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was a symposium on the human figure in the now defunct Art Digest in which I stated in part: "Certainly, the human figure, and by that I mean man and his life, his attributes, his habitat, human content in general, can be re-interpreted and can have validity for our times, as it has been re-interpreted in each successive epoch through-out the ages"

That seems to be happening now. I must confess that for a long [[strikethrough]] time [[/strikethrough]] period of time in which abstraction and abstract expressionism, as well as other isms, abounded in restless succession, I had lost interest in the art world. I just stayed in my studio and worked. But now, with the re-emergence of the human figure in art, in other words, [[strikethrough]] figurative art, [[/strikethrough]] realism, I began again to attend exhibitions in the N.Y. galleries and museums. Of course, there are new ephemeral isms, like minimalism, conceptualism, body artism, anti-artism and what have you. The big fact is that realism is in ascendance. And, as always, critics, art historians, museum directors, those analyzers, classifiers, pigeon-holers are already busy analyzing and classifying, labelling and dividing realism into "old" and "new", radical, post-pop, sharp focus, etc. And a jargon like that formerly employed in philosophying about, rationalizing and pushing abstract and abstract expressionism, is now being used on behalf of the so-called new realism.

Such fancy language is used in two articles in the Dec.-Jan.1972 issue of Arts Magazine. One by Cindy Nemser entitled "Representational Painting in 1971-A New Synthesis", and the other called "Rent is the Only Reality, or the Hotel Instead of the Hymn (whatever that means) by Ivan Karp. For example, in the torturous Nemser article she gives us an observation by another writer of the same kind, Anton Ehrenzweig. "The important difference between traditional realism and modern art was the flexibility and openness of the traditional schemata, and that in [[strikethrough]] the [[/strikethrough]] 20th century art, flexible schemata and gradual innovation were replaced by defensive and rigid mannerisms that yielded only to periodic catastrophic disruption." 

If I'd take time I could fathom the meaning of this. But certainly artists do not talk like this. 

Both articles seem to advocate realism. The first one ends with a paragraph from Sidney Tillim: "There is an aura of hope and anticipation that frequently surrounds the issue of a new figurative art. There is a nostalgia about it that far from being reactionary, expresses a desire to