A Blockbuster Survey of American Figurative Painting in Rome

This piece originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

When Realism was born in the mid 19th century, everyday scenes elbowed their way into the Western canon. Before that, religious and history painting had largely reigned supreme. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Gustave Courbet and his ilk, galvanized by a successful proletariat struggle, began focusing instead on “real” life, painting the quotidian experiences of workers and peasants with a kind of gritty naturalism.

In “Day for Night: New American Realism” at the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica in Rome, curator Massimiliano Gioni redefines Realism for the present, with all the contemporary works on view from the extensive collection of Tony and Elham Salamé of Beirut’s Aishti Foundation. Featuring some 100 artists, the show is a blockbuster survey of American figurative painting made over the last 20 years. Brimming with masterpieces, it also includes a few abstract canvases and works in other mediums scattered about. In the exhibition’s most conventionally Realist painting, Kids with Slime (2019), Jill Mulleady portrays the hard work of motherhood. The woman pictured has twice as many children who require attention as she does arms: one is about to topple out of the stroller, another is covered in green slime, and a third has decided to have a seat on a street corner. Toys are strewn everywhere, and the fourth kid, the one she holds in a loose grip, is fidgeting, clearly plotting an escape.

Elsewhere, the definition of “Realism” begins to stretch, with the show factoring in countless spinoffs of the genre introduced long after the mid 19th century. Lorna Simpson and David Salle reference Italian neorealist cinema (the show’s title refers to a camera technique that is a classic of the genre). Nicole Eisenman’s figures have blocky limbs recalling Socialist Realism. And Josh Kline extrapolates current climate-change conditions in a work of hysterical realism, with a wax sculpture of a house that slowly melts over the course of the show. Louise Bonnet’s grotesque cartoons, smooth-skinned with protruding veins, fit the hysterical realist bill, too.

Sometimes, the definition of “Realism” stretches even further—perhaps too far. It is difficult to see how abstract painters like Charline von Heyl or Jacqueline Humphries are Realist in any form, even as their canvases delight. And maybe stretched definitions are appropriate, given that, in American life and art, we are struggling to share any sense of collective reality. Truth is social, and news is fake. Gioni’s narrative rightly suggests that Courbet’s Realism has been refracted: once a mirror, now a disco ball. And necessarily so: now, photography is easily accessible, and it is a better medium for portraying proletariat life since photographs are both more “real” and less burdened by bourgeois trappings.

Rolling with this elastic expansion of Realism, Cameron Rowland’s 49-51 Chambers Street – Basement, New York, NY 10007 (2014) is the most “real” work in the show: a table that was produced by incarcerated laborers in New York, who were paid around $1 per hour, perhaps less. Rowland has not altered the table at all, save for pairing it with an informative handout. The table is displayed in the building’s top floor, an opulent apartment from the Rococo era—the “let them eat cake” period that preceded the French Revolution that birthed Realism. There, it is joined by decadent wallpapers and chandeliers. The stark juxtaposition belies inequality in a move that powerfully retains the class politics of Courbet’s Realism, and the jarring contrast makes it easy to see why Rowland tends to rent works rather than sell them to museums or collectors.

The Rococo apartment, like one other mostly segregated gallery on the museum’s ground floor, focuses on work by Black artists. Many of the works are abstractions that address social issues, like Rick Lowe’s paintings of maps of red-lined neighborhoods and Mark Bradford’s Rat Catcher of Hamelin I (2011), an abstraction that, on close inspection, reveals itself to be a collage made of posters and other materials culled from his urban environs. These works are Realist not in style but in content: importantly, they retain the important class politics of the original Realists. Because if the show is about America now … well, the class struggle is real. The Rococo framing astutely captures our moment of an empire seemingly on the brink of collapse—and going down decadently.