Natalia Martynenko, “American Painting in the Twentieth Century,” translated from Russian by David Mossop, originally published as Zhivopis’ SShA XX veka. Puti razvitiia (Kiev: Naukova Dumka, 1989), 118–139 (excerpt)

Addressing both realism and the avant-garde counterculture of the 1960s to the 1980s, Martynenko adopts the Soviet rhetorical position that treated the avant-garde as a counterculture protesting against bourgeois norms. In the 1970s, one of the most significant movements of bourgeois art—Hyperrealism—became a subject of lively discussion. It can trace its origins to an exhibition held in the Whitney Museum in New York entitled 22 Realists. In the urban “landscapes” of Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Malcolm Morley, and the other Hyperrealists, the world is presented as a function of machinery and the objects created by them. Its anonymous space is filled only with the accidental flashes and reflections in the shackling fusion of the perfectly smooth surfaces. A characteristic feature of the trans-avant-garde is the exhortation to return to figurative art. This in turn is a reaction to the head-spinning movement of the avant-garde, which came to reject artistic work in general.