Humankind cannot bear very much . . .

Patrick Skene Catling

AMERICAN REALISM by Edward Lucie-Smith Thames & Hudson, £29.95, pp. 240 Twentieth-century American Realism, which is skilfully anatomised, though with a certain amount of bloodshed, in this beautifully produced compendium of drab splendour, perhaps should be called Depressionism. Throughout most of this century it is generally the ugly art of the dust-bowl, industrial oppression and urban squalor, of left-wing disillusion and resent- ment, the art of Skid Row.

Even when underdog Realist artists with top-dog dealers reach the galleries of 57th Street and summer places in East Hamp- ton, they somehow manage to retain their indignant sense of the worthlessness of civilisation and life itself. In literature this is Joseph Hellerism. On the other hand, at the same time, the Realists steadfastly cherish justifiable pride in their technical competence, in some cases very highly developed indeed and beyond the ability of many practitioners of less demanding other `isms'. 'From its beginnings,' as Lucie- Smith points out in his thorough historical survey, 'American painting was motivated by the desire to represent reality.' He traces the origins of American art as far back as the Revolution. Before 20th-centu- ry artistic schismatic divergence, all Ameri- can artists, even the most romantic of them, used to endeavour to paint people, places and things as realistically as possible.

Until the middle of the 19th century, there was an age of innocent idealism, in which artists painted landscapes, especially on the Western frontier, that depicted America as an unspoilt Eden. By the end of the century it was apparent that Paradise was lost. Citing Thomas Eakins' close-up study of a surgical operation, 'The Gross Clinic' (1875), Lucie-Smith observes: 'Real- ism becomes almost the opposite of hedo- nism.' That 'almost' soon seems redundant.

The artists of the so-called 'Ashcan School,' which was named long after its dis- solution, were the first to be preoccupied with demotic subjects, if not always the garbage, of contemporary city life. George Bellows' Cliff Dwellers' (1913), a Hogarthian scene of an overcrowded street between slum tenements, makes a critical comment which anticipates the Social Realists of the 1930s.

For many Americans, the Thirties were the century's dreariest decade. The Realists portrayed its dreariest images with dreary fidelity. In the agricultural hinterland, regional artists, such as Alexandre Hogue, painted eroded landscapes and farmyard relics of abandonment. Typically, in his `Drouth Stricken Area' (1934), a vulture on a broken fence keeps vigilant watch on an emaciated cow obviously close to death. Grant Wood painted orderly, lush farm

2nd of May, Los Angeles, by John Nava, 1992

landscapes as he wished they were, but showed farm people as they really were in the famous gloomy double portrait called `American Gothic' (1930).

Meanwhile, in towns and cities, Roo- sevelt's WPA paid subsistence wages to indigent artists to paint murals in public buildings. Inspired partly by Soviet and Mexican Social Realists, American institu- tional paintings of this period controver- sially represented industrial workers as brawny microcephalics martyred by capi- talism. Lucie-Smith reproduces Fletcher Martin's sketch for a post-office mural of coal mining. 'Mine Rescue' (1939), showing miners with bowed heads carrying a dead or wounded comrade on a stretcher, was

vehemently rejected by the local population, led by representatives of the mineworkers' union.

Proletarian art was not always popular.

As American writers such as Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos wrote realistic, melancholy novels about the misfits of American society, the Realists painted Americans in gloomy soli- tude and even gloomier crowds. Edward Hopper was the master portrayer of alien- ation. Lucie-Smith offers Hopper's cele- brated 'Early Sunday Morning' (1930) as 'a quintessential evocation of urban loneli- ness,' and shows that the artist grew no more cheerful with the passage of time. His isolated individuals, in a gas station, a small-town office, a theatre's 'under- populated auditorium' and a crummy hotel lobby at night, 'seem to be captives of an insuperable inertia.'

Reginald Marsh, Philip Evergood and Paul Cadmus painted men and women at the opposite extremity of hell, in chaotic congestion on the beach at Coney Island. In George Tooker's 'Coney Island' (1948), the principal figure in the foreground appears to be dying. Only one person seems to care, while a gross woman squat- ting nearby looks on with an expression of mild curiosity. Tooker pushed self-pity and misanthropy even further, painting loneli- ness and crowdedness simultaneously, in `Subway' (1950).

I was thinking of the large modern city as a kind of limbo [he explained], the subway seemed a good place to represent a negation of the sense and a denial of life itself.

The 1940s and 1950s witnessed the most drastic upheaval in the history of American art [Lucie-Smith writes], and the point at which uses of the term 'realism' tended to change their meaning.

After the disruption caused by postwar Abstract Expressionism, nothing could ever again be quite what it seemed. Even Andrew Wyeth's 'Christina's World' (1948) is not actually the bucolic idyll which has made it 'the best-known image in 20th- century American art.' The girl half-reclin- ing on a grassy slope, aspiringly gazing up at a house in the distance, cannot reach it, Lucie-Smith observes, because she is a cripple, with 'a skeletally thin right arm, while her useless legs are covered by her skirt.'

When Realism seemed to reassert itself in the late 1950s and the 1960s with the advent of Pop soup-cans, flags and facsimi- le comic-strip icons, sculpture cast directly from human bodies which made humanity inhuman, photographically realistic city- scapes and polemical posters, reality no longer looked quite real. Something had happened to it. We can but hope that Eric Fischl's and Jeff Koons' hideous nudes are not really realistic.

Lucie-Smith says there is more Realism about these days, 'as confidence in Mod- ernism wanes'. His conclusion is unsurpris- ingly sombre:

Yet our belief in the reality of realism — in its closeness to the world as we perceive it has been for ever undermined by the ways of thinking and feeling which Modernism itself has now made second nature.