Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s

At the end of the 1960s, a number of young artists working in the United States began making realist paintings based directly on photographs. With often-meticulous detail, they portrayed the objects, people, and places that defined both urban and suburban American life. Variously presented under the labels Hyperrealism, Radical Realism, New Realism, and Photorealism, their work quickly became one of the most discussed topics in contemporary art. Unlike the Pop artists, the Photorealists did not present their ubiquitous, and in many cases mundane, subject matter—for example, reflective shop windows, shiny cars, and sugary foodstuffs—in an ironic manner. Rather, they stayed more or less faithful to the mechanical reproductions that served as their point of departure, using a variety of methods to translate photographic information onto canvas and paper.