DON EDDY: THE RESONANCE OF REALISM IN THE ART OF POST WAR AMERICA An art history monograph Internet publication by Virginia Anne Bonito, 1999. Published by ArtregisterPress.com. © Virginia Anne Bonito, 1999. All rights reserved.
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Footnotes

Footnotes Chapter 1: Excursions
1.	The term Photorealism was coined by Louis K. Meisel for a branch of the new realism that emerged in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s; Louis K. Meisel, Photorealism (New York: Abrams, 1980); Louis K. Meisel, Photorealism Since 1980 (New York: Abrams, 1993). A quarter of a century later, some practitioners of that movement have expanded their pictorial vocabulary and refer to themselves under the broader heading of representational artists. More overarching terminology such as Contemporary American Realism and Post War American Realism has been established to categorize the movement. Return to text
2.	By the expanded third edition of the survey book, through the consciousness raising of Feminist Art History, Audrey Flack was the only other artist to be included alongside Eddy as representative of "Photo Realism." H. W. Janson, History of Art (New York: Abrams, 1986) 723-24, color plate 162 and fig. 991. Return to text
3.	We will consider the impact of Surrealism and Dada upon modern art movements more fully in Chapter IV. Return to text
4.	See the essay "A Razor is a Razor: Word and Image in Some Paintings by Magritte" by Frederik Leen, in Magritte, 1898-1967, Gisele Ollinger-Zinque and Frederik Leen eds, (Ghent: Ludion Press, 1998) pp. 25ff. By the late fifties and the emergence of Pop Art, in the work of the artists Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, and Larry Rivers to cite notable examples, words played a key role alongside objects in the reaffirmation of the viability of the figure in Contemporary art. (See, for example, William V. Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991) p. 206 and his footnote referencing comments by Irving Sandler, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (New York: Harper and Row, 1978) 185-187. Words continued to factor significantly throughout the sixties, for example, in Conceptualism’s substitution of words as objects - as evidenced in the epistomologically based work of Joseph Kossuth and in the work of other noted artists of the period such as that of Joseph Beuys. Return to text
5.	John Arthur makes this noteworthy observation in his introduction to John Baeder, Diners; Revised and Updated, (New York: Abrams, 1995) 8-9. Return to text
Footnotes Chapter 2: Universal Focus
6.	In the earlier literature devoted to the new Realism, attempts to disentangle it from Pop Art downplayed Pop as an important source; with hindsight, and the now obvious diverse paths taken by practitioners of both movements, the importance of Pop Art as a source can be reconsidered. Return to text
7.	Gregory Battcock, ed., Super Realism: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1975) xxvi-xxix; see also the discussion of photographs as a model for Photorealists by William Dunning, Changing Images, 205-208. Return to text
8.	The relationship of the artist and the camera in its many forms - from the Renaissance onwards - is a well-studied subject in the literature of art. See for example, Arthur J. Wheelock, Jan Vermeer, (New York: Abrams, 1988) 26-37; Pierre Schneider, The World of Manet (New York and Canada: Time, Inc., 1968) 98ff; and,Van Deren Coke, The Painter and the Photograph: From Delacroix to Warhol, (Alberquerque, U of New Mexico Press, 1972). The recent literature on the new Realism is replete with references to the impact of the camera and photography on its practitioners. Return to text
9.	Hofmann was an important influence, as much through his teaching as for his art, for a number of artists who one way or another joined the ranks of the new Realists. Notable among these artists are Larry Rivers and Richard Estes. For Rivers relationship to Hofmann see Sam Hunter, Larry Rivers (New York: Rizzoli, 1989) 12; for the influence upon Hofmann to Estes see John Arthur, Richard Estes: Paintings & Prints, (San Francisco: Pomegranate Art Books, 1993) 9- 11. Return to text
10.	Eddy has since seen may of these paintings first hand and realizes that their surfaces are much livelier and freer both in terms of brush work and surface illusionism - that is, what is on the picture surface as opposed to what appears to drop behind the uppermost picture plane. Return to text
11.	For many, like Eddy, photographs and mechanical photographic processes opened the route towards innovative styles. To cite a few examples, consider, for one, Roy Lichtenstein's highly original adaptation of the Ben Day dot screen used to produce comic strips. Daniel Weaver characterizes the innovation most astutely. "The miracle of Lichtenstien's achievement derives from the insight…that within cartoons lurked a commentary about abstract art and its entanglement with information. Grasping the irony of this truth - that the schemata of comics constitute a debased version of modernism's conceptualized simplifications - Lichtenstein saw the possibility of reintroducing figuration in a context as flat and reductive as anything in traditional modernism…he perceived that in the cartoonist's heavy black contour lines, bright flat, primary colors…any visual data could be restructured." D. Weaver, Art Since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present , (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1991) 147. Chuck Close too recognized in the commercial printing arena, a starting point for the development of his hallmark style of enormous airbrushed canvases built on the exact reproduction in exploded scale of the dot screen matrix of a projected, commercially printed photographic model. Another example might be sighted in the working method of Audrey Flack who, using an airbrush, replicates the surface of her projected photographic models in the saturated color of photographic prints, rather than the actual surfaces or exact colors of the objects represented. Return to text
12.	For Stella's observation see William S. Rubin, Frank Stella, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970) 42 and fn. 55. Return to text
13.	For the complete reference to Meisel, Photorealism see Chpt. 1, fn. 1. Return to text
14.	In the essay to the catalogue of a landmark exhibition on the new Realism, Alvin Martin identified the distinguishing characteristics that differentiate it from preceding Realist movements, especially those of the 20th century, but also from Pop Art. See Alvin Martin, “Modern Realism is Really Real Modernism: Contemporary Realism in Context,” Real, Really Real, Super Real: Directions in Contemporary American Realism (San Antonio: San Antonio Museum Association, 1981) 15-22. A number of other astute observations by various prominent authors and critics of the movement can be found in the anthology, Super Realism (Dutton, 1975); compiled and with intro by Gregory Battcock. John Arthur commented on finish and technique in his introduction to John Baeder’s Diners: Revised and Updated, (Abrams, NY, 1995) 7-8. His point, however, aims beyond simply noting the attention to polish and meticulous rendering shared by a number of 19th and early 20th century predecessors of the Photorealists; he concentrated on identifying the contemporary sources that drive this impulse in the Photorealists. Return to text
15.	Leon Battista Alberti is the Renaissance architect, painter, mathematician and theoretician who codified the one point perspective system in a little book entitled Della Pittura. For a standard English translation with commentary see John R. Spencer, Leon Battista Alberti On Painting, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). Return to text
16.	For early discussions of the importance of photography see, for example, Louis K. Meisel, Photorealism, (New York: Abrams, 1980) 13; and various authors in the anthology Gregory Battcock, SUPER REALISM: A critical Anthology, (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1975). Return to text
17.	Alan Watts, who died in 1973, was a doctor of divinity and noted philosopher. He wrote more than twenty books and a series of essays on Oriental metaphysics and Western religion, with a focus on the philosophy and psychology of religion, especially as it applied to consciousness raising and spiritual enlightenment. Books such as Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship, The Way of Zen, The Supreme Identity, and This Is It were immensely popular among student and ‘lay’ members of the “60s generation” at large. Return to text
18.	Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (Yale, 1988) 28. Return to text
19.	Arthur Wheelock presents a most useful and cogent synopsis of this subject in his text on Jan Vermeer, cited above, Footnote 8. Return to text
20.	The full citation for the Old Master paintings mentioned reads as follows: Jan Van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife, 1434, oil on panel, 33 x 22 1/2 in., NationalGallery, London; and Parmigianino, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524, panel, 9 5/8 in. diameter, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Return to text
Footnotes Chapter 3: Reflections
21.	One need go no further, to substantiate this claim, than Frederick Hartt’s comments on this painting in his survey text, Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Vol II, (Prentice Hall / Abrams, third printing, 1979) 364. Hartt notes, “But his [Manet] extension of the mirror beyond the frame at top and sides suibstitutes for the expected space within the picture the reflected interior of the cabaret, which is behind the spectator and , therefore, outside the picture. Spatially, this is the most complex image we have seen thus far in the history of art.” Return to text
22.	The full citations for the mentioned works by Titian and Verrocchio read as follows: 1. Titian, Flora, c. 1530, oil on canvas, 79 x 63 cm., Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi; Verrocchio Bust of a Lady (holding Primroses), c. 1475, marble, h 61 cm., Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello. For a reading of Manet's painting, see Robert L. Herbert’s discussion of the painting in Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (Yale, 1988) 79-81. Return to text
23.	One need only recall the well documented debates sparked by Gustav Courbet's 'realism.' On the photographers see, Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982), especially Chapters 10, 13 & 14. Return to text
24.	See, for example, the discussion in Virginia Anne Bonito, Get Real: Contemporary American Realism from the Seavest Collection, (Durham: Duke University Museum of Art, 1998) 4-6 & related footnotes. Return to text
25.	The renowned linguistic theorist, Noam Chomsky was a pupil of Zellig S. Harris, and is considered to have made the most significant contribution to linguistic theory to date. His system of transformational-generative grammar, first presented in Syntactic Structures (1957) is the reference point for all debate on the subject. Among his major publications are Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Language and Mind (1968, enlarged ed., 1972, and Language and Responsibility (1979), which explores the relation between language and politics, science, the history of ideas, and the exploration of the ramifications of generative grammar. Return to text
26.	Don Eddy, Galerie Andre Francois Petit (Paris: L’Imprimerie Union a Paris, 20 April 1973); and quoted again in Isy Brachot, ed., Hyperrealisme (Brussels: Imprimeries F. van Buggenhoudt, 13 december 1973) 72. Return to text
27.	There is a good description of the paragone in Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art from Plato to Winckelmann, (New York: New York University Press, 1985) 164-174. Return to text
28.	Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth Century Art, (Prentice-Hall and Abrams, revised ed., second printing, 1982) 67 and 47 respectively. Return to text
29.	John Canaday, Mainstreams of Modern Art (Holt, Reinhart, Wilson, 1959) 458. Return to text
30.	Dale Dunning, in his text Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991) 206-08, discusses the preference of and dependence upon photographs by the Photorealist painters, noting their awareness of the limited focusing ability of the eye versus the ability of the camera or a painting to capture transparency and reflection simultaneously. Dunning’s comments are interesting in the context of Alan Watts theories about selective inattention. For this discussion see Footnote 17 and Chapter 2. Return to text
31.	See for one the discussion in the introduction of Bonito, Get Real, pp 1-9 and related fns. Return to text
32.	See our footnotes 6, 7 and 11 and the related discussion in Chapter 2. Return to text
33.	Hans Hofmann, intro by Sam Hunter, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, second edition, nd) 47. Return to text
34.	Hans Hofmann, p. 48. Hunter notes in his introduction to the book that “...in dramatic contrast to the constructionists or the Mondrian disciples, Hofmann is incapable of creating, through his geometric art, a Platonic world of pure essences or fixed varieties without taking account of the medium of thought and feeling in which these disciplined images occur. His most disciplined methods and strict forms are as much a matter of feeling as conception: their ultimate character is colored by the mental medium in which they are still partially awash. It is a mark of Hofmann’s contemporary candor that what we usually call structure in art - the rigor of balance, symmetry and proportion - does not remain outside the currents of his thought and the ongoing, multiple sensations he experiences in the act of creation. Relationships are felt as concrete sensation, not mere lifeless abstractions or arbitrary structure. Hofmann’s art maintains a precarious balance between the need to build definite form in an objective order, and his faithfulness to the findings of his own consciousness, to its motion, life, immediacy and ultimate indistinctness which constantly undermines exact formulations and fixed quantities.” p. 29. Return to text
35.	The full citations for the paintings mentioned read respectively: Wayne Thiebaud’s Pies (1961, oil on canvas, 22 x 28 in., private collection); Claes Oldenburg’s Pastry Case I, (1961-62, enamel on nine plaster sculptures in a glass showcase, 20.5 x 30 x 14.5 in., Museum of Modern Art, NY); Carolyn Brady’s Blueberry Jam (1979, watercolor on Arches, 41 x 28 1/4 in., private collection.) Return to text
36.	Bechtle’s comments are recorded in a well known series of interviews given by leading PhotoRealists in 1972. The interviews were published by Linda Chase, Nancy Foote, and Ted McBurnett, “The Photo-Realists: 12 interviews,” Art in America, November-December 1972, p.73. Bechtle further remarked, “Malcolm Morley put it that he was “looking for a house in which no one was living,” an area where he could function quite uniquely as himself. I think we’ve all done that in one way or another. We backed into a series of situations by deciding not to do something. It seemed the only way you could get away from style and “Art” was to paint things as they really looked. ... Most of us made a personal decision that what had been happening in painting was relatively closed off to us, that too many people had been there before us and that there were too many predictables. Realism became a way of getting away from that in the sense that you didn’t feel the ground was already broken. That sounds strange, since realism seems so traditional. Yet, when you think of it, the real tradition today is modernism, and it is now almost one century old.” Certainly there are fundamental points of departure between Eddy’s and Bechtle’s artistic intentions within the Realist camp, yet understanding realism as a route to the liberation of artistic expression is central to the practitioners of the new realist movements. Return to text
37.	The Canadian born educator, Marshall McLuhan was the originator of the oft repeated phrase, “the medium is the message,” and its instructive variation, “the medium is the mass age,” which gained such currency in the later 60s. His ideas and teaching depended upon his interest in the popularity of motion pictures, television and the like especially among the younger generation. Return to text
38.	Richard Estes: The Urban Landscape, John Canaday, essay; John Arthur, catalogue and interview (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1978) 38. Return to text
39.	Neil Johnson, “Don Eddy, Master of Reality,” Airbrush Action, Nov - Dec 1991, 17. Return to text
40.	Expressed in a letter dated 1963. Magritte: 1898 - 1967, Gisele Ollinger-Zinque and Frederik Leen, eds., (Ghent: Ludion Press and New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1998) 20 and n. 19. Return to text
41.	Magritte: 1898 - 1967, 18 and n. 8. Return to text
42.	Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, transl. with intro. and notes by John Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966) respectively 51, 57 and "Book One" notes 41 and following for perspective construction. Return to text
43.	Magritte: 1898 - 1967, 18 and n 7. Return to text
44.	On Painting, Spencer, 72 and "Book Two" n. 36. Return to text
45.	On Painting, Spencer, 77 and "Book Two" n. 59. Return to text
46.	These observations were articulated by Alvin Martin based on conversations with Eddy in, “Spaces of the Mind: New Paintings by Don Eddy,” ARTS Magazine, February 1987, pp. 22-23. Return to text
Footnotes Chapter 4a: Color
47.	These lines are taken from a selection of chapters from the “Book of Suger, Abbot of Saint Denis: on what was done under his administration,” presented in English translation by Elizabeth Holt, A Documentary History of Art, vol. I, (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957) 30. Return to text
48.	At the time of Suger, the Pseudo Areopagite was confounded both with the real Dionysus the Areopagite and, more importantly for Suger, with the third century missionary to the Gauls, Saint-Denis, the patron saint of Suger’s Abbey Church. For a fuller explanation of Suger's thought and what was set in motion by his ideas see Erwin Panofsky, editor, translator, and annotations, Abbot Suger, on the Abbey-Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures (Englewood Cliffs: Princeton University Press, 1946). Return to text
49.	J.J.Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History and Terminology (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974) 57-58. Return to text
50.	Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art from Plato to Winklemann (New York: NYU Press, 1985) 12. Return to text
51.	The list is translated and reprinted in Elizabeth Holt’s entry on Roger De Piles in A Documentary History of Art, vol. II (New York, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957) 185-187. Return to text
52.	Moshe Barasch, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art (New York, New York University Press, 1978) ix-x. Return to text
53.	The letter dated Arles, mid-June 1888, is given in translation by E. Holt, A Documentary History, vol. III, 481. Return to text
54.	'Form versus color' is a preferred tool of art historians in the analysis, categorization and study of artistic impulse, method, composition and style. Return to text
55.	For which see our Footnotes 5, 16, 23, 24, 46 and the related text passages; see our index under 'photography'; and refer to the introductory comment to Bonito, Get Real, 5-6 and relevant footnotes. Return to text
56.	For an early reference on Gillespie's technique see Hugh M. Davies & Sally E. Yard, Gregory Gillespie: The Timeless Mystery of Art," Arts Magazine, December 1977, 6-8. Return to text
57.	See above Chapter I, fn. 1. Return to text
Footnotes Chapter 4b: Color
58.	Henry Geldzahler, Charles Bell, The Complete Works 1970 - 1990 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), p. 19. Return to text
59.	Alvin Martin, "Don Eddy: Image, Reflection, Dream," Don Eddy exhibition brochure designed by Emsworth Studios, NYC, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, 1986. Return to text
60.	Audrey Flack consolidated her thoughts about color into an essay which is quite interesting and thought provoking to read when taken in the context of Eddy's own struggle with color. For the essay, see Audrey Flack, Audrey Flack on Painting, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1985) 44 - 51. Return to text
Chapter 5: Poetic Resonance
61.	These comments are excerpted from an essay on Leigh Behnke that resulted from interviews with the artist in 1996, and that appeared in Bonito, Get Real, 16-18. Return to text
62.	Depending upon the size of the panels, the space between the panels ranges from one half to two inches wide. Eddy designed the spacing to separate the panels just enough to establish their own identity, or individuality, but at the same time to be sufficiently close to each other to connect them to the whole. Return to text
63.	See the discussion on Chomsky above, Footnote 25 and related text in Chapter III. Return to text
64.	For a well regarded scholarly study of the shared sensibilities of painting and poetry, especially as it impacted Renaissance thought, see Rensselaer W. Lee, "Ut Pictura Poesis:" The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: The Norton Library, WW Norton & Co., Inc., 1967). Return to text
65.	René Magritte in: Rhetorique (Tilleur, June 1965), no. 9. Return to text
66.	Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque, Magritte, 20. Return to text

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