Alex Potts’s ambitious new book, Experiments in Modern Realism, attempts to decenter and reconfigure dominant notions concerning the nature of art production in one of the liveliest periods in the history of art, roughly 1945–1968. At nearly five hundred pages and with numerous chapters and subheads, the book has the broad scope and episodic feel of a textbook, but it also has some of the rich texture and nuance of a volume with more specialist concerns. If Potts’s last book, the brilliant The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) (click here for review), made the question of the “sculptural” central to conceptions of modernism, then this new one shuffles the postwar deck in both the United States and Western Europe relative to the widely used and contested term “realism.”

“Realism” has long been used as a descriptor for a number of the artists Potts discusses: Andy Warhol and others in Sidney Janis’s 1962 The New Realists exhibition; Pierre Restany’s grouping of Yves Klein, Arman, and others as part of “Nouveau Réalisme”; and Gerhard Richter’s formulation of a “Capitalist Realism” in West Germany, to name but a few of these instances. But in this book Potts wants a “more specific take on realism” (2), one that expands its conception and the artists usually considered under its rubric. For instance, readers will find pages describing how Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings skirt the line between unintelligible marks and representational forms, as well as discussions of Joseph Beuys’s layering of mythical content onto found, prosaic objects. “Realism” for Potts thus encompasses the practices of those artists who dialectically engage both the complex processes of experimental art making and the social world around them.

In his impressive first chapter, Potts lays the theoretical foundation for what follows, employing diverse thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Georg Lukács, and Theodor Adorno to dismantle the simplified notion of realism as a figurative, anti-abstract style. By conceptualizing “realism” as a strategy that can transverse the usual discursive divides of painting versus sculpture, abstract versus representational, and United States versus Europe, Potts defamiliarizes the usual conceptions of this period. Such a broad understanding of realism is original but also clearly builds upon and synthesizes the pivotal work of both Leo Steinberg and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. For the former, Potts understands an example of “experimental realism” as something akin to Steinberg’s famous “flatbed picture plane” (1968)—a work where information is presented in a seemingly nonhierarchal manner. In relation to Buchloh’s more recent work, Potts’s notion of realism is predicated upon artworks that embrace contradiction—those that express a commitment to art making and its discourses but at the same time ironize art’s abilities to accomplish anything tangible in the realm of politics. Thus, Pottsian realism—be it a grimy urban abstraction by Willem de Kooning, a Brutalist totemic sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi, or the détourned paintings of Asger Jorn—occupies an interstitial space between reality and its representation, between contingency and autonomy.

But where Experiments in Modern Realism makes an especially important intervention is in its complication of the dominant strand of postwar art history of the last twenty-five years: the poststructuralist turn associated with the journal October, what Potts describes as an “anti-referential” practice (4). Unlike Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Buchloh, and others, Potts embraces the tools and methods of iconography, of identifying and interpreting some of the many concrete references that appear in these works. Building upon strategies evident in recent scholarship (such as Thomas Crow’s or Joshua Shannon’s important work on Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines), Potts conjoins the skepticism of poststructuralism with an acute sense of historical and social event. This approach not only provides readers with a rich, textured account of the ways art objects reference the social world, but it also presents those contested sites where social and artistic discourses overlap. An artist, therefore, can be engaged with modernist experimentation and produce “work that referred to, evoked or commented on phenomena in the world at large” (4). Whether exploring the actual content (including the typed scripts) of a Happening by Allan Kaprow, deciphering the barely coherent references to the classical world in a Cy Twombly painting, or identifying the lost importance of some political figure in a Jacques Villeglé décollage, Potts provides a much-needed materialist corrective to many previous accounts of these and other figures. While he realizes the impossibility of ascribing a singular meaning to any of these works based on iconography alone, to deny their “realism”—their explicit and concrete references to a political world outside of the gallery—is to miss at least half the story of these objects.

I think Potts’s discussion of Edward Kienholz’s room-sized installations cuts to the heart of the book’s aims and methods. In The Beanery (1965), the artist acquired and then reassembled the components of a recently closed Los Angeles bar, complete with all of the details that one would expect to find in a crowded establishment: an endless array of bottles and glasses, brand and other signage on the wall, food and cigarettes ashes on tables, and even mannequins decked out in mid-1960s clothing. When viewers traverse the doorway into the cramped and claustrophobic space, they are forced into an intimate proximity to all of this assorted stuff. Potts argues that with this inexhaustible level of detail (also visible in works by Twombly, Rauschenberg, Beuys, and others), the viewer is compelled to consider the implication and resonance of these particulars. Are some details more important than others? Does all this material add up to anything specific? In The Beanery, one detail is especially relevant for Potts: in front of the entrance to this bar/installation sits a newspaper vending machine with the visible headline “Children Kill Children in Vietnam Riots.” This otherwise minor moment can inflect the entire work, demonstrating, as Potts writes, “how what was happening in the larger world impinged on the relatively enclosed environment of people’s everyday lives in contemporary America” (65). And since the detail seems haphazard—there as a kind of accident, recalling Barthes’s “reality effect”—the realism of The Beanery is all the more convincing.

In Potts’s model of realism, the viewer thus becomes an investigator of sorts, forging one’s own interpretation by drawing together select bits of evidence that have been framed and placed together in the context of the work of art. Even in artworks focused on a single image or individual, as with Warhol’s deadpan replications of Jackie Kennedy or Richter’s mysterious and anonymous paintings based on snapshots, the chain of associations provoked in the viewer is vital to the artwork’s power and realism. Like Ernst Gombrich’s beholder theorized in Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), Potts’s period viewer grafts her or his perspective and desires onto the work of art. And these concerns were structured by social and political conditions. (It is interesting in this regard that Potts was a student of Gombrich at the Warburg Institute.)

For Potts, such a model of realism—contingency dialectically struggling against the totality of the artwork—serves to decenter viewers, making them realize that the artist does not fully control meaning. What is especially interesting about this book is that its very form mimics its subject; in some ways, the text operates like The Beanery or a Rauschenberg Combine. As with these works of art, the volume exists as a coherent totality, enframed and familiar, not unlike a survey text of the postwar period with many of the usual suspects. But also like the works of realism Potts considers, the book nevertheless contains details and narrative threads that rupture this totality, inspiring readers to formulate narratives of their own. In other words, Experiments in Modern Realism is both a closed and an open text. This is echoed in the volume’s structure; instead of dividing the text chronologically or geographically, Potts arranges the book via artistic strategies, albeit with some counterintuitive selections. For instance, in the section “Assemblage,” Potts not only gives readers compelling sections on standard figures like Rauschenberg and Kienholz, but also makes readers rethink the nature of assemblage in Pop artists Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist, as well as more unfamiliar names such as the Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström. In his section on American painting, Potts discusses the relatively unknown late work of Robert Matta, along with Pollock and de Kooning. I could go on, as Potts provides many such provocative groupings throughout his text. I mentioned at the start that the book is a hybrid of a survey and a more specialist art-historical text; this again befits Potts’s understanding of realism. Surprising figures and excavated historical detail puncture the survey quality, suggesting to readers that there are a myriad of ways to assemble the art history of the postwar period.

Despite this pluralism, Potts does miss some crucial opportunities to destabilize other established art-historical assumptions, mainly through his choice of artists. While he openly acknowledges the arbitrary nature of his selections (including the predominance of white, male artists in the text), Potts’s choices also fail to address at least two aspects vital to any consideration of “realism” in these years. First, why not address at least some work from Eastern Europe? I could imagine Potts debunking simplistic understandings of postwar Socialist Realist painting or engaging with the political interventions of the Czech Fluxus artist Milan Knížák or what I see as the secret Pop constructivism of the East German Hermann Glöckner. Such an intervention would pierce the Iron Curtain that continues to frame our art-historical understanding of the period. And second, what of the medium of photography, itself such a conflicted vehicle for Potts’s key dialectic of contingency and unity of expression? Explorations of the work of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, to name two well-known examples, would have brought an additional dimension to this discussion of realism. While such omissions should not take away from Potts’s achievement, they do signal ways to broaden the implications of his book. I hope that younger scholars take heed.

While very generously illustrated, the nature of the included images points to another missed opportunity: where are contextual or archival images? Save for a reproduction of a page from Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951), the book contains no images from non-art discourses, such as source materials in their original press context or iconic media images circulating globally. While Potts’s text calls for the recognition of the messiness and contingency of postwar art practices in relationship to the visual archives of the mass media, the optics of the book belie this aim. If these artists relied on particularities gleaned from the materials and matter of their social worlds, then why not give readers some of these visuals in the text itself?

These minor critiques, however, do not detract from the overall success of the book. With its commanding sweep of transatlantic concerns and succinct and powerful sections on individual artists (Potts’s look at Beuys’s irony, for example, is particularly groundbreaking), Experiments in Modern Realism is an important book for anyone interested in the art of this contested and oft-studied period.