I have sometimes used the term “visionary realism” to describe in these pages an aspect of the new representational or figurative movement in the serious visual arts. Unlike Photorealism or hyper-realism, visionary realism has no tedious neo-Marxist axe to grind about simulacra, consumerism, authenticity or reproduction. (Isn’t it strange how reproduction, the way loving fathers and mothers generate babies, has become a bad word in our deathly and elitist contemporary artspeak? And the term representation, which literally means “making present again,” and in other senses denotes the process of meaning and the way we govern ourselves in a decent society, is similarly stigmatized.) But there is nothing snide or dismissive or cheaply apocalyptic about visionary realism. Visionary realists are not afraid of being upstaged by photography, the technology of reproduction. They know that the human eye is the best possible camera already, because it can see what is really there, not just what things look like. If there are spirits in the woods, the human eye, when trained in the shamanic techniques of classical craft and backed by a mind seething with creative energy, can see them and reveal them to others.

At a time when so much artwork seems haphazard and indecipherable, created by artists with little art history knowledge and limited skills, the art of Vincent Desiderio stands out. Well-versed in Western art history, rigorously trained in this country and abroad, sensitive to the world around him and influenced by personal family history, he creates large, erudite paintings filled with meticulous detail, dramatic lighting and sweeps of emotion. It is art that challenges the eye and the intellect. A thinking man’s painter, who talks knowledegably about a vast array of European and American painters, and freely acknowledges his debt to several, Desiderio applies his keen intelligence and emotional sensibilities to virtuoso representational works that carry postmodernist allegories. His large canvases and huge triptychs offer ambiguous, enigmatic narratives drawn from his life, our times and the history of Western art. Elaborately detailed and astutely lit, they often take years and years to complete, as he wrestles with ideas and concepts while the image evolves.

While there is no doubt that John Morra’s meticulously constructed “Mertz” paintings exalt the sublime beauty of exquisitely composed junk, the artist consistently achieves a synthesis with traditional realism that makes his canvases deeply satisfying, if not surprising, on a purely aesthetic level. Morra’s Mertz appliance still lifes intentionally evoke Kurt Schwitters’s prewar Merz assemblages, Dadist collages made of everyday detritus that now hang in numerous museum collections. Schwitters’s monumental three-dimensional junk collage, however, perished during World War II air raids, after Schwitters actually cut out several floors of his house, in Hanover, Germany, to accommodate his creative project. Schwitters extracted Merz randomly from a Commerzbank ad, providing the masthead for his Dadaist publication (1923–1937) and Merzwerke ad agency. Mere fragments of a similar Merzbau assemblage in Norway managed to survive, made during Schwitters’s exile from the Nazi regime, while a more complete version remains on display in Ambleside, England. Morra’s series intentionally pivots on a perverse witticism that connects Schwitters’s avant-gardist invention to contemporary realistic painting, providing what the artist regards with satisfaction as a contemporary “surrealistic crunch.” The conceptual play in Morra’s “Mertz” assemblages could even be characterized, with some mental acrobatics, as an homage to Duchamp’s Dadaist concept of the readymade—the bottle rack, the snow shovel, in short, the ubiquitous and quotidian non-objet d’art of Duchamp’s anti-aesthetic. Although the allusion is patently superficial, its results cannot be dismissed as unsatisfactory.

Richard Hambleton (b. 1954) made his reputation in the late 1970s with a series of edgy public art projects, including the ominous neo-noir Shadow Men, life-size silhouettes painted first on city street corners and then on paper and canvas. In the 1980s he was closely allied with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. But at the same period Hambleton was beginning to think about landscape as well, albeit through the filter of modernist abstraction. The full flowering of that interest was on view in “The Beautiful Paintings,” through November 3 at the Woodward Gallery.

Landscape is the genre that most easily bridges the divide between representation and abstraction: skies and swaths of land can be translated into fields of color. Clouds, water, snow and sunsets have a vitality not necessarily tied to form, and their fluidity appeals to painters who favor free brushwork. But landscapes can also provide ways to connect intimately with specific places, and certain regions attract groups of painters and help define their style. The Barbizon painters and the Hudson River School are important historical examples. This tradition continues today. Sherry French Gallery in New York City presented its fifteenth annual “Mainely Maine” exhibition in September. The rugged seacoasts and forests of Maine have been a mainstay of American artists since Winslow Homer and the Luminists. Among the artists in this show were Janice Anthony, Eliza Auth, Cora Ogden, Dean Thomas and Carolyn Edlund.

An exhibit of paintings about the Susquehanna and its environs, which began this past year and will travel regionally through 2008, may help introduce the subject to a broader audience. “Visions of the Susquehanna: 250 Years of Painting by American Masters” was the brainchild of painter Rob Evans, who twenty-five years ago set up a studio on his grandparents’ farm, which overlooks the river near Wrightsville in York County. Initially, Evans’s interest in the river was as a subject for painting, with its seductive views and sentimental ties to his childhood. But he was gradually drawn into the river’s history and decided to research artists who had painted along it. Evans conducted research for over a year and a half, using a grant from the Richard C. von Hess Foundation as well as support from the Lancaster County Historical Society and the Lancaster Museum of Art. What he discovered is a who’s who of American painters that had painted the river and its tributaries, including Benjamin West, Frederic Church, Thomas Doughty, George Inness, Jasper Cropsey, Thomas Worthington Whittredge, Thomas Moran and Sanford Robinson Gifford. The river also figured in the works of the Swiss-born artist Karl Bodmer and the French painter Louis Remy Mignot. Mignot, along with West, painted the river from memory, an act that catalogue essayist Leo G. Mazow calls an “imaginary reconstruction,” creating the “Susquehanna of the mind.”

The craftsmanship of contemporary realists, in general, is at a high level, and they are being more widely recognized both in galleries and in the mainstream art press. Calls for these technically proficient artists to tackle more ambitious subject matter are perfectly legitimate. This is a complicated enterprise, however, one tied to the evolution of our cultural and educational institutions. In the meantime, artists continue to work in perennial genres such as the still life, often with worthwhile results and, occasionally, real inventiveness.

New York City and San Francisco have long maintained a push-pull relationship, particularly in arts and letters. Despite its diminutive size, in comparison with New York, the City by the Bay has been remarkably influential in shaping twentieth-century American culture. In the lull before the storm, when Abstract Expressionism swept all other art movements aside as the dominant style of the 1950s, a group known as the Bay Area artists were impressively demonstrating the compatibility of abstract and figurative art in striking works by Richard Diebenkorn, David Parks and Elmer Bischoff. The relationship between the painterly viscosity of the New York School—Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko—and the Bay Area artists was demonstrated again in the recent Hackett-Freedman exhibition “A Culture in the Making: New York and San Francisco in the 1950s and 60s.” During the 1950s many New York artists and writers, such as Mark Rothko and Allen Ginsberg, traveled to San Francisco, attracted by its easygoing permissiveness and freedom from the pressure of New York’s egoism and competitiveness. The dialogue between the two cities was further explored at Hackett-Freedman in exhibitions juxtaposing early modernism with new realism drawn from New York and California. The best realist artists working today reflect some of the same issues of formalism, beauty and memory addressed by the modernists a half century ago. The exhibition at Hackett-Freedman appeared at the same time other important San Francisco art galleries were also showing contemporary realism.