The aesthetic revolutionaries of the past century and a half have often proclaimed the death of realism, a mode of thought and vision they considered tainted by bourgeois materialism; they have likewise consigned to irrelevance the primitive medium of painting, outdone by photography, film, video, and the Internet, respectively. Yet realism re-invents itself in every generation, just as painting does. It is only our habit of thinking that only one style of art can represent an age that leads us repeatedly to aesthetic fallacies that we have to recant (or allow to lapse, unannounced) a decade later.

Glenna Putt is a native Californian who, after a successful four-decade career as an illustrator in New York, segued into fine art. Now living in San Francisco, she explores the traditional subjects of still life, figure, landscape, and domestic interior. While some of her works, frankly, smack of 1960s magazine illustration, they are never less than handsome and accomplished. Her best paintings and drawings, however, are vision and delight distilled, civilized discernment embodied. Putt’s abstractly organized and confidently rendered books, flowers, magazines, paintings and sculptures serve as humble yet transcendent objects of desire, and bespeak the quiet joys of the mindful eye. The amazing views from her airy San Francisco studio do not hurt, either; nor do the marvelous paintings and sculptures (names withheld to spare you unnecessary pain) that she and her husband, retired gallerist Charles Campbell, have collected over the years.

Putt notes that Chinese painters on attaining old age choose to depict “household treasures, personal treasures,” and that her “paintings of contentment” aim at the same goal — a welcome change in a mercantile/military culture becomingly increasingly coarse, loud and intrusive.

—DeWitt Cheng

(*Images, from top to bottom: Glenna Putt, In Retrospect, July 24 - September 13, 2008; George Krevsky Gallery, Cattle Drive, 1975, oil on canvas, 42 x 42", courtesy of the Artist and George Krevsky Gallery. Glenna Putt, In Retrospect, July 24 - September 13, 2008; George Krevsky Gallery, Living Room, 2007, oil on canvas, 24 x 18", courtesy of the Artist and George Krevsky Gallery. Glenna Putt, In Retrospect, July 24 - September 13, 2008; George Krevsky Gallery, Town in Snow, 1967, oil on canvas, 36 x 48", courtesy of the Artist and George Krevsky Gallery. Glenna Putt, In Retrospect, July 24 - September 13, 2008; George Krevsky Gallery, City At Night, 2007, oil on canvas, 20 x 24", courtesy of the Artist and George Krevsky Gallery.)