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Art: 19th-Century Realism vs. Idealism

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N.Y. Times, Wednesday, Oct. 4. '67 [[/left margin]]

Two Exhibitions Open a Borough Apart

By JOHN CANADAY

"THE TRIUMPH OF REALISM," an exhibition that opened yesterday at the Brooklyn Museum, and American Paintings and Historical Prints from the Middendorf Collection," which opens at the Metropolitan Museum today, could have been dovetailed into a single show, although you would have had to find a new title for it—something like "How Realism Developed in the United States as a Spontaneous National Expression in Mid-19th-Century Landscape and Genre, and How It Was Discredited by the Introduction of European Romantic-Classical Idealism. While at About the Same Time Other Groups of Artists in the United States, France and Germany Were Rebelling Against That Same Romantic-Classical Idealism and Looking to the Everyday World, as Realists, for Their Subject Matter."

Perhaps, after all, it is just as well that the two shows were not fused, attention spans being what they are.

The Middendorf collection (to consider the two shows in chronological sequence) runs from the late 18th century when American painting was largely a provincial expression of English standards, to the late 19th century and the early 20th, when American painters were assimilating impressionism. But its richest section is in the middle decades of the 19th century when American landscape and American life were inspiring American painters to native expression.

The collection is in no way a complete summary, but that is part of its attraction. Its inclusion of minor painters and its omission of some major ones indicate that Mr. and Mrs. Middendorf are not the stamp-album type of collector eager to fill each space in the book, but that they buy what interests them as art combined with historical and social reference. They have acquired a varied group of paintings that, in landscape, reflect the mid-19th-century American's awe at the spectacle of untrammeled nature along with an agreeable Thanatopsian consciousness of man's frailty in its presence even while he feels communion with it. And in the genre paintings of the same period, the painters are fascinated with Americans as Americans—people not quite like any others and, from our end of the vista, almost a lost race.

Brooklyn's "Triumph of Realism" is a scholarly collection of paintings including international loans, and it is distinguished from what is expected by the inclusion of a group of German painters who, although connected with the French realists of the latter 19th century, and although the confreres and teachers of a generation of Americans, are usually passed over in the history books.

It must be admitted that, seen purely as artists, the German realists must still take third place to the Frenchmen (led by Courbet) and the Americans (led by Homer and Eakins), although there is always the argument that we have for a long time been preconditioned to judge all painting by the French standard. But whatever the Germans' merits and shortcomings, their place in history is brought back into attention by the Brooklyn show. 

An agreeable aspect of both exhibitions is that they present the works of art in the context of their own time and the artists' intentions, rather than subjecting them to the weeding-out and the distorted judgments that, practiced for so long, have tended to blind us to merits in painting that cannot be interpreted as prophetic of the 20th-century revolution. There is not much chance that this pair of exhibitions will stimulate painters to return to realism, and no reason why they should have such an effect. But they should stimulate historians to straighten out a few kinks and fill in a few blanks spots in our consideration of the 19th century.

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Frank Duveneck, an American artist, painted this portrait of his wife. It is on loan from the Cincinnatti Art Museum for the Brooklyn Museum's "Triumph of Realism" show.