Doctrinaire & Proud of It

It's a New York story of courage and defeat followed by 50-year commitment to classical figurative painting. Next week, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., a New York group of painters who bucked the tide of fashion will celebrate a painterly triumph.

In May 1961, some brash young figurative painters threw down the gauntlet to the modern art establishment. In an exhibition at the National Arts Club called "A Realist View," a group including Aaron Shikler, Daniel Schwartz, Harvey Dinnerstein, Burt Silverman, and David Levine declared their opposition to the trend toward abstraction in modern art. The abandonment of tradition in favor of personal style and individual expression had led to the impoverishment of the artist's imagination, Mr. Silverman declared in a "Statement by the Artists." "In our paintings we have not succumbed to the frantic search for something ‘new,'" he continued. "We are not concerned with being ‘of our times'…. Our concern is with the world around us."

Their protest against the apotheosis of Abstract Expressionism did not go unheeded; they were critically trounced. "[I]t's the quietest, oldest show you ever saw," the New York Herald Tribune's critic, Emily Genauer, wrote. "Nowhere are there fire, urgency, even innocence, the conviction that there are new things and new ideas in the world …. What showed in the paintings — apart from craft — was chiefly doctrinaire attitude."

Today, several of those artists are still friends and still painting together, teaching a once-a-week figure painting class that has been going in some form since the late 1950s. And now, after years out in the cold, the Painting Group, as they call themselves, is having a modest comeback. Last fall, the retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor came and sat for the group. Next week, their 25 portraits of her will go on exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Is it a 50th anniversary party? "I don't think we're celebrating a length of time so much as that we love what we're doing," Mr. Levine, 80, who admitted he couldn't recall exactly when he started teaching the class, said. "Because there's no critic saying anything nice about what we do."

About 50 years ago, Mr. Levine, who is famous among the literati for his iconic, crosshatched caricatures in the New York Review of Books, began teaching a weekly painting class to pay for the rent of his studio, which was in a building, later demolished, on Cadman Plaza, where the Brooklyn Heights branch of the Brooklyn Public Library is now situated. The building, which contained all artists' studios, "more or less fell apart after they picked up the Russian spy Emil Goldfus," Mr. Levine said. Goldfus had a photography studio on the fifth floor of the building, which is identified in a history on the FBI's Web site as 252 Fulton St. He was tracked by the FBI and finally arrested in 1957.

When the class moved to Manhattan, Mr. Levine was joined by Mr. Shikler, and then by Mr. Schwartz.

Today, as in the beginning, the students' fees go only toward expenses. "Dave and I do not take a cent," Mr. Shikler, 85, said. "The class pays whatever's necessary to carry the rent, electricity, models, coffee."

The class has migrated around Manhattan, in pursuit of affordable rent. In the 1960s, it was in a studio at 54th Street and Third Avenue; a few members of the current class date back to that era. One of the better places, Mr. Shikler recalled, was above Fairway on Broadway and 74th Street. Currently, they meet in a studio on Greene Street in SoHo.

From the beginning, the focus has been on figure painting. A model will typically come in for several weeks, although Ms. O'Connor did one six-hour sitting. (Yes, sometimes the models are nude. No, Ms. O'Connor was not.)

Messrs. Shikler, Levine, and Schwartz paint with the class and also offer pointers. "The atmosphere is extremely warm," Mr. Levine said. "In all these years, only one person left in a rage, over a criticism from Mr. Shikler." While acknowledging that he didn't hear the comment in question, Mr. Levine said that Mr. Shikler "is my mentor and an extremely able teacher, and I think he was probably right."

The idea for the Sandra Day O'Connor sitting came from a longtime member of the class, Walter Bernard. Mr. Bernard thought it would be neat for the group to paint a prominent figure and for him to make a film about it, as a tribute to Messrs Levine and Shikler. He enlisted his friend Neil Leifer, a former staff photographer for Time magazine, to shoot the film, and they asked another old friend, David Hume Kennerly, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who is a friend of Ms. O'Connor's, to entreat her to pose.

Along the way, the three mentioned their plan to the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Marc Pachter. He liked the idea of exhibiting multiple portraits, he said. "They said they'd been thinking about finding a great American to paint — and that's a cross point for us, because we're in the great American business," he said. "And when they told me the person was going to be Sandra Day O'Connor, I thought, this is a great American, a great figure — one that we actually don't know very well, and that artists can help us to get to know." When the exhibit opens next Friday, the paintings will all be in "one wonderful but tightly hung gallery, so you will be surrounded by her," he said.

Messrs. Leifer and Bernard shot the artists at work and will shoot the festivities in Washington; they hope to edit the film and submit it to festivals this summer.

In spite of not being trendy, Messrs Levine and Shikler both have had very successful artistic careers. Mr. Shikler has painted portraits of many powerful and wealthy Americans, including John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. "I refer to them as the ‘Big Berthas,'" he said of his subjects, using the slang name for a German cannon used during World War I. But much of his work, which is sold in galleries in America and Europe, is outside of portraiture. "When I hear the term ‘Mr. Shikler the portrait painter,' I cringe," he said.

Mr. Levine said that as a teenager, he wanted to be a comic book artist, so his parents suggested he go to art school. He chose the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, "which is easy on disciplines, so I could fit in without a problem," he said. He met Mr. Shikler there. Later, he was in a business making Christmas cards. The cards didn't sell, and the business was a flop, he said, "but I learned the crosshatching and the kind of pen-and-ink drawing that I then utilized for my caricatures."

All these years later, the harsh reception to "A Realist View" is now water under the bridge, Mr. Schwartz, who is 78, said. "The show was rather ambitious, and we were rather naïve, because the art world was changing and we did not want to change in that direction," he said. They were young and passionate, "and the world didn't care, but it got us all together," he continued. "We had meetings and we all worked together, and it was a very good thing. Because there's nothing like being a young student trying to become an artist and trying to get a career and then being lonely and not having friends you can share it with. We were sharing."

March 30 to October 8, (Eighth and F streets, Washington D.C., 212-633-1000).