A solitary 1962 Chevy gleaming in a Wells Fargo parking lot. The brightly lit bumpers of a pinball machine. Ketchup bottles shining in a deserted diner. All the classic scenes of postwar American capitalism, seductive and abundant, featured in the two-part show “Picture This: Photorealism 1966–1985.” Each of these thirty-seven paintings in oil and acrylic—taken from a collection of more than seventy works—is a high-fidelity re-creation of a photograph. With a conjurer’s eye, the Photorealists translated the textures, colors, and details of flat analog images into ravishingly three-dimensional illusions.
In Robert Bechtle’s ’64 Chrysler, 1971, the car is parked in a neighborhood of beige stucco bungalows and white picket fences. All neat lines, the pigment is creamily even, as if enacting the inviting blandness of suburbia. In Tom Blackwell’s Queens Boulevard, 1974, the late-afternoon sun lends an unexpected romanticism to the lanes of traffic passing a First National City Bank. The scene itself is painted from the perspective of the driver’s seat of another vehicle, placing the viewer inside this archetypal American scene of motion and money.
If the Photorealists’ ambition was to make it appear as if only a pane of glass divided subject from viewer, then Don Eddy’s Bananas, Apples, Avocados, Tomatoes; Supermarket Window III, 1973, is a perfect example. A series of dazzling reflections within reflections—plastic-wrapped fruit displayed behind glass that in turn captures the facing skyscrapers—reveals the sensuousness hidden in the surface of the everyday. Yet this transparency is a fiction. The Photorealists were as drawn to invention as fidelity. The artists often worked with multiple photographs to distill an ideal image. They also frequently swapped black and white for color, or switched the perspective of the originals entirely.
Human figures are almost entirely missing; places are lent an eerie vastness. In Still Life (Color Pick), 1982, Ralph Goings zooms in on a diner interior. He traces the shine of a chrome napkin dispenser glinting in dappled shadows. Pools of liquid light well up on the red Formica counter. (To deepen the illusion, the work itself was hung next to a gallery window, as if the light depicted was streaming in from outside.)
Despite attempts to suppress the artist’s hand in pursuit of the represented subject, traces keep appearing. Often, a signature is incorporated within the mise-en-scène. John Baeder’s name can be seen on a hand-painted sign on the window of Max’s Grill, 1974, and appears as graffiti on a building in the background of Silver Top Diner from the same year. The artist’s identity becomes another brand name. Collectively, these works amount to an odyssey through the American landscape in the latter half of the twentieth century, but their preoccupations are typically male: from Robert Cottingham’s vast rendering of a beer-branded neon sign in daylight (Miller High Life, 1977) to car engines stickered with swaggering, performatively macho statements (Ron Kleemann’s Harry Loves Maxine The American Way, 1973). For all its alleged neutrality, the movement, with its maleness and whiteness, presents a partisan view of the culture.
Yet intriguing slippages in style remain. In Ben Schonzeit’s Fruit of the Month (F.O.T.M.), 1972, photographic images of fruit are spliced over an advertisement for an aerospace company, the original edges and folds reproduced by the painter’s hand. Cottingham’s Old Crow, 1983, depicts the dichotomies of all-American consumerism: A sign reading SPIRITUAL READER AND ADVISOR is displayed next to a liquor store. For all the peppiness and plenty of these scenes, we sometimes see the other side of the coin. John Salt’s two “Arrested Vehicle” paintings from 1970 feature cars in junkyards, the paint mistily applied with an airbrush to create an almost wistful effect. And despite a preoccupation with the triumphalist ethos of the American dream (Richard McLean’s portraits of racehorses; the gambling arcade close-up of Charles Bell’s Gin, 1977), its beneficiaries are oddly absent.
