Many contemporary realist artists, passionate about recovering old master skills, are intimidated by the iconographic burden of the past. Their caution is understandable. Symbols and visual tropes wrenched from their original context and pastiched into contemporary compositions can seem jarring, even ridiculous. Yet the best representational art has always been an inspired amalgam of mimesis and imagination. Cristina Vergano and Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, who had solo exhibitions in New York City galleries in the fall, are developing highly individualistic styles and iconographies.

Now that modernism has been proclaimed bankrupt, even by some of its previously staunchest advocates, a reverse psychology has set in, provoking a rush to resurrect the Academy and traditional art genres. The problem with this response is to rely too heavily on a narrow ideological approach. As we try to show with each issue of American Arts Quarterly, there are wonderful, major talents among the new Realists.

“Different Views in Hudson River School Painting,” an exhibition at the Babcock Galleries in New York City, organized by the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, has an interesting premise. Curator Judith Hansen O’Toole, director of the Westmoreland Museum, focuses on pairs, series and groupings of paintings as a way of exploring shared iconography and the intimacy between painters and specific locales.

Domenico Tiepolo (1727–1804) is best known for his charming images of commedia dell’arte characters and the secular life of Venice. Yet he was also a deeply pious man who created a cycle of 313 large religious drawings, in ink and wash on handmade paper, an ambitious project executed in a relatively short period, between 1786 and 1790.

Stephen Magsig’s new urban streetscapes, which were on view through the end of 2006 at David Klein Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan, draw on a number of stylistic traditions, but they have their own poetic logic. Tight shots of commercial buildings dominate, usually in New York or Detroit, although Palace Detail, L.A. (2006) takes on a west coast subject. What interests the artist here, however, is less regional than compositional—the alluring curves of the italic “l” and “a” in the unlit neon sign.

David Ligare’s autumn exhibition at Koplin Del Rio Gallery in California, his eighth solo show there, was titled “Ritual Offerings,” alluding to the cults of ancient Greece and Rome. Ligare (b. 1945) does not traffic, however, in the fancy-dress reenactments of propiation and celebration rites that were a specialty of historicists such as the Victorian painter Alma-Tadema. Ligare’s contemporary neoclassicism is ideological as well as stylistic.