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 Revisited: 1963-1984.”[1] Three of the artists—Leland Bell, Gabriel Laderman, and Louisa Matthiasdottir—have exhibited at Schoelkopf through the years; the other six, whose reputations range from small-scale to nationwide, were: Lennart Anderson, Harold Bruder, Audrey Flack, Paul Georges, Philip Pearlstein, and Sidney Tillim.

“Nine Realist Painters Revisited” wasn’t a big show. The two paintings per artist—one from the 1960s and one recent—weren’t necessarily the artists’ best or most elaborate works, and for someone who didn’t know the work very well the show may not have made much sense. It was a bit of a scrappy little affair, but there was also a rough tightness about it, which