Why Realism Matters

Glass With Flowers and Wall, 1965.

During my first painting class here, my teacher once asked a student what she thought of a diptych still life by Antonio López-García.  Her response was immediate and confident: “It’s boring.”  In some ways, I suppose one really can say that a painting of a few carnations in a glass qualifies as boring.  The painting contains no drama or engaging narrative.  While the successful accuracy of López-García’s work may impress some people, most contemporary artists and art lovers are more interested in originality than traditional technique.  The problem with the painting is probably the fact that it’s a still life of a few carnations in a glass, when the artist could instead have painted an abstract statement about his medium.  It’s conventional.

López-García is one of a new generation of Spanish Realists.  I’m not terribly familiar with trends in contemporary art, but I think it’s safe to say that realism hasn’t been seriously in vogue for almost a century now.  Realism as an artistic and literary school occurred in earnest during the latter half of the 1800s in response to romanticism and a new age with firm confidence in science, empiricism, and democracy.  Realists focused not only on depicting subjects in as literal a way as possible but on chronicling the ordinary.  They were concerned with the achievement of accurate and faithful portrayals of life.  Although realism was most popular in Europe and America during the late 1800s, realism was an integral part of Spanish painting for much longer, beginning as far back as the 1200s, flourishing during the Spanish Golden Age.  Old Spain produced Zurbarán, an early realist still-life painter, later Velázquez and Goya.

A new wave of Spanish realists emerged in the 60s and 70s, of which Antonio López-García is the best known in the United States.  He received attention for his 2008 retrospective in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, his first solo exhibition in the United States.  Before the 2008 show, however, he had already become something of an icon to American realist painters due to the film Dream of Light, which follows López-García as he invariably revisits his quince tree autumn after autumn, trying to capture the light through its leaves.  He never really succeeds, but the point isn’t to succeed anyway, only to look and try to express in paint the experience of looking.

Apparently Matthew Zapruder, a poet, has generated similar responses to the one my classmate had to Lopez-Garcia.  On his blog he posted this comment received from a reader of his book of poetry Come On All You Ghosts: “Matthew Zapruder is a boring man looking out his boring window for something to inspire boring poetry with no message.” Zapruder’s own comment in response: “so true…”  The poems are often lacking in drama or any concrete narrative.  They consist of collected images, some bizarre but most quotidian.  A green porch, pedestrians on a sidewalk, or a lamp are described in simple terms without fancy rhyme schemes or heavy rhythm.

Both Zapruder and López-García’s work are quiet, beautiful, accomplished examples of the value and art of description.

Last weekend I attended the second annual Princeton Poetry Festival and had the incredible pleasure of hearing Mark Doty speak on “The Art of Description.”  He spoke of description as the act of trying to share our experiences with others, a way of trying to convey to others what it feels like to be our selves.

I wonder, as a young artist attempting not to be obnoxious, “why would anybody be interested in what it feels like to be me?  What’s so special about how I see the world?”  This gets at the heart of why realism matters in both poetry and painting.  Realist paintings and successful poetic descriptions are records of both the subject and the viewer.  They capture a particular viewer’s perspective.  I believe that we are interested in the perspectives of others because we recognize that we don’t all see in the same way.  We cannot know any thing completely without understanding its different aspects, and we cannot see certain aspects without the aid of someone else’s perspective.

Description could be scientific observation, quantitative or qualitative, or it could be poetry, or painting, but according to Doty, description is an art to the extent that it tells about the self.  Successful poems contain the poet’s signature, and I believe the same can be said of visual art.

In his lecture, Doty noted that as an editor he reads a lot of poems that seem to go straight to the interior, as though we have already done the work of conveying the outside world.  This tendency is also true of much modern and contemporary art.  The direction is necessary in order to expand the possibilities of art, but I agree with Doty when he says that we have not finished the work of conveying the world.  We can always use more poems that make us awake, and the world will always have a place for visual art that does the same.

Here I find the value of realism in the contemporary.  The reason why Antonio Lopez López-García’s artwork is important despite being criticized by some for “neo-academism.”  López-García, like Doty and Zapruder, works to describe the world, but he does so in a different medium.  His paintings, like “achieved poems”, contain his signature as the viewer.  Unlike typical photorealistic paintings, Garcia does not try to paint what his subjects should look like.  Rather, he tries to capture in paint or bronze exactly what he perceives.  His sensitivity to the exact visual character of his subjects results in the often surreal feeling of his hyperrealistic pieces.

The Table, 1971-80

The Table is true to reality in a way that manages to capture the passage of time in the motion of his wife’s head in the periphery of the scene.  The painting tells the viewer where the painter’s attention is most heavily focused: his daughter’s exact expression, the reflective surface of an egg, the edge of a bowl.  López-García’s paintings are accurate to his individual perception of his surroundings.  They constrict us temporarily to the limits of his eyes; by allowing these limits and these attentions to overlay our perception, we learn to look in a different way.

Likewise, Zapruder startles us awake to the ordinary through his use of unusual yet accurate imagery.  His descriptions require us to consider a different aspect of what we thought we understood in order to grasp their applicability, and in so doing they alert us to a different way of understanding.

There is also wonderful selfish value in painting realistically or writing descriptively.  Just as these works tell the viewer to look, they require an intensity of observation from the artist/writer that is unusual, often unpracticed, and very important.  Realism and description may be outdated, but they matter anyway because they continually teach us how to observe actively with all our senses a world from which we can always learn more.