The Whitney Museum of American Art opened 22 Realists on February 10, 1970, with the exhibition continuing to March 29. Curated by James K. Monte, it assembled painters associated with renewed figurative and realist practice at a moment when postwar abstraction, Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art dominated much critical discussion. The participant list ranged from photorealist and sharp-focus painters to artists pursuing more psychological or constructed forms of representation. By putting Chuck Close, Audrey Flack, Richard Estes, Malcolm Morley, Philip Pearlstein, Robert Bechtle and others under one institutional frame, the exhibition helped clarify that realism in the late 1960s was not a simple return to tradition but a contested contemporary position.
It gave museum visibility to several artists who shaped later debates around Photorealism and postwar figuration.
