Picturing America

At the end of the 1960s, a number of young artists working in the United States began to make paintings directly from photographs.With often painstaking detail, they portrayed the objects, people and places that defined American life. Their work was often grouped together in exhibitions and publications, and described by the term Photorealism. This fully illustrated, bilingual volume provides a snapshot of a single chapter in art history and a particular moment in American history. Leading photorealism scholar Linda Chase analyses the similarities and differences in the individual artists philosophies and approaches. David Lubin elucidates the historical context out of which Photorealism emerged, with a particular emphasis on how this art relates to the cultural and social landscapes in the United States at that time. In recognition of the fact that this is the first major presentation of American Photorealism in Germany in nearly thirty years, exhibition curator Valerie Hillings reconstructs the history of the movement in Germany in the 1970s through an examination of the critical and art historical literature of the period, private collections of this art, and key exhibitions, including especially Documenta V in 1972.