“American Artist” Celebrates the Realism Movement in Painting

The Magazine Marks 75 Years of Keeping Classical Skills Relevant to Art

At American Artist, which is a lavishly illustrated monthly art magazine, the phrase “Sunday painter” is not a dirty word.

            For that matter, neither are the words “old master,” “self-taught,” or atelier, the French term for a small workshop composed of a teacher and students, typically learning classical art techniques.

            Celebrating its 75th year, the magazine continues to be a flagship for what it calls a continuing American “movement” for realism and representational work in drawing, painting, and pastels. It honors the European old masters and the great American realists. It also encourages everybody to learn to paint, an egalitarian approach that nevertheless argues that it is best to learn by imitating the genius of the past.

            To mark its 75th, the magazine has produced a March/April “special issue” that charts the history of representational painting in the United States. It ends with a look at “the state of representational art in the new millennium.” This panorama also tells the publication’s history. It was founded in 1937 as Art & Instruction, changing it name to American Artist three years later. The publication weathered the 1950s to 1970s, when abstraction and then anti-traditionalism became cutting edge in the United States. Having endured, American Artist has caught the 1980s wave that revived “classical realism” in painting.

            Even so, every art publication today faces challenges to keep readership and underwrite the staff and printing.

            In 2008, the Colorado investment firm Aspire Media acquired the American Artist Group (which has several “how-to” magazines on painting and drawing skill), and placed it under Aspire’s other unit (acquired in 2005), Interweave, one of the nation’s largest publishers of craft and skill magazines. In recent years, American Artist has gone beyond just magazines, expanding its “do-it-yourself” (DIY) movement of people who are eager to learn from the old masters. The magazine now holds weekend workshops with traditional instructors. It also launched the Artist Daily Web site and a video channel.

            In a competitive environment for art publications, American Artist is hoping to building on its “great brand,” said editorial director, Michael Gormley, the former dean of the New York Academy of Art, which was founded in 1979 as a graduate studio school for figurative art and art history. To claim some of its past glory, the magazine has revived its headline logo from the 1970s, a kind of compliment, Gormley said, “to our history and our readers who have stuck with this through the ages.”

            With its brand status, American Artist continues to be a clearing house for the nation’s many ateliers with traditional art teaching programs. This month’s special issue, for example, offers the annual Workshop & Art School Directory, a road map to outlets for training in classical arts—oil painting, sculpture, watercolor, pastel, colored pencil, graphite, printmaking, or charcoal. Typically, these media are applied to a list of classic subject matter: portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, and outdoor painting.

            For all art such ventures, the market is still a bit ambiguous. Only a few of the independent art colleges in the United States still emphasize classical painting skills. The same is true for many more art departments at U.S. colleges and universities. Students, laymen, or retirees who want to learn the skills of the old masters must typically search hard, or be ready to pay for specialized training. That support system largely exists in the surviving ateliers—the constituents of American Artist—that continue to unashamedly trace their heritage to the Renaissance, trying to plug the dike against “contemporary art,” a tide that excludes “Sunday painters” to emphasize ironic attitudes, shock-value, and conceptualism over skill.

            In some ways, on the other hand, the return to realistic painting is an embarrassment of riches these days. There is a great deal of it, in fact. In the large Chelsea Art Galleries district of west Manhattan, it is told, the dominant kind of art is representational, and the artists—many coming from top graduate schools, others self-taught over the years—are very good and are looking for sales.

            Though not having a monopoly on the realism spirit, American Artist does hope to throw a spotlight on the plenitude and quality of the new classical realism. In April 2013, it will hold a large “commemorative exhibition” of “a core group of artists we have identified as long-time leaders of our movement.” In conjunction, it will also hold a juried competition for new blood in the realist approach (with submission guidelines coming in May). The 2013 exhibit will be held at the historic Salmagundi Club (taking its name from a Washington Irving satire), a midtown Manhattan art club founded in 1871, and then travel to the West Coast.

            As an art education movement, magazines such as American Artist speak of “timeless instruction,” in other words, techniques and disciplines that have proven to work in the hands of any diligent artist. After those skills are mastered, the artist is free to be creative. After all, Leonard da Vinci said, “The greatest misfortune is when theory outstrips performance.” Picasso, too, justified his Cubist revolution on his mastery of classical skills. Since he had mastered them, he said, did he not “have the right” to experiment with a few rebellions? It’s still a good argument.