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THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1967  D 21

Art
The (Temporary) Triumph of Realism

By JOHN CANADAY

[[image]]
From the Museum Folkwang, Essen
Trubner's "Portrait of a Lady," 1877, German work at the Brooklyn Museum
"The most original thing you can do is revive something discarded"

LET'S start off with a list of names this week: Wilhelm Leibl, Franz von Defregger, Wilhelm Trübner, Charles Schuch, Theodor Alt, Karl Hagemeister, Fritz Schider, Karl Haider, Ludwig Kraus, Georg H. Breitner, Franz von Lenbach, Hans Thoma, Lovis Corinth.

There is not much change, even among people who hold a degree in art history (unless from a German university), that one in a hundred could identify more than a couple of names in this list of German painters. They are included with their French and American contemporaries in a remarkable show at the Brooklyn Museum, "The Triumph of Realism," which opens to the public this Tuesday, Oct. 3. Lovis Corinth alone among them has had attention in New York recently (or at any time), although Hans Thoma and Wilhelm Leibl are occasionally given a nod in art histories.

While one or another of these painters must have turned up here and there in an exhibition or two now and then, the catalogue of this show points out that they are no better known in this country today than they were nearly 60 years ago when they could still be called the "living art" of Germany. The Metropolitan Museum, in a catalogue of a 1909 exhibition, went on record "confidently and without exaggeration that the living art of the Germany of today is practically unknown to the present day American."

The aging sons and the youngish grandsons of the public for whom those lines were written are not going to find anything like a sensational revelation in these German painters, but they should find the Brooklyn exhibition enlightening if they are not too deeply mired in the conventional habit by which only the impressionists and their direct precursors or descendants are worth attention in the art of the latter 19th century. The triumph of realism—a triumph achieved less than a century ago, but which seems hardly closer to us than the Roman campaigns in Gaul—was a successful revolution against both classical and romantic idealism, dedicated to the idea that the world around us everywhere, even in its most commonest aspects, was worth the painter's attention. The battle was fought from the time of Courbet, who opened it in France, to the Ashcan school, which closed it in America—unless it can be considered to have been reopened by our Pop artists, who also, in their own curious way, have revolted against the degenerated artiness of their immediate predecessors.

Impressionism was an immediate outgrowth of the realists' adulation of the unidealized visual world, and since then thing shave moved so rapidly that the realists, who started the ball rolling, have come to be thought of as the original squares. In their search for subjects in the everyday world they were often unable to avoid the trap of sentimentalism, and in the German pictures now in Brooklyn (most of them never before exhibited in this country) there are undeniably some corny ones. But in filling a lacuna as it does, the German selection would be inadequate without such representation.

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If we talked only of the Germans, who are only a portion of this German-French-American amalgam of 100 paintings, it is because they are so unexpected. At a time when exhibition after exhibition tries to astonish by something that can be called originality, the most original thing you can do, it appears, is to revive something that has been discarded. The variety of taste called camp is based on a modish indulgence of this idea, and some of the German paintings in Brooklyn may arouse covetousness among members of the cult. But they have been selected not for their novelty, which is specious, but in an effort to show the half-forgotten revolution of realism in an international context that has never been fully displayed to the American public.

The French colleagues and contemporaries hanging with the Germans make a more familiar list: Courbet, Millet, Manet, Degas, Fantin-Latour, Géròme and Meissonier. But if the names are familiar, the list as a whole is unexpected: it is a rare show that includes the academicians Géròme and Meissonier with the rebels who, since then, have usurped their eminence. The academicians, as teachers, were powerful forces. Thomas Eakins, the greatest American painter, was in Paris while Courbet was realism's grand old man and Manet its current scandal, but it was Géròme that Eakins studied under.

The American list includes some familiar and magnificent Eakinses (8 of them), 11 Homers and groups by Sargent, Whistler, and members of the Ashcan school. William Merritt Chase, who has been making a comeback lately, is present also, and there are sixteen pictures (painted between 1871 and 1892) by Frank Duveneck, a group that might stimulate an overdue Duveneck revival. For good measure there is a single portrait by Robert William Vonnoh (who?) that serves as a hint that there are unexplored pre-impressionist areas in American as well as in German art.

Duveneck, having been an American disciple of the Munish school, and then having bred his own school in this country, is one of the principal liaison figures in the show and we are reminded, as well, that Courbet visited Germany and was admired there. The exhibition is hunt to emphasize the internationalism of the realist movement; there are neither national nor temporal divisions. A pupil and teacher may be placed side by side, but on the other hand there are artists who probably did not even know one another's names who were approximating similar ideas simultaneously, and they, too, are compared by placement.

What it all comes down to is that this is an imaginative show, an original idea that should have been an obvious one. The emphasis on the Germans may be exaggerated, but there is the defense that this only makes up for long neglect. Axel von Saldern conceived the idea and began work on it while curator in painting and sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum. When he left that post to become assistant director and curator of devorative arts in the Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf, Brooklyn wisely asked him to go ahead with the project.