New Realism in Contemporary Israeli Painting

By David Graves

Art today can be whatever one wants it to be: a rotting cadaver, a photograph of someone else’s photograph, a banana… In this post-modern age of post-truth, of social media and the selfie, when everyone has a high-resolution digital camera at their fingertips, one wonders what would possess a talented artist to sit for days, weeks, often months, to paint a portrait of a friend or a landscape of home. Today, a group of 20 or so remarkable painters have revived a fascinating style of realistic painting, and in Israel of all places, where realistic art has never played any significant role. Their brand of realism is not mundane photographic realism, but rather it is an intensified sort of realism, a kind of hyper-realism. This book offers an initial explanation as to what these artists are doing, and how they are doing it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398437371

David Graves

David Christopher Graves is a philosopher of art, residing and working in Tel Aviv, Israel. He teaches at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. Graves is a fanatic amateur painter, with two solo exhibitions under his belt. He has been following this outstanding group of artists for over a decade, and remains in close contact with them still.

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Introduction

Something interesting is happening in the Israeli artworld. Roughly thirty or so professional artists are currently engaged in figurative-realistic painting of the most severe nature. They are all in their prime and they have been painting in this manner for the last twenty years. Roughly fifteen of them constitute a sort of group. They are not a formal group with a name like ‘The Blue Rider’ or ‘The Stuckists’, but they all know each other, some of them studied together, some of them paint together, most of them have exhibited together.

As any group of rugged individualists, they too oppose to being grouped together. As any group of hardcore artists, they oppose to being labelled. They do not like being called ‘realists’, they don’t think the tag is adequate to what they are trying to do. And in an important sense all this true. They do not act as a group. They don’t have a name. They don’t have meetings. And calling them ‘realists’ doesn’t really explain what they are doing.

However, were I to open this study with the statement that there are fifteen different artists in Israel, doing fifteen different things, I most certainly could not have made the opening statement that I made, Something interesting is happening in the Israeli artworld.

What is interesting is precisely the fact that they appear to be a group of artists with a shared ideology, in an era when we thought such things could never occur again. The age of grand theories, styles, movements and schools has been over and done with in art, presumably, since the 1980s, when the post-modern artworld of the West declared that art had reached its end. Properly speaking, from the philosophical perspective, ‘The End of Art’ thesis was forwarded by one of America’s leading philosophers and art critics, the late Arthur C.

Danto.¹ One can be an abstractionist in the morning, a photorealist in the afternoon and a minimalist in the evening, says Danto. It makes no difference; When one direction is as good as another direction, there is no concept of direction any longer to apply.²

And yet, here we are. Something interesting is happening. A direction. What is generally tagged as ‘figurative-realist painting’ is back and appears to be gaining momentum. It is not a return to the good ole days. I do not even know when the good ole days were, if they were at all. It makes no difference, for it is not the same kind of group as to which we might have become accustomed during the grand Age of Manifestos, as Danto called the heyday of modern art, say from 1850 till 1970.³

The important difference for us is that those previous groups and their Manifestos, their isms, were calls to arms. Come, follow us! they called, from Baudelaire’s biting essays in favour of original French Realism, through Kazimir Malevich’s invitation for all to join him in Suprematism’s infinite sea of spiritual purity⁴, all the way to Joseph Kosuth’s tautologous claims that Art is the definition of art.⁵ All of the historical isms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were claims to the effect that art is such and such and therefore, one should do it like this and this.

The group of artists involved in this study, however, grouped together by myself as realists for reasons soon to be made clear, have no desire to debate the nature of art, to tell anyone that they should do art the way they do, nor that their way is superior to other ways of doing art. In blunt matter of fact, they simply do not care all that much about these sorts of concerns. They are too busy painting. And yet, they have chosen a direction in art.

It is not the case that some of them paint abstract works, some engage in performance art, some install things, some engage in post-conceptual critical art or anything else they are all quite free to do. They all paint things that they look at. And the interesting thing about it all, is that the reasons they chose to go that way are all similar reasons, the goals they present themselves are all similar goals and the means they have chosen to employ are all similar means.

I repeat, saying that fifteen powerful artists are doing fifteen different things is not interesting. It is to be expected. To acknowledge this, while at the same time finding that there are distinctive and important similarities between them, is something to be investigated. To find that a certain type of Realism binds them, in the State of Israel, where Realism never caught on and plays virtually no role at all in the history of Israeli art—Well, now, that is just plain intriguing. That is the basis for a story. I wish to tell that story.

It is not my purpose herein to formulate and defend a certain theory of philosophical realism. That is an important and worthy pursuit in its own right and is starting to be carried out in the corridors of philosophy departments around to world.⁶ Nor is it my purpose to herald the next big thing. Hopefully, those days are truly over. It is my purpose to offer a thesis that will explain what it is that these artists are doing.

The term ‘realism’ applies both to a type of art and to a philosophical position. In this study, I intend to use the one to illuminate the other. I will try to explain artistic realism by way of philosophical realism and I will try to probe ‘New Realism’ in philosophy, by way of ‘New Realism’ in art.

A great philosophical debate concerning our ability to know the truth about reality came up during the twentieth century. One can philosophise endlessly about various aspects of the problem, including the problem of knowing whether reality itself is given objectively, that it is simply out there or whether it is dependent upon some form of consciousness (ours or God’s—), in which case it is sort of in here—Whatever the case may be, the major problem weaving its way through the debate is whether we can or cannot know the truth about reality (be it whatever it may). Very basically and very importantly, a realist is a person who holds that we can, in some significant sense, know something of the truth about reality, whereas an anti-realist is a person who maintains that we cannot.

‘Truth’ I believe, is the key concept.

In truth, a messier key concept one could not have chosen. Objective truth, subjective truth, absolute truth, relative truth, divine truth, logical truth, my truth, your truth—A dozen debates for a hundred other occasions. I will use the concept in its nearly primitive, highly intuitive meaning, the everyday, regular, layman’s meaning, the truth is how things are in the world.

If there is some external reality, then that’s the truth and that’s what I’m after. If reality is dependent upon consciousness, then that is the truth and that is what I’m after. If what one sees is what there is, then that’s the truth. If the mind informs what is seen and that is the way things are, then that is the truth and I want it. I seek the truth. I hunger for it. It is this very basic, fundamental drive that propels the thinkers and the painters alike into the throes of an unknown realm, we call ‘reality’.

One particular aspect of the problem of realism, however, appears to be reasonably clear. We deeply believe that there is some essential link between truth and reality. Which is why my preferred definition of truth is ‘how things are in the world’. Now, I might not know how things are in the world. I might not know the truth. But I know what it would be in any given case, the truth would be how things are in the world. For instance, I do not know if it is true that dragons can fly. I do, however, know exactly what it would take for it to be true, namely that there be dragons in the world and that they fly.

In the real world, I feel this way because I feel (intuitively) that essential link between truth and reality. This deeply felt intuition manifests itself in common forms of speech and in many languages: In many contexts, in English, the terms ‘real’ and ‘true’ are synonymous. ‘True feelings’ are real feelings. In Hebrew, they are actually the same word: ‘amiti’ (which means both ‘real’ and ‘true’).

What all this boils down to, for our purposes, is that philosophers keen on understanding the truth have to deal with reality, while artists keen on representing reality have to deal with the truth. It is for this reason that I have tried to arrange this study of art representing reality along the lines of the quest for truth. Even when it becomes problematic, even when the artists discussed herein have objections to it, the quest for truth will always be in the background of the study.

The book runs as follows. Chapter One introduces the original movement of French Realism in the mid-nineteenth century. We hope to clarify the basic issues involved in the very endeavour to seek out significant truths about nature by way of painting. Chapter Two goes a bit deeper by tracing the development of landscape painting as a central genre of Realist painting. This is not only important to understanding the inception and the development of Realism but also to the current practices of landscape painting by the group. Some of the follow the traditional scheme more closely, others do not.

Chapter Three deals with realism and the quest for truth in both philosophy and art. There we shall explain the tenets of philosophical realism and apply them to realism in art. In doing so, we shall run up across one of the book’s most important distinctions, the distinction between a factual truth and a logical one. A factual truth, we will offer, has to do with what actually happens in the world. A logical truth, on the other hand, has to do with the way things happen in the world. Art, we argue, is almost exclusively interested in the latter.

Chapter Four introduces the thesis of this book, namely ‘New Realism’. The basic idea is that New Realism (in painting and in philosophy) hinges upon a unique dialectical process which we call the Dialogue. In the Dialogue, the artist and the world negotiate for the truth of the subject in question, be it a landscape, a portrait or a still-life. To be sure, the exposition is highly metaphorical but then that is the nature of the beast. We will be analysing a creative process that is highly experiential and purely intuitive. Still, if we are both creative enough with our words and careful enough, things will be rendered clear enough.

Chapter Five introduces the artists themselves.

After all was done and said, there remained an issue I thought was important enough to be included. Thus, Chapter Six entitled On the Relationship between Photography and Realist Painting. From my experience introducing the subject of new realism in painting, many people are perplexed by the very idea, since, as they believe, it looks just like a photograph. Well, it doesn’t and I try to address these concerns thoroughly.

And bringing up the rear is the Appendix. Personally, in all my years of research into the nature of art, I have always found that my favourite sources of gaining insight are the writings of the artists themselves. Since the explanation I offer in this study comes from my engagement with the artists and their artistic practices themselves, I place paramount importance upon their opinions. Hence, I asked all of the artists participating in this study to write a credo, a text expressing or summarising their personal, specific position concerning their artistic endeavours. Some of them offered up a concise paragraph. Others needed a few pages. One or two of them are probably still writing. These texts are in the Appendix.

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¹Art’s funeral started with Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author, which first appeared in the American journal Aspen, no. 5–6 in 1967. By 1984, American philosopher Berel Lang instigated a series of lectures at the Walker Institute for Contemporary Art in Minneapolis, which resulted in a volume entitled The Death of Art, edited by Lang and Arthur C. Danto and published by Haven in 1984. Finally, Danto’s seminal essay The End of Art was published in its final form in Danto’s The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1986 (pp. 81-115).↩︎

²Op. cit. Danto (1986), p. 114-15.↩︎

³See Danto, Arthur C., Three Decades After the End of Art, in After the End of Art, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997 (pp. 21-39).↩︎

⁴Swim! The free white sea lies before you. Malevich wrote in the ‘Catalogue 10th State Exhibition’, referring to his infamous ‘White on White’ of 1918. Kazimir Malevich, Moscow, 1919; as quoted in Autocritique, essays on art and anti-art 1963–1987, Barbara Rose (ed.), N.Y.: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988, p. 71.↩︎

⁵Swim! The free white sea lies before you. Malevich wrote in the ‘Catalogue 10th State Exhibition’, referring to his infamous ‘White on White’ of 1918. Kazimir Malevich, Moscow, 1919; as quoted in Autocritique, essays on art and anti-art 1963–1987, Barbara Rose (ed.), N.Y.: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988, p. 71.↩︎

⁶‘New Realism’, as it is called, is a topic of considerable interest in philosophy since 2012. I will refer to specific thinkers and their ideas when pertinent.↩︎

Chapter One

Realism as the Truthful

Depiction of Reality

It makes good common sense, as well as sound professional practice, to start off an essay on New Realism with a grounding explanation of Old Realism. In the Paris Salon of 1850, a young painter exhibited a few paintings that were quite odd, perhaps even a bit shocking by the standards of the time. The painter was Gustave Courbet and one of the paintings he showed was A Burial at Ornans (1849-50, Fig. 1). The painting depicts a real event—the funeral of his great uncle at his native Ornans—with real people and a real hole in the ground.

The importance of the painting resides in what it lacks, as much as in what it shows. It lacks drama, it lacks religious significance, it lacks fervent emotions, it lacks metaphysical ideals. It shows an ordinary group of simple folks burying an ordinary simple man. Surely, depictions of such a topic as death rank higher than that. A burial is a sombre scene of life and death, with mourners beside themselves with grief and the very heavens cloud over with sorrow. Sometimes, angels descend from the Heavens to attend. No, they don’t, says Courbet. He shows us what really happens, nothing much. Even the dog looks away because something more interesting is happening over there.

Figure 1: Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849-50

The first key to understanding what Courbet was all about is given in the number of times the adjective ‘real’ appears in the previous paragraph. Real funeral, real death, real people, real life. No wonder Courbet (somewhat reluctantly) dubbed his approach to art by the name ‘Realism’. In comparison to the rationally idealised world depicted by his contemporaries in the Academy, the world Courbet painted was deemed "the real world. For that matter, in comparison to the spiritually romanticised world depicted by Romanticism, Courbet’s world seemed to be an unabashed, hard look at the real world", as well.

Here, then, we have come across one of the most basic tenets of Realism in art:

Realism is intended to exhibit the simple, unadorned and unabashed truth about the world, without idealising and without romanticising.

This is a good principle, because even if one does not quite know what to do when painting a realist picture, one may at least begin by knowing what not to do. Be it a landscape, a portrait or a still-life, do not idealise the subject and do not romanticise it. I pick out these two approaches—idealism and romanticism—because that is what Courbet had to deal with at the time.

From the beginning of the nineteenth-century, two schools of art had been battling it out. On the one hand, there was the traditional style of the academy, called Neoclassicism. This style of painting was based upon classical traditions, which were in turn based upon a distinctly idealistic kind of philosophy. It was rather intellectual in its character, sombre and well-balanced. It depicted its subjects as heroic ideals, Napoleon first and foremost. The paintings were very clear, precise, well-constructed. Emotions were constrained, colour was subdued. All in all, Neo-Classicism depicted Napoleonic France as a very proper and level-headed world. Which it was not.

Some of the finest students of the academy rebelled and painted in a style that was taking over all form of art in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth-century. This new style re-introduced a degree of chaos into the works. Movement (mainly by way of strong diagonal compositions), action, confusion, strife, fear and all manner of emotion depicted a world in which Man and Nature battled it out on open seas and Liberty battled tyranny on smoky battlefields.

This kind of painting, depicting a world in which Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, were forever locked in conflict over the God-given soul of Man, was called Romanticism. Thus, intellectually cool Neo-Classicism and emotionally-charged Romanticism were at each other’s throats for the better part of the nineteenth-century. So much so, that in 1863, Emperor Napoleon III introduced a second Salon to run parallel to the first formal one in Paris. The second one was to include the many paintings rejected by the jury of the first, academic (meaning traditional, neoclassical) salon. This was the famous Salon des Refusés.

The problem, however, was rather glaring. Neither Neo-Classicism nor Romanticism were particularly attuned to the modern world view of Europe in 1850. In terms of truthfully depicting reality, neither did the job. This is a good way of deciphering Courbet’s work. He considers his art to reflect the real world, not an idealised version of it, nor a romanticised view of it.

A natural consequence of regarding Courbet’s paintings as depictions of the real world is to regard them as being true. Indeed, truth became a hallmark of Realism. Courbet’s scenes might not always be grandiose, they might not be mind-boggling, they might even seem mundane and pedestrian but so the adherents of Realism say, they will be the truth. (It is important to stress, that we are not claiming here that Courbet’s paintings do indeed capture the truth, whatever that actually means, only that they were so regarded at the time.)

Such is the case with another of the 1850 Salon paintings Courbet exhibited, The Stonebreakers (Fig. 2). The picture shows two laborers; one young, merely a boy; the other older, too old for such work. They are breaking rocks to pave a road. Their clothes are tattered and patched-up, they are dirty and perhaps most importantly of all, their faces are hidden.

Figure 2: Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849

Such things may seem a bit obscure to us, inhabitants of the twenty-first-century but to the viewers of the mid-eighteenth-century, they pose quite the problem. On the one hand, for the traditionally minded aristocrat, art should depict hard-working peasants as an aspect of the ideal of Man. Traditionally, even though such men are hard-working, they take pride in their labours, shouldering their tasks with a kind of nobility that springs forth from inner strength. (One is reminded of depictions of manual laborers in the Soviet style Socialist Realism).

Traditionally, laborers were often idealised or romanticised, thus depicted as unsung heroes. Courbet’s workers, however, are about as far from that ideal as possible. On the other hand, for the modern-minded bourgeoisie, these poor souls are just as worthy as any other human being. Unfortunately, since the eyes are windows to the soul and the eyes are hidden, the humanistic viewer has no access to these poor wretches, any more than the stuffy aristocrat does. Courbet turns the workers into objects, out there clearing the road.

As one writer of the period put it:

Nobody could deny that a stone-breaker is as worthy a subject in art as a prince or any other individual—But, at least, let your stone-breaker not be an object as insignificant as the stone he is breaking.⁷

Still, in his refusal to idealise, elevate or embellish his subject, Courbet’s style of painting promoted a commitment to truth, honesty and sincerity that rang true in post-revolutionary, modern France. Even though he was often derided by the public and even ridiculed in the popular press, Courbet was admired by key figures in the French cultural elite, such as Delacroix , the poet Charles Baudelaire and the critic and essayist Champfleury.

Courbet’s realist approach travelled beyond local borders, as well. As English philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes commented, writing on Realism in Art in 1858, "Realism is the basis of all art and its antithesis is not Idealism, but Falsism—Either give us true peasants or leave them untouched."⁸ The logic of the new position was becoming clearer and clearer, Idealism (that is Neo-classical Academic art) is false, Realism is true.

SIDE-BAR: THE BIRTH OF AESTHETICS

In 1750, German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) brought ‘Aesthetics’ into the world as a realm of inquiry. Under his initial conception, human thought is divided into two different types of cognition, yielding two different kinds of knowledge. There was the knowledge that comes from the reasoning intellect and he called this ‘intellectual cognition’ (cognitio intellectualis). And there was knowledge that came from the perceiving senses, he called this type of knowledge ‘sensate cognition’ (cognitio sensitiva).

Hence, we know things through the intellect and we know things through the senses. Intellectual cognition can be taught by way of concepts, whereas sensate cognition can only be acquired by way of experience. In this respect at least, intellectual cognition is abstract, while sensate cognition is concrete. That means that we can think of intellectual cognition as being ‘objective’, whereas sensate cognition is ‘subjective’, i.e. it necessitates first-person experience). To this day we maintain that distinction as the dichotomy between head and heart, between analysis and intuition.

Baumgarten’s idea, purely brilliant, was this. Just as there are universal laws for the proper application of the intellect, so there are universal laws for the proper application of sensate cognition. The universal laws governing intellectual cognition comprise the realm of logic. Thus, Logic (capitalised, as a discipline) is the science of intellectual cognition.

An example of a universal law of logic is the law of contradiction, namely that no proposition can be true and false at the same time. In a similar fashion, there must be universal laws governing sensate cognition; they comprise the realm of aesthetics. Thus, Aesthetics, as proposed by Baumgarten , would be ‘the science of sensate cognition’.

An example of a universal law of aesthetics would be the Golden Ratio as the mathematical representation of a perfect proportion.⁹ Baumgarten suggested that sensate cognition, even though inferior to intellectual cognition, was still good and true. He probably entertained the idea that the two types of cognition were basically opposite, hence complementary.

What the one could not handle, the other one could. Applying this to the relationship between modern science and modern art, I think Baumgarten would have approved of the suggestion that what science cannot explain to us, art can show us. This just might be what original nineteenth-century Realism was all about.

In 1855, Courbet submitted fourteen paintings for exhibition at the Exposition Universelle, which was an international exhibition, held on the Champs-Élysées in Paris from May to November. Three of his fourteen paintings were rejected for lack of space, including A Burial at Ornans. Refusing to be denied, Courbet took matters into his own hands. He displayed forty of his paintings in his own gallery, called ‘The Pavilion of Realism’ (Pavillon du Réalisme), which was a temporary structure that he erected, next door to the official Salon-like Exposition Universelle.

For the introduction to this independent, flying-in-the-face-of exhibition, Courbet wrote a brief text, outlining his basic artistic philosophy. He entitled it ‘The Realist Manifesto’, echoing the tone of the period’s political manifestos. The somewhat dense text can readily be found elsewhere and we shall return to it when relevant. Our present concern is not with the text, but rather with another of the paintings that was exhibited at the Pavilion. It is a curious one, with a rather curious title, ‘The Meeting (Bonjour Monsieur Courbet)’ (Fig. 3).

Figure 3: Gustave Courbet, The Meeting (Bonjour Monsieur Courbet), 1854

Much has been regaled concerning this painting and rightly so. It is a fascinating work. It shows Courbet going off to paint in nature one fine morning. He meets an acquaintance, actually his patron, a wealthy gentleman named Alfred Bruyas and his valet taking a leisurely stroll with the dog.

Countless texts have been written about the apparent deceptiveness of this painting. It appears to be but an innocent meeting between friends on a fine sunny day, but it is actually a biting and controversial statement on the true pecking order of society. It would appear that Courbet is depicted as a regular working man, in linen shirt and denim workpants, staff in hand seeking out a good topic to paint with his art tackle burdened upon his back. Hats off, everyone is enjoying a good so, how are you? in the sunshine. But the heads tell the real story.

The servant lowers his gaze down to the ground as is befitting of his station. Bruyas, the rich man, looks straight ahead at his prodigy. Courbet, however, raises his head and verily looks down his nose at them. Conjoin that with the fact that the servant, Calas, is dressed in colours of the ground and Bruyas is dressed in colours of the grass and trees, while Courbet is dressed in the colours of the sky and a message is starting to emerge.

To top it off, one should notice that Bruyas and Calas are standing in the shade, whilst Courbet is the only one casting a shadow. Courbet wishes to impress upon us that, while social convention would have us believe that the rich man is the most important one, it is the artist who in truth is superior.

It’s a good story for its time and place. It has been told and retold countless times. Still, we think that it misses an important point. When seen from that perspective, such notions as truth, honesty and sincerity are seriously compromised. From that perspective, the painting is little more than a pretentious case of self-glorification, hardly worthy of the title ‘realism’.

We are not quite sure that such is reality at all. Indeed, it seems that most people do regard the social message of the painting to be the major one and as such could and perhaps should, be disenchanted with the painting as a work of realist art. This was probably the case even when the painting was first shown at the Pavilion.

Says Ting Chang, art historian at the University of Nottingham:

"When Courbet showed the painting for the first time—critics already familiar with his brash and declamatory style were offended by the blatant display of self-glorification. Many objected to his pretentiousness.

As one reviewer, Paul Mantz, wryly observed, ‘The Meeting is a page taken from Monsieur Courbet’s memory; it must be of a palpitating interest to him and his friends: I confess that it means less to me and I see it as little more than a new portrait of the painter in travel clothes.’ In acknowledging only a likeness of the artist in this major work, the critic deliberately ignored Courbet’s principal message."¹⁰

However, by deliberately ignoring the painting’s principal message, perhaps Monsieur Mantz stumbled upon the painting’s deeper