New York artist Edward Minoff has followed an increasingly familiar path for a contemporary realist: studying with Jacob Collins at the Water Street Atelier and Daniel Graves at the Florence Academy of Art, then securing a berth with the John Pence Gallery in San Francisco. His summer exhibition there, his fourth solo at Pence, was a demonstration of what he has learned. A fine draftsman, Minoff tries his hand at a wide range of painting genres, with usually solid results. Tightly rendered still lifes display his mimetic skills. There is nothing particularly innovative about the composition of Bread, Wine and Olives (2008), but the textures of a rough stone wall, a painted wooden table and a crusty, flour-dusted loaf are beautifully captured. The more colorful Tomatoes & Mozzarella (2006) plays with rounded forms—the irregular ovoids of loaf, tomatoes and cheese have distinct surfaces—in an entertaining way. Two wine bottles, a goblet and a cruet of olive oil establish a vertical rhythm. The blond wood of the wide-planked table and a jutting cheese board break the smoky background into an intriguing shape.

Virtuosity in today’s art world presents a hard brief to argue insofar as it encompasses virtù, or excellence, which implies hierarchies of values, achievements and, at least in a narrow sense, persons. All of these are currently suspect if not, in the present parlance, downright transgressive. In some quarters, a craft tradition may now be seen as obsolete or, worse yet, exclusive. It is hardly surprising that the draftsmanship of freshman art students has been declining for decades. This shift, to some degree, represents an overcorrection of past failings. In the Ars Poetica, Horace emphasized the importance of both native ability and assiduous learning, but until relatively recently the appearance of talent and the opportunity to cultivate it appeared almost entirely among the privileged classes. Occasionally, a great talent could ascend in society in the same way as a great beauty, but the common lot was mere subsistence, and commoners’ lack of achievement no doubt reinforced aristocratic attitudes and perpetuated self-fulfilling prophecies for generations. The spread of mass literacy, increasing life expectancies and a degree of mass prosperity have fortunately extended to many commoners the opportunity to find out whether they have talent and the will to cultivate it. While we can only wonder how much genius has been wasted in the past, it would be perverse not to relish these new opportunities.
 

There is an intriguing premise behind “Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly” at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The title of the exhibition paraphrases a remark made by Whistler in Venice in 1880: “Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.” James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) suggests a good deal in this aperçu, both about technique and his aesthetic milieu, recurrent preoccupations in this attractive but scattershot exhibition and its accompanying catalogue.¹ Second billing goes to George Inness (1825–94). Temperamentally, the two men were very different. Whistler was a cultural magpie, painting alongside Gustave Courbet and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, collecting Asian art, forging a stimulating friendship with the Symbolist writer Stéphane Mallarmé. Yet he developed his own idiosyncratic style, specializing in portraits and a genre he largely invented, the Nocturne. Whistler painted London and Venice; Inness, the marshes around Montclair, New Jersey, and Tarpon Springs, Florida. Inness began as a Hudson River School painter, softened his style under Barbizon influence and ended as a visionary landscapist, not by seeking the sublime but by transfiguring the ordinary. Juxtaposing Whistler and Inness reveals some interesting crosscurrents in post-Civil War American art.
 

There was food for thought as well as much to seduce the eye in “Located at the Edge of a Momentary Convergence: New Landscape Paintings,” a late spring exhibition of fifteen works by Tula Telfair at Forum Gallery in Los Angeles. Her epic-scale vistas, untouched by signs of human presence, clearly allude to the sublime aspect of the Romantic landscape tradition. A Material Thing in Which All Material Things Are Located (all works 2008) is 72-by-921⁄2 inches, a sweeping panorama of feverish red hills under grey clouds and a cornflower blue sky, with a swath of lemony light at the horizon. The intensity of color and the wilderness terrain suggest the visions of Frederic Church. Yet Church’s topography, whether he is depicting the Hudson River, the Arctic or a South American volcano, remains rooted in specific places. Telfair’s images are invented, painted in her New York City studio. They come, she explains, “purely from memory, not from observing a site, or utilizing photographic aids.” She signals this conceptual impulse not only by her philosophical and rather fanciful titles but also by adding narrow bands of flat color to one or more sides of her paintings, undercutting the illusion of spatial recession by reminding us we are looking at two-dimensional surfaces covered in paint. “I am interested in the subjectivity of perception and the power of memory,” she explains.
 

We should apprehend, too, the nature of death; and that only if it be steadily contemplated, and the fancies we associate with it be mentally dissected, it will soon come to be thought of as no more than a process of nature (and only children are scared by a natural process)—or rather, something more than a mere process, a positive contribution to nature’s well-being.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 2, Section 12¹

 
All of modernism—color for the sake of color, form for the sake of form, in varying proportions and arrangements²—is contained in Nicholas Poussin (1594–1665), but much more. The sadness of modernism is that this “much more”—nature, in all the majesty of its meaning—has slowly disappeared from modern painting, which finally loses its resonance because of this absence and loss. Pure abstraction is a Pyrrhic victory over nature, for without nature, if only as expressive trace or emotional undercurrent, art becomes stale, flat and unprofitable, a technical game with diminished aesthetic and human returns, as post-painterly abstraction—the dregs of modernist purity—makes clear.

An exhibition of recent paintings by Andrea J. Smith, at Forum Gallery in New York City, was a highlight of the increasingly lively summer art scene. Smith spent time at the Florence Academy, a bastion of the new realist movement, where she became, in her words, “obsessed with good draftsmanship.” When she founded the Harlem Studio in New York City in 2002, she based her teaching program on Charles Bargue’s 1850s Cours de Dessin, which influenced generations of academically inclined art students and even more avant-garde practitioners, such as Vincent van Gogh. Smith’s portraits and still lifes demonstrate a solid grounding in old master techniques. But, while some contemporary traditionalists advocate isolation from the modernist legacy, she balances classical forms with elements of abstraction and emphatically vigorous painthandling.
 

In May, Bernarducci Meisel Gallery presented the first New York City solo exhibition of paintings by Italian Photorealist Luciano Ventrone. The mimetic clarity of his work is uncanny. In fact, the illusion of three-dimensionality he achieves in his still lifes and nudes far exceeds the flattened verisimilitude of the camera eye, approaching the hyper-reality of Early Netherlandish oil painters such as Memling, whose effects seemed a species of sorcery to many of their Italian contemporaries. The title of the exhibition, “L’Eterno Presente,” alludes to the way art can capture and perpetuate the ephemeral ripeness of nature. This lesson is exemplified by the vibrancy of the cherries in L’Ultimo Tocco (2008), which spill out of their bowl and into the viewer’s space. Translated as “the final touch,” the title links the succulent perfection of the fruit to the artist’s technical virtuosity. Ventrone’s compositions exclude the paraphernalia of twenty-first-century life: elegant nudes wearing silk turbans look as if they had strayed from an Ingres seraglio; fruits and flowers are displayed in woven baskets and marble bowls that have been mainstay vessels since antiquity. Yet the hard studio light is blatantly artificial. Simultaneously clinical and theatrical, it brings out the tiniest details.