Re-envisioning Everyday Spaces: Photorealism in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Photorealism, a style that transfers photographic imagery and conventions to the medium of painting, is one of the few artforms of the 1960s and 1970s that has yet to receive substantive reevaluation. Contrary to critics’ derogatory dismissals, the style raises issues of production and interpretation central to postwar aesthetics and critical theory. This study argues that Photorealism’s hybrid forms and iconographical dedication to everyday subjects are essential to understanding realism’s post-abstraction re-emergence, new directions in intermedial practice, and the cultural impact of demographic transformations of the American landscape. Taking three Photorealist painters—Robert Bechtle, Richard McLean, and Ralph Goings—from the San Francisco Bay Area as case studies, this dissertation considers how the artists are tied to both the region’s artistic lineage and its socio-geographic development. Their training and artworks are evidence of the persistent, but frequently overlooked, dialectic of realist and modernist approaches, both in terms of formal strategies and notions of artistic commitment. Their collective iconography also registers pivotal postwar spatial developments. I contend Bechtle, Goings, and McLean’s chosen subjects are not simple distillations of urban, suburban, or rural landscapes, but, rather, places where such categories are continuous—a national phenomenon with great social and ecological impact. These examinations of form and environment are balanced by a historiographic study of the ways in which Photorealism is key to critical and theoretical debates over contemporary realism. The style functions as a central node in these contentious dialogues, and is tied to both new directions in American figurative art and contemporaneous realist investigations in European literature and theory. These parallels point to a complex network between the visual and the verbal and the American and the European; my research documents how each party borrowed cultural goods to advance their own views on artistic innovation and cultural identity. Ultimately Photorealism is an essential part of the geographic, aesthetic, and critical discourses of its era. Its forms and subjects are significant artifacts of the spaces of everyday life and offer a fresh view of negotiations between the formal and the vernacular, the modern and postmodern, and new and traditional media.PHDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100082/1/begilman_1.pd