December 2011
Santa Fe editor John O’Hern talks with Burton Silverman
about realist art and his zeal for painting from life.
When my colleagues and I began the Re-presenting Representation exhibitions at the Arnot Art Museum in the 1990s, we were a lonely voice in the wilderness. The community of contemporary realist artists loved the exhibitions, the local public was curious, my peers in the museum world thought I was wasting my time, and the wider art world couldn’t have cared less.
Recently Burton Silverman wrote to me: “The Arnot was important particularly because of your herculean efforts to reveal the hidden underbelly of American art—all those tons of artists who seemed to have emerged from nowhere, with a passion for ‘objective’ art...The first of the Representing exhibits should have been a minor revolution in the respectable art critical establishment. It was in a public space not a conventional art gallery or exhibition venue and it should have raised an interesting ‘question or two.’ It went by almost completely unnoticed.”
A subsequent edition of Re-presenting Representation was featured by CNN in 250 countries and mini exhibitions have been held in San Francisco, New York City, and Santa Fe. Little did we know that other exhibitions in other places would follow and that there would be an American Art Collector to continue the support and the interest. Nevertheless, the general effect was, as Silverman noted, “like a tree falling in the forest.” Silverman had been there. In 1961 he and a group of artists including Harvey Dinnerstein, Aaron Shikler, and David Levine had mounted an exhibition, A Realist View, at the National Arts Club in New York. At the time, realist artists were “living in the shadow of Pollock and Motherwell” as they strove to bring some of the ideals of late 19th-century French painting into the 20th century; to find a way to embody “our passions for the ongoing real world and our sense of painterly understanding embedded in it.” He adds, “Largely, the show was ignored.”
A recent exhibition of his work, Realism Recovered, at The Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, “was a kind of branding to distinguish my painting from whatever is happening in the hurly burly of ‘realism’ today.”
His current exhibition, Burton Silverman: The Humanist Spirit, at the Hofstra University Museum, “has the same impulse.”
Silverman notes, and asks, “The painting I do has a tradition and a current sensibility. (Does that mean at last I’m a ‘Contemporary Artist’?).”
When I asked him about the “humanist spirit” he referred me to writers on the political left like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, the psychologist William James, and the leaders of the 18th-century Enlightenment like Spinoza and John Stuart Mill.
William James wrote, “I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.”
Silverman comments, “All of those people project a concern for human development in an environment—a polity—that is organized to inhibit it. Their philosophy could be characterized in general as promoting the interest of the ‘commons’ and society as a whole as opposed to wealth and private self-interest. Communitarian in spirit, it inspired our own democratic beginnings and revolutions throughout subsequent centuries. Humanism in painting is more difficult to define. But I feel that artists such as Caravaggio who ‘humanized’ Mary (with dirty feet), and Rembrandt who painted Jews of the Amsterdam ghetto to depict Christ, and many others in that spirit somehow evinced the notion of a moral universe derived from personal acts rather than by religious command. My own preference is for this kind of art that transforms the sense of the ‘ordinary’ and the everyday into something understood as a universal ‘good’. This does not preclude portraits of the wealthy and the powerful; I would clearly not exclude Velázquez nor Sargent, despite the bad rap he has had as merely a bravura painter of the social elite. I also tend to exclude art that deals solely with formal issues—paint quality, brushstrokes, color values—particularly when they are non-object pictures, because people seem to be the necessary vehicle for the widest expression of feelings that connect to our own lives. And I also maintain the privilege of changing my mind about all of this as our realist ‘adventure’ continues!” Silverman treads a fine line in his paintings. In the catalog to The Humanist Spirit he quotes Roger Kimball writing about the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones: “Anyone serious about culture knows that an art unguided by an ideal is likely to be vapid, but it also true that when art is swamped by an ideal the result is likely kitsch.”
The 19th-century Academic tradition, in which Silverman was trained, and which again underlies much of today’s art school training, stresses drawing from the live model.
“Drawing from life, or the current mantra of some artists who proclaim their passion for painting the everyday world, does not necessarily translate into interesting art,” he declares. “It can produce paintings that are just routine retro portraits or completely banal genre scenes that have no point except the self-congratulatory one that the artist is painting ‘real life’. Tough stuff? Yes. Because I think all this art has to be dealt with honestly and with a very clear idea of what might be called ‘criteria’. Otherwise, realism becomes trivialized and its importance both historically and for the future is undermined. I have an interest in promoting both.”
Reading his words and looking at his paintings, I’m struck by their relevance in today’s uneasy world.
Figure in Sun and Shade (1998) refers to an earlier time when it was not uncommon to sit outdoors to feel real light and to breathe real air and to listen to the sounds of nature. The motif is sometimes seen in contemporary realism but often in a manner that is cloyingly nostalgic.
There is nothing cloying about The Stonebreaker (2008). Silverman writes “I am particularly affected by images—of the unspectacular and the unheralded—of people who have, for many years now, been left out of the loop.” In the Hofstra catalog he comments, “What I loved about this man, this image...was his complete unselfconsciousness about his beer belly and his body in general. He stripped to the waist not to show himself off but simply because it was a damned hot day. His identity was formed by his work, not by what he looked like.”
Silverman’s identity is formed by his work as well as those “molecular moral forces” that have guided his life and, through his work, nudge the viewer toward an awareness of real people in the real world.
John O’Hern, who has retired after 30 years in the museum business, specifically as the Executive Director and Curator of the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, N.Y., is the originator of the internationally acclaimed Re-presenting Representation exhibitions which promote realism in its many guises. John was chair of the Artists Panel of the New York State Council on the Arts. He writes for gallery publications around the world, including regular monthly features on Art Market Insights and on Sculpture in Western Art Collector magazine.