ABSTRACT
Realism is as dependent on conventions and stratagems, on devices artfully employed, on the whole fictive process of art, as any other style. For realism makes a double claim on our attention, appealing at once to our sense of recognition of the world beyond the boundaries of art and our capacity to respond to a wholly imaginary conception of that world. The modern movement in painting has brought this fictive element in art to a high degree of self-consciousness and has done so, paradoxically, by declaring the unequivocal reality of its own artifice. The exhibition was chosen by Alfred V. Frankenstein, the art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, who is the leading authority on American trompe l'oeil painting, and is being circulated by the University Art Museum, Berkeley and California. Thus, the realism to be found in these trompe l'oeil paintings was, at the very outset, placed at the service of a purely fictional impulse.
