Word: realism
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...Folly? Offered with much advance fanfare after three intervening novels (widely praised but not very widely read), The Spire is clearly intended as a crowning work. Like Golding's other books, it is less a novel than a kind of fable in which a thin skin of realism is stretched to meet a rigid allegorical frame. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious, it does not fully confirm the remarkably high reputation Golding now enjoys. But it proves that he has made himself the relentless modern master of two ancient and provocative themes-the loss of paradise and the sinfulness...
...Realism depends on your assumptions, how you sense it," says Thiebaud. "For rne, it's the evidence of what happens in a clean, well-lighted white space, or what happens to reality divested of its literary conditions." His figures dawdle endlessly with their food, hesitant whether to spring to life or to remain contentedly paint...
Four people on a bus-how do they relate to each other? It's no accident that the subject matter of so-called new realism is concerned with the intimacy of daily life-your relationship to the food on your breakfast table and to the woman across the table...
...life that he paints seems to have a pretty tenuous grip on itself. In a show of 23 recent works that opened last week in Manhattan's Terry Dintenfass Gallery, Goodman's three-panel Trilogy suggests a man who enters a closet and hangs himself. His realism is obtuse, his figures often secret sharers in politely observed crimes or Baconesque participants in some gory exercise. Often he veils or blurs his figures. They seem to enact Dante's Inferno in modern dress, where the condemned of the sixth circle knew the eternal future and remembered the past...
What these artists create is only examples of reawakening realism. Yet they signal a change of mood. Realism, as opposed to abstraction, recognizes the external world and asserts the place of man and the objects that he makes within it. Sir Herbert Read, the British art critic, thought that realism is "an expression of confidence in, and sympathy for, the organic processes of life." Contemporary realists play it too cool for words like confidence and sympathy, but, almost reluctantly, they seem to be at least in touch with life...