Features April 1985
The representational impulse: painting in New York 1960-1985
On the artists exhibited at Schoelkopf’s 1963 show “Nine Realist Painters Revisited: 1963-1984”.
Representation is an impulse, not a style.
—Sidney Tillim
Looking back on the New York art scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s you see quite a few artists, mostly younger ones, painting landscapes, still lifes, figures. Diving into back issues of art journals from that time, you glimpse the loose coming together of these artists in studios, clubs, galleries. There were a number of group shows back then that brought representational painters—most of whom had already been showing in downtown galleries—onto the uptown scene. One of these shows was “Nine Realists,” at the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in 1963. The twenty-first anniversary of that exhibition was recently celebrated at Schoelkopf with a then-and-now show featuring the nine artists who, in 1963, were mostly in their early thirties and just beginning to be known. It was called “Nine Realist Painters...
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