounded these styles, it must have seemed to many to be a breath of fresh air. Its subject was readily recognizable and its themes readily understood, or so most people thought at the time. And then there was that eye-fetching realism—or again, so people thought, since the images looked like photographs, which viewers believed do not lie.To many, Photorealism must have seemed like a descendant of Pop Art, building on the representational imagery that Pop daringly reintroduced to art after a decade dominated by Abstract Expressionism and post-painterly abstraction. And similarly, it seemed to deal with popular culture, though in a way that would never be confused with Pop. Charles Bell painted gumball machines, John Baeder diners, Robert Cottingham garish neon signs, Robert Bechtle California suburban culture and Richard Estes airless, silent, urban streets, often focusing on slick Modernist ’60s architecture that contrasted dramatically with the revival-style buildings, even skyscrapers, of pre–World War II New York.
While Pop art appropriated both the look and style of vernacular or popular art, transforming “low art” into “high art,” Photorealism used low art—commercial signs, pinball machines, suburban tract housing and diners—as its subject matter rather than appropriating its style. The style of Photorealism instead came from snapshot photography, not billboards, advertisements and magazine or newspaper images. While Warhol and Rauschenberg had incorporated a range of silk-screened photographic images from the mass media into their art, the Super-Realists approached the photographic image in an entirely different way: They took their own photographs and then painstakingly imitated them in paintings. Many used an airbrush, and those who did not often used fine brushes that resulted in a smooth, cool surface that gave no hint that the work was a painting and not a large photograph. These seemingly nonobjective, emotionless images shared with Pop and Minimal art a cool, deadpan presentation.
Sculpture is often linked to Photorealism, right or wrongly, especially the work of Duane Hanson. Sometimes labeled Verism, because of its illusionism, this sculpture is generally lumped with Photorealist painting under the umbrella term Super-Realism. As sculpture, Hanson’s figures did not look like a photograph. Yet, his realistically painted fiberglass figures dressed in real clothing and equipped with real accessories, gave the work a startling life-like quality that shocked many viewers when they discovered they were looking at art, and not living human beings. While Hanson’s deceiving illusionism is the lure for many viewers, the strength of the work lies in its biting social criticism. His people are too fat, bored with the rote routine of their jobs or are mindless consumers. They live in an unfulfilling, spiritless world, one that seemed to many to correspond to the silent, lifeless world of so much Photorealist painting.
Despite its parallels with Pop and Minimal art, Photorealism has not shared the critical acclaim of these movements, though it certainly has its critical adherents and collector support. Most art-historical surveys tend to treat the movement more as a footnote than a chapter, and auction prices for works by Bechtle, Goings and Bell tend to be a fraction of those for Lichtenstein, Warhol, Donald Judd, or Sol LeWitt, for example. Of the group, only Estes and Hanson do well in the marketplace, although even their prices do not begin to touch those of major Pop, Minimal, Post-Minimal and Conceptual artists. They are also the sole artists in the group who are included in most art-historical surveys. 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. His career has been an ongoing exploration of this issue. In 1970, he began working in color, which he applied with the same process used for printing color photographs or color reproductions in a book: He layered the three primary colors and black until the top layer was actually color-correct. Close’s quest to study how images are made led him to paint with his thumb, putting one thumb mark of a different color and value within each square of his grid, or to paint with different shaped and colored marks within each grid square. With these techniques, no one could describe his blurry, painterly images as Photorealist, although the work was still based on photographs, but looked more like computer-generated images, each square an enlarged pixel.
Unlike Close and the Photorealists, Malcolm Morley used photographs from the media. He emerged toward 1964, a few years before Close and Estes, painting ships he found on posters and postcards or rendering found snapshots of middle-class white families vacationing on beaches or dining on lavish ocean liners. Morley’s paint handling, however, was sometimes pasty and visible, clearly indicating this was a painting of a photograph and not an attempt to make his image look like an actual photograph. He sometimes left a white border around his image, just like the border on snapshots, thus, reinforcing the photographic source of his picture.
In his deadpan paintings of ocean liners and battleships, Morley is telling us that paintings, just like photographic images, can be vague, misleading and open to interpretation. His works, which were based on travel posters or snapshots of affluent vacationing families, appear equally deadpan, although they are filled with social commentary. These paintings were created during the social revolution of the 1960s, when the American status quo of a white, patriarchal society as reinforced by the media was under attack. By re-presenting these kinds of mass media images, Morley was subversively underscoring their artificiality. Like Close, he would become increasingly painterly in succeeding decades, and his imagery fractured as he juxtaposed what appeared to be disparate fragments culled from a variety of images.
While Richter is never associated with the Super-Realists, there are numerous reasons for discussing him here. Like Morley, Richter emerged in 1963–64, albeit in Düsseldorf, predating American Super-Realism. His preoccupation with the photograph is important, for it reflects how important photography was becoming worldwide and how its images were structuring public opinion. For many painters, it was rapidly becoming the most valid way to justify the act of painting, which by the end of the decade many critics were declaring dead, killed by Minimal and Conceptual art. Richter was especially influenced by Rauschenberg and the Pop artists and their appropriation of the media, which reinforced the importance of American Pop in spurring the period’s infatuation with the photograph and its relationship to painting.
Richter initially called his photography-based style “Capitalist Realism,” underscoring how the media served the financial interests of specific groups, corporations or individuals. He painted family snapshots of his uncle in a Nazi uniform and of found media images of dive-bombing World War II airplanes. He painted eight individual portraits, probably based on yearbook photographs, of the nurses who were murdered in Chicago by Richard Speck. In every instance, he painted a slightly blurry image, distinct enough to identify the subject and recognize that it is based on a photograph, but distorted enough to suggest an ambiguity of sorts. The visual ambiguity was intended to suggest an ambiguity of meaning: What is the intended meaning of this snapshot of a man in a Nazi uniform, of warplanes or murdered nurses, who the viewer does not even know are murdered nurses since they are presented as portraits lifted from a school yearbook? Like Morley, Richter is justifying the existence of painting through photography, their brand of Photorealism commenting on photography and image-making in general, and not just appropriating the look of a photograph. In the 1980s, Richter created a series of “history paintings” based on media photographs of the demise of members of the German terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang. These are vague images that call attention to the ambiguity of the photographs themselves, which become meaningful only when supplied with a context, generally a news story, although neither image nor text necessarily presents an absolute truth.
To date, critics, curators and collectors seem to prefer the headier work of Close, Morley and Richter, which raises issues that are seen as dominating the postmodern art of the last 50 years. And yet, it is surprising that in this era of postmodernism, which in theory does not apply qualitative values to art, more attention is not paid to the core group of Photorealists. Despite the admonition of postmodern theory against hierarchies of styles, media or artists, scholars and collectors alike continue to view the history of art as a landscape filled with mountain peaks, foothills and plains, placing the Rembrandts, Picassos and Rauschenbergs at the top and their followers below.
But Estes, Flack, Bechtle and the other Photorealists are hardly followers. They are just different. And more importantly, they and Close, Morley, and Richter as well as the silkscreened photographic images of Rauschenberg and Warhol are a reminder of the moment when photography was first recognized by the upper echelons of the art world as a powerful medium, one that was responsible for molding popular opinion, taste and worldviews. (It was also a time when photography itself increased in scale, functioning more like painting, and when it also became the favorite medium of Conceptual artists.) By the 1980s, photography, along with its “moving” cousin, video, would be hailed as a major art form, rivaling painting and sculpture for supremacy in the art world. But the turning point was the 1960s, and the Photorealists are the barometer of this storm that has transformed our perception of fine art.
Art critic and Art&Antiques Contributing Editor Joseph Jacobs is the executive director of the Chaim Gross Foundation and writes regularly on contemporary art.SOURCE LIST
Forum Gallery
New York, 212.355.4545
Los Angeles, 323.655.1550 forumgallery.com
Robert Cottingham
Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York
212.677.1340 meiselgallery.com
Charles Bell, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings
Marian Goodman, New York
212.977.7160 mariangoodman.com
Gerhard Richter
Marlborough Gallery, New York
212.541.4900 marlboroughgallery.com
Richard Estes
OK Harris, New York
212.431.3600 okharris.com
John Baeder, Ralph Goings
PaceWildenstein, New York
212.421.3292 pacewildenstein.com
Chuck Close
Sperone Westwater, New York
212.999.7338 speronewestwater.com
Malcolm Morley