Word: realistes
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...more than his style, it is Shahn's choice of subject and statement that cut the same in both painting and photo; a social realist, influenced by the Cubists, he captures different planar levels in "Roadside Inns," "Destitute Ozark Residents," and "Cotton Pickers, Pulaski County, Arkansas." The young girls picking cotton carry their long white bags like wedding trains falling in curves down the foreground of the photo. These cotton workers are as much tied to their jobs as the black woman in "Relief Check, Scotts Run, West Virginia" is tied to a life on welfare. Leaning out the window...
...this tension between commonplace detail and sublime staging. Caught between the transfiguring light and the gnawing darkness, his figures acquired a mysterious, haunting irrationality. Sometimes the flow of light actually contradicts the muscles and skin that Caravaggio studied with such care. The final effect is not, for this reason, "realist" at all, but the impact remains. It is the violent blackness of Macbeth...