Art Chowder September | October 2017, Issue 11 | Page 45

THE PROBLEM WITH “REALISM”
By Melville Holmes
George Bellows
Cliff Dwellers
1913
Oil on canvas
40 1/4 x 42 1/8 ”
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
A
descriptive note on the Whitney Museum’s website about Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930), depicts the
artist as “a quintessential twentieth-century American realist.” As an artist reflecting his times, his “realism” is manifest, not by
calling attention to social inequity, but by the psychological bleakness and sense of modern isolation and alienation found in such
works as Woman in the Sun, a standing nude woman in a bare room looking out the window, smoking a cigarette, or the film noir
mood of his famous Nighthawks (1942).
A comparison with another artist, Norman Rockwell, also known for his iconic representations of the times calls attention to the
semantic problem of what should be called Realism. If realism means truth to nature, Rockwell’s selection and characterization
of human types and settings can be said to reflect his times with a high degree of verisimilitude. But, because he walked on the
sunny side of the street and failed to avoid sentimentality, the role of Realist might best be left to those who dispassionately
depict the world around them. Then again, Realism was always only one kind of representational art.
1 https://www.quora.com/Why-didn’t-great-painters-of-the-past-reach-the-level-of-realism-achieved-today-by-many-artists?ref=fb
2 http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/mike-dargas-artist-instagram July 4, 2016
3 Nochlin, Linda Realism, Style and Civilization. Penguin Books, 1971.
4 Randall C. Griffin. “Thomas Anshutz’s The Ironworkers’ Noontime: Remythologizing the Industrial Worker” Smithsonian Studies in American Art. Vol. 4, No. 3/4
(Summer - Autumn, 1990), pp. 128-143
5 Robert M. Crunden. Ministers of reform : the progressives’ achievement in american civilization 1889-1920. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984. pp. 108-109

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