Photorealism is a genre of art
that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic mediums, in which an
artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as
realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be used to broadly
describe artworks in many different mediums, it is also used to refer
specifically to a group of paintings and painters of the United States art
movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As a full-fledged art movement,
Photorealism evolved from Pop Art and as a counter to Abstract Expressionism as
well as Minimalist art movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the
United States.
Photorealists use a photograph or several
photographs to gather the information to create their paintings and it can be
argued that the use of a camera and photographs is an acceptance of Modernism.
However, the admittance to the use of photographs in Photorealism was met with
intense criticism when the movement began to gain momentum in the late 1960s, despite
the fact that visual devices had been used since the fifteenth century to aid
artists with their work.
Pop Art and Photorealism were
both reactionary movements stemming from the ever increasing and overwhelming
abundance of photographic media, which by the mid 20th century had grown into
such a massive phenomenon that it was threatening to lessen the value of
imagery in art. However, whereas the Pop artists were primarily pointing out
the absurdity of much of the imagery (especially in commercial usage), the
Photorealists were trying to reclaim and exalt the value of an image.
The word Photorealism was
coined by Louis K. Meisel in 1969 and appeared in print for the first time in
1970 in a Whitney Museum catalogue for the show "Twenty-two
Realists." It is also sometimes labeled as Super-Realism, New Realism,
Sharp Focus Realism, or Hyper-Realism.
Louis K. Meisel,[17] two years
later, developed a five-point definition at the request of Stuart M. Speiser,
who had commissioned a large collection of works by the Photorealists, which
later developed into a traveling show known as 'Photo-Realism 1973: The Stuart
M. Speiser Collection', which was donated to the Smithsonian in 1978 and is
shown in several of its museums as well as traveling under the auspices of SITE.
The definition for the ORIGINATORS was as follows:
1. The Photo-Realist uses the
camera and photograph to gather information.
2. The Photo-Realist uses a mechanical or
semimechanical means to transfer the information to the canvas.
3. The Photo-Realist must have the technical
ability to make the finished work appear photographic.
4. The artist must have exhibited work as a
Photo-Realist by 1972 to be considered one of the central Photo-Realists.
5. The artist must have devoted at least five
years to the development and exhibition of Photo-Realist work.
