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"In January
of 1979 I went to live and work in Berlin at the invitation of the D.A.A.D.
(German Academic Exchange Service)," wrote New York artist Howard Kanovitz.
He did not go empty handed. In a retrospective at the Akademie der Kunste
which encompassed more than 200 paintings, pastels, drawings, and installations,
the artist established himself as one of the leading realists of his country.
"Howard Kanovitz paints realistic paintings for which the term 'realism'
is too narrow," wrote former president of the Akademie der Kunste, Werner
Duttman: "His paintings do not show reality as such, but rather express
doubt in what normally is taken for reality." In the meantime, the work
of the Documenta participant (1972 and 1977) has become less fashionable,
as have all types of so called 'neo-realism' one would think that after
years of abstract art's dominance, a new type of realism would be welcomed
with open arms as a counter-balance to the harsher minimal and conceptual
art forms.
It might
at least have been embraced with the same warmth that Pop Art once was,
although the latter never enjoyed the popularity of Pop music. Intellectual
art, however, rarely receives an instant-majority vote. The serious form
of American realism as it is represented by Richard Estes, Chuck
Close, Philip Pearlstein, ALex Katz, and Kanovitz, is not what the public
had hoped for. It does not consist of mirror-like naturalism or a predictable
pseudo-romantic idyll. Discussion of the movement, with its variety of
contrasts in East and West, in Europe and America, has always suffered
from a surprising lack of differentiation. It seems to have ceased altogether
now that an artist of Gerald Richter's caliber produces abstract paintings.
Many have fallen into the bad habit of remaining silent about what doesn't
conform to the mold. "Realism doesn't satisfy the public," says sixty-year-old
Kanovitz. In a refreshing way, he does not present the soul of his art
on a silver platter. Refraining from simply copying visible reality, he
instead questions it, and despite exactness of detail, distances the subject.
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There is
no singular moment of revelation. Once one has overcome the surprise of
precisionist illusion, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and figure and
object combine, so that one becomes almost symbolic of the other. "I have
to find a metaphor," says the artist, and refers to Kafka. The man from
Prague, he says, made the old parables plausible by describing them in
a fresh way and interpreting them based on his own personal and public
vision.
"This is
the way an artist thinks." The process of Kanovitz' pictorial thinking
is exemplified by his personal, contemporary version of the age-old Icarus
theme, done in 1974 and inspired first by W.H. Auden's poem on Brueghel's
rendering of "Icarus' Fall," and, as it happens, a reproduction of the
painting. In Brueghel's work the drowning is an incidental anecdote, while
all around life goes on as usual: the plowing farmer doesn't even turn.
In Kanovitz' painting one looks from the back seat of a car just behind
the windshield. Only the hands of the driver (Kanovitz) on the steering
wheel are visible, along with a part of his face in the rearview mirror.
Seen through the windshield are the Queensboro Bridge in New York, a tiny
airplane in the sky, and a man on the embankment with his dog continuing
on his way, unaware of the plane that sooner or later will crash. Kanovitz
has translated Auden's thoughts into the language of the painted image.
Much that doesn't alter the flow of life goes unnoticed, both past and
present. The everyday life of the urbanite turns to legend and becomes,
as writer William Berkson of once said, a fragment of a public mythology."
The painting "Icarus" is exemplary of iconography that is typical of Kanovitz:
the permeability of internal and external as symbolized by the windshield,
the interweaving of public and private, and of everyday life and legend.
Seeing what one sees is, to paraphrase Le Corbusier, the mark of this
style. This means also recognizing what in the first viewing may be hidden,
but which emerges to make the passing moment permanent and gives perspective
to commonplace experience. This has always been the case with Kanovitz.
As a student and assistant to the painter Franz Kline (1910-1962), he
was still coming to terms with Action Painting.
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