Superrealism

Superrealism. Style of painting (and to a lesser extent sculpture), popular particularly in the USA and Britain from the late 1960s, in which subjects are depicted with a minute and impersonal exactitude of detail. Hyper-realism and Photographic Realism (or Photorealism) are alternative names, and some artists who practice the style do indeed work from photographs (sometimes using colour slides projected on the canvas); sharpness of detail is evenly distributed over the whole picture (except where out-of-focus effects in the photograph are faithfully recorded), but the scale is often greatly enlarged, as when portrait heads are blown up to giant size. (Some critics prefer to use the terms ‘Photographic Realism’ or ‘Photorealism’ only when a picture has been painted direct from a photograph, but most are not so restrictive.)

The immediate progenitor of Superrealism was Pop art; banal subject-matter from the consumer society was common to both, and certain artists, such as Malcolm Morley (who coined the label Superrealism) and Mel Ramos, overlap both fields. The kind of humour found in Pop is very rare in Superrealism, however, which tends to be cool and impersonal, with subjects often chosen because they are technically challenging (involving multiple reflections, for example). Like Pop, Superrealism was a commercial hit; Edward Lucie-Smith writes that ‘in purely wordly terms, [it] is the only innovative art style to have achieved a marked success in the late sixties and early seventies. From its first appearance on the New York art-scene it scored a triumph with collectors. With critics and institutions it was somewhat slower to make an impact’ (Super Realism, 1979). Some critics, indeed, regard it as involving a great deal of painstaking work but very little else; others think that its exponents can achieve a strange kind of intensity, the effect of the indiscriminate attention to detail bring—somewhat paradoxically—to create a strong feeling of unreality.

The leading American Superrealist painters include: Chuck Close; Robert Cottingham (1935– ), whose most characteristic works are close-ups of advertising signs and who says he aims for ‘a detached unsentimental observation of a piece of our world'; Don Eddy; Richard Estes; Audrey Flack (1931– ), who is unusual in that she aims for emotional effect in her still-lifes of religious symbols and images of vanity and death; and Howard Kanovitz (1929– ), whose work sometimes has a Surrealist element or uses figures that appear to have been cut out and pasted on a background. Painters who are often labelled Superrealist but who stand somewhat apart because of the imaginative element in their work are Jack Beal, Alfred Leslie, and Philip Pearlstein.

British Superrealist painters include Graham Dean (1951– ), Michael English (1943– ), David Hepher (1935– ), Diane Ibbotson (1946– ), Michael Leonard (1933– ), whose work includes highly detailed portrait drawings in a style mimicking the Old Masters, and John Salt.

Although it is particularly associated with the USA and Britain, Superrealism has spread to other countries. Claude Yvel (1930– ), who specializes in paintings of motorcycles, is a noted French exponent, for example; in Germany the style has affinities with Ugly Realism and some of the work of Gerhard Richter; and the Spanish Realists are sometimes described as Superrealists.

The leading Superrealist sculptors have been the Americans John De Andrea and Duane Hanson, whose work often uses real clothes or props and shows attention to minutiae such as body hair. The British sculptor John Davies is sometimes called a Superrealist, but his work is too personal for this label.

In the 1930s the term ‘Superrealism’ was fairly commonly used as an alternative to Surrealism, but this usage has died out.