Word: realism
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...into their own minds that what was considered to be art was what looked least like the external world. Some was fresh, some was fraud, some was Freud, and quite a lot of it was an artistic withdrawal syndrome, a turning away from the calamitous Depression that the social realism of the 1930s pitilessly explored, and from the war that followed. But the young abstract expressionists showing this year are few and-by comparison with such "Old Masters" as Pollock, Kline and De Kooning-lackluster. By the evidence of what is on view in Manhattan, the nation...
...trends are many, as evidenced by four dissimilar artists showing this week-Wayne Thiebaud, George Segal, Fairfield Porter and Sidney Goodman. Yet they all agree that their realism is in no sense a return to the past...
...times, Thiebaud has been a gag cartoonist, a cinema director, and an advertising art director. Now he teaches painting at the University of California's Davis campus. "New realism," says Thiebaud, "certainly relates to advertising art-cropping, directness, noninvolvement with the product. Abstract expressionism said you had to be involved, to search for individual consciousness and sensibility. The new realists, or Pop artists, say it's possible to be cool, not have a personal feeling for the object. The new artist is saying maybe you can do your art with ease, without any involvement...
Cheever's demonic quality is just beginning to emerge in his fiction from its buttoned-up Brooks Brothers carapace of realism. It has always been recognized in the private pre-Ovidian Cheever. "He is a magician," says his friend Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, recalling the old women who lurked in the back parlors of the Negro section of Oklahoma City where he grew up. "He can take a watch chain or something and tell you the whole man." Even Mary Cheever subscribes to the theory that her husband is not as other men. She recounts with some...
...level of realism, the Cheever biography is just another success story -of a man reaping the modest rewards of recognition after a lifetime of devoted apprenticeship, journeyman years, and final mastery of a difficult trade. His spiritual biography is something else again, seen clearly only in terms of his own severe moral vision. He sees man not in modern terms as any individual but as the center of a system of obligations. Evasion or betrayal of these obligations may be punishable by metamorphosis into some monstrous, less-than-human form. Life, he writes, is "a perilous moral journey." The freaks...