Some Men of the Year, judged on criteria at which we can only guess, are to lunch at the Hilton hotel; the Equal Opportunities Commission is to file a report advocating greater child-care facilities in the workplace; several Everest climbers, armed with a scale model of the mountain, are to lecture the Royal Geographic Society; a major political figure will dine at the American Chamber of Commerce. Things like this happen in London every day. They are of varying importance and interest, and could, for the most part, go unnoticed by the population at large. But the attention given to them by the

What could be more abstract than realism? Imagine an Arcimboldo figure called “Reality”; of what would it be composed? A chimera of metonyms, magnetized about an absence, or as Nietzsche said of truth, “a mobile army of metaphors, anthropomorphisms . . . human relations . . . ” composing an illusion of presence.

In “3 American Painters,” Michael Fried spoke of “the gradual withdrawal of reality from the power of painting to represent it.” In his introduction to this show, John Roberts shows awareness of the slippery state of “realism” by prefacing his comments on the paintings by a history of