Word: realistically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...retro spective in San Francisco last month, Wayne Thiebaud gave an aw-shucksy wriggle of the shoulders and declared, "I'm just a sign painter gone uppity." One may, with respect, demur. At 64, after decades of painting in the Bay Area, Thiebaud is one of the most gifted realist artists in America. At a time when so much new art leaves an iridescent slick of depletion on the eyeball, the group of 89 of his paintings and drawings, assembled by Curator Karen Tsujimoto at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the real thing, a distinct and bracing...
...however, untrue. Today it seems clear that Thiebaud's still lifes were far less interested in the manipulation of "cool" admass signs and pervasive cliches (the landscape of pop) than in traditional pursuits of realist painting, especially the celebration of minutiae of texture and light...
...recognizes the ordinary without ridiculing it, but his ordinary is loony enough for any South American magic realist. The seat of Mist County, in an unmapped region northwest of Minneapolis, delights in eccentric folklore. The first white settlers are led by a Boston Unitarian called to convert the Indians with interpretive dance. She only captivates a beskinned and unbathed French trapper, with whom she has seven children. The failing local college - is finally abandoned after a bear kills a student, and the town's first Norwegian is a Union Army deserter whose descendants, the Sons of Knute, hold a yearly...
Bacon utterly rejects this view. He sees himself not as an expressionist but as a realist who nevertheless stakes the outcome of his art on an opposition between intelligence (ordering, remembering, exemplifying) and sensation. His paintings do not strive to tell stories, but to clamp themselves on the viewers' nervous system and offer, as he puts it, "the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance." He once remarked: "An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a nonillustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact...
Jenney carries the traditional view-through-the-window idea of realist painting to an extreme. The frame is part of the work, and within it -- always a wide, heavily molded, dark construction, its inner edges toned so that a white glow seems to be emanating from the picture itself -- one catches a glimpse of, say, a broad horizon, a band of achingly pure and silent sky, the trunk of a pine. The frame becomes a prison for a sign of traditional vastness, the 19th century view of limitless America. But look closer and the ideal landscape is fatally cankered...