Carole A. Feuerman:
Pop Superrealism

By Demetrio Paparoni

The extreme realism that characterizes Feuerman’s young women is a translation of their inner condition. Their closed eyes, slight smile, the crease of their lips and hints of expression suggest a fullness of being—a moment in which feeling prevails over thinking. They raise their heads to immerse themselves in nature, waiting for their faces to be caressed by the sunshine, or by droplets of water that will soon dry upon their skin. All inner turmoil appears to subside when they are in contact with the natural elements. At the same time, the body becomes an instrument for knowing reality. The immediacy of feeling, which precedes thinking, allows these subjects to see despite their closed eyes.

We are far from the fragility of Edgar Degas’ Little Dancer of Fourteen Years (1881), whose eyes are closed, or from the social criticism of Duane Hanson from the late 1960s, with his vacationing women who sunbathe on plastic beach chairs, often surrounded by magazines, thermos bottles and snacks. To create his Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, between 1878 and 1881, Degas used pigmented beeswax, clay, metal armature, rope, paintbrushes, human hair, silk and linen ribbon, a cotton faille bodice, a cotton and silk tutu, linen slippers and wood. The sculpture, today housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is the prototype of a series of fusions obtained after the artist’s death. While technically and formally impeccable, as well as a great source of fascination, today they seem to lack the expressive power of the original model. This revolutionary experiment, which featured a body fashioned in wax, with real hair pulled back with a real linen and silk ribbon, wearing a real bodice, a real tulle skirt and real dance slippers, garnered little appreciation from critics when first presented at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881. The sculpture captured and presented reality without yielding to the temptation of idealization—not only the tangible reality of the actual materials used, but also the intuitable reality of the burdensome condition of the young students at the Paris Opera Ballet school, one of whom was the artist’s model. The sculpture’s wooden base is reminiscent of the hardwood floors in the studios where the ballerinas practiced, as they put in countless hours of arduous work to pursue a career in the ballet company. Many of them came from impoverished and underprivileged backgrounds from which, at times, they were unable to escape or to which they returned after facing the illusion of a better life. This was the experience of Marie van Goethem, Degas’ young model who was expelled from the Opera Ballet at age fifteen, only to be thrown into prostitution. The young girl’s head is raised high, her eyes half-closed, her hair tie untidily fallen below the nape of her neck. Her arms are outstretched behind her back, her fingers intertwined. She rests her weight on her left leg, while her right leg is extended forward, foot turned outward.

Degas’ ballerina is one of the numerous transitional moments in art’s trajectory toward verisimilitude, beginning in the Renaissance. Linear perspective aimed to create the illusion that one could enter the space of a painting. Yet, despite how realistic a representation could seem, the painterly surface remained an impassable wall. In more recent times, the holes (1949-1968) and slashes (1958-1968) of Lucio Fontana were an attempt to surpass the pretense of perspective. The emptiness caused by the slash on the canvas created a real space in the work that could be penetrated. We could stick our finger in it if we wished; the space we see beyond the surface of the canvas is no longer illusory. The reflective paintings of Michelangelo Pistoletto (the earliest dating back to 1964) and the mirror works by Robert Smithson (the earliest dating back to 1969) are additional attempts to incorporate a changeable reality within the artwork. It was around this time, on the thrust of such challenges to reality, that Hanson’s social realism translated into Hyperrealism. Policeman and Rioter (1967), featuring a white police officer beating a black unarmed protester and holding him on the ground under his foot, appears so true to life that, at first glance, we feel as though the action is taking place right before our eyes. Soon after, Hanson would bring to life a woman, cigarette in mouth, pushing a shopping cart full of groceries. In the realm of painting, Chuck Close, who was not so much a Superrealist as a Hyperrealist, painted Big Nude (1967-68) and, shortly thereafter, his first self-portrait, with a cigarette dangling from his lips. It was in such a climate that artists like John Clem Clarke, Richard Estes and Robert Cottingham were committed to helping Pop art transition towards Hyper- and Photorealism.

In those same years, Carole Feuerman worked as an illustrator, making album covers. Judging by how many artists worked as illustrators before achieving their signature style, it would seem the profession was an ordinary part of life for American artists at the time.

In the second half of the 1970s, new generations began detaching themselves from both Pop art and Hyperrealism. To distance themselves from experiences marked by Conceptualism and Minimalist Abstraction, they welcomed Postmodernism as a gateway to reaching new expressive possibilities. Joining the debate over Postmodernism, in 1976, Feuerman created Lace Panties and Hand on Bra, wall sculptures in painted resin featuring segments of women’s bodies. In Lace Panties, panties edged in lace adorn a woman’s pelvis, her pubic hair sprouting out from her groin. Her hips and stomach are not cleanly truncated—the laceration bears the asperities of a broken terracotta, evoking the trauma of a violent fracture. Hand on Bra is a fragment of a woman’s torso and a hand with long polished nails pressing against her bra. These are the first two of a series of works featuring the fragment motif, one of the cornerstones of Feuerman’s artistic exploration. Visually, these works assimilate various influences derived primarily from the cultural experiences of the 1960s, particularly from early Pop art. At a theoretical level, they are impacted by the theories of Philip Johnson from 1961, which opposed the rationalist views of the so-called Modern Movement.

In art, Postmodernism emerged around the mid-1970s—the same years in which Feuerman was drawing from images and stylistic elements from the past (from classical art and Rodin to archeology and Pop art) and modifying their meaning because of this new context and ways in which works were presented. Soon after, in 1978, Julian Schnabel created his first paintings using broken plates. The following year, in 1979, Jean-François Lyotard would lay out the philosophical premises of postmodernism, sustaining that with the decline of the main conceptual constructions that characterized Modernism—Illuminism and the myth of progress, idealistic historicism and Marxism—the postmodern condition was defined by the fragmentation of these very conceptual constructions.

Without the exigency of new ideologies, a plurality of languages prevailed, which—from art to politics, architecture to philosophy—had no interest in restoring new forms of totality. For this reason, Feuerman’s sculptures from the second half of the 1970s, while Pop in origin, are reminiscent of archeological remains. Much like when we find ourselves before a fragment of a vase or a statue and we try to imagine it whole again by identifying its provenance, reconstructing its history and revealing its significance, the incompleteness of Feuerman’s sculpture-fragments calls for a stretch of the imagination in order distinguish the work’s meaning. This practice is not the exclusive prerogative of Postmodernism. Rodin believed that a fragment could contain the truth if it rendered the essence of reality. For him, the Ancients’ ability to recreate reality was due to their steadfast observation of nature. In 1904, Rodin described finding a marble hand at a pawn shop: “It’s cut off at the wrist,” he wrote, “it no longer has fingers, only its palm, and it’s so real that to admire it, to see it live, there is no need for the fingers. Though mangled, it suffices unto itself, because it is real.”

One of the substantial differences between Rodin and Hyperrealists like Hanson and De Andrea, lies in the fact that, while Rodin sought to portray something that embodied the idea of reality to the point that it would be perceived as intrinsically true—that is to say, something that does not lie—the Hyperrealists strove to display something that resembled reality by deceiving the eye. The difference is profound—it could not be otherwise, as nearly a century separates the French sculptor and the American Hyperrealists. In 1877, Rodin’s technical mastery of modelling the human figure earned him the accusation of having made a cast of a living model. A controversy of such nature would have had no place in the 1960s: the work of George Segal, for instance, was born from plaster casts of real people. Segal was not a Hyperrealist, just as Feuerman was not and is not, despite what most argue. The Hyperrealists are situated at an historical intersection between Pop art and Postmodernism; yet, more so than creating a bridge, they bring out the differences between the two. If we were to speak in radical terms, we might say that, throughout the various phases of their artistic production, neither Segal nor Feuerman ever wished for their subjects to be mistaken for real people. It is in this regard that, standing before Feuerman’s fragmented bodies from the second half of the 1960s, we are reminded of Rodin’s anecdote of the marble hand from the pawn shop. Furthermore, while Feuerman also uses casts for her sculptures, for her, unlike Hyperrealist sculptors, the completeness of the body and natural scale are non-binding elements.

Compared to the Hyperrealists, Feuerman’s approach to figuration is also radically different. Drawing a comparison between her Beachball (1984) and Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl with Ball (1961) proves particularly useful in this regard. In Lichtenstein’s work, a young girl holding a ball, arms raised, is a two-dimensional modification of a detail from an advertisement. Lichtenstein uses the same style of the advertisement and, like the original print, flattens the colors, eliminating all effects that might simulate three-dimensionality, while at the same time drawing the image with sharp lines and accentuating the typical screen effect of typographical prints. The same subject, developed three-dimensionally by Feuerman in her sculpture, Beachball in oil-painted resin, appears incomplete in its bottom portion. Had the work been created in marble, we might assume that the figure, only three quarters complete, had yet to be finished. In Beachball, yet again, the reference is Rodin, who, beckoned to interact with a Pop image, emphasizes Feuerman’s Postmodernist approach to figuration. In another sculpture, Leda and the Swan (2014), Feuerman interprets a theme from classical mythology the way she knows best—through her swimmers. Leda becomes a young woman in a bathing suit and swim cap, lounging in the sun on a giant swan-shaped float. Once again, various stylistic elements intermingle, which, in this case, accentuate the Pop component of her work. All this demonstrates the incongruity of associating Feuerman’s work with the historical Hyperrealism established in the second half of the sixties.

A look back to Feuerman’s early works further emphasizes what has already been said. In Jean Shorts (1976), a hand lingers between the thigh and buttocks of a woman in jean shorts. This detail contributes to the ambiguity of the image as we fail to understand if what we are witnessing is an erotic game or a violent act. A comparison with the hand of Pluto, who in The Rape of Proserpina (1621-1622) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini grabs hold of the goddess’ thigh, affirms that only through the completeness of the whole can we understand that the scene is one of violence. This detail, considered in isolation, could be erroneously taken for a moment of fiery passion. Though their erotic charge reigns supreme, only to progressively diminish in her subsequent works, Feuerman’s sculpture-fragments are open to interpretation. Works such as Lace Panties and Hand on Bra take on additional meaning when we consider that their maker is a woman, and that in 1976 the climate of protest and revindication across American campuses and European squares, which emerged in the second half of the sixties, was alive and well. At the heart of the battle to free women from the marginal roles to which they had been relegated by society was their right to make decisions about their own body. The driving forces that characterized the idealism of the years between the sixties and seventies also played a fundamental role towards achieving greater sexual freedom. Feuerman’s works from the seventies unapologetically convey the expressive freedom conquered by women.

In 1978, Feuerman would create her first version of Catalina, a high relief bust of a swimmer devoid of arms, hanging on the wall as if it were a painting. The woman, who sports a red swimsuit, swim cap and goggles on her forehead, has just emerged from the water. Her facial features are relaxed, though the absence of her arms and the lower portion of her body, as well as the jagged line of the cut, suggest that the shape of the sculpture was the result of a fracture. A sense of loss, stressed by the absence of the arms and legs, returns even more dramatically in EN2. 02.78, from 1981, a life-size wall sculpture in oil-painted resin in which two female arms and a male arm—the only human presence—grab hold of a black inner tube. The mysterious title of the sculpture calls to mind old telephone numbers that used to contain letters. Perhaps it is the information of a contact from the new land the subjects, both holding onto the life preserver, are trying to reach. The work was inspired by current events in which asylum-seekers fleeing Cuba for Key West braved the waters on makeshift equipment to reach the archipelago off the Florida coast.

EN2. 02.78 is perhaps the work by Feuerman that most successfully brings into focus the force of ideas underlying her work. Three years later, she would create Innertube (1984), another life-size wall sculpture, in which a black innertube, this time more inflated and devoid of cracks, keeps a young girl wearing a white swim cap afloat. The presence of the black innertube, which is an old car tire, leads to the conclusion that she is not a bather enjoying her day at the beach, but rather an exhausted refugee fighting for her life. The tragic nature of the theme places the work within the realm of a dramatic realism not foreign to Pop art—we might think of Warhol’s paintings of mugshots, road accidents, electric chairs, police officers beating African American citizens or Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s funeral. Certainly, there is a contrast between these and other more frivolous subjects by Warhol, related to the world of consumer goods, wealth and entertainment. Within Feuerman’s body of works, we find this same contrast between dramatic subjects such as EN2. 02.78 or Innertube and more peaceful examples, including Capri (1981), Shower (1981), Scuba (1984) and Waterskier (1984).

In 2007, the artist revisited her female subject on a life preserver, this time with all the features of the inner tube of a motorized vehicle. In this new version of Innertube, entitled Survival of Serena, in which she modified the crease of the young woman’s lips and the tilt of her head, Feuerman made her features more relaxed and tranquil. In contrast with EN2. 02.78, in Survival of Serena, the life preserver is no longer soiled, and the droplets of water are limpid. This time, though the life preserver is reminiscent of an inner tube, nothing leads us to assume it is a means of escape. In subsequent versions of Survival of Serena, the life preserver becomes a typical colorful pool tube used by swimmers on vacation. The various changes made since EN2. 02.78 and Innertube, leading to the different versions of Survival of Serena,reveal how these swimmers, for Feuerman, are ultimately all survivors; they are not perpetually happy individuals. In her works in which young women appear serene, what Feuerman captures is a moment of grace in the tempestuous sea of life. The sea is often used as a metaphor for the difficulties we face—hence the expression, “a sea of troubles” in common parlance. Traversing the sea requires courage and can involve risks. This symbolism, albeit implicit, is a constant throughout Feuerman’s oeuvre, who at the same time sees water as an element of rebirth. This is evident in her dramatic works, such as EN2. 02.78, as well as in those marked by a moment of serenity. We find a similar contrast between drama and serenity in the diptych A Visit To / A Visit From / The Island (1983) by Eric Fischl, an American artist who in the early eighties revisited the theme of swimmers on various occasions.

Feuerman’s paintings from those years often feature atmospheres and subjects reminiscent of the works of Joaquín Sorolla, although they express an explicit sensuality that is not present in the paintings by the Spanish artist. Like Feuerman, Fischl felt impelled to explore the more somber and dramatic implications of existence using the same setting. In A Visit To / A Visit From / The Island, he creates a comparison between two scenes set on the same beach. In the first panel, an upper-class white family on vacation enjoys a day on the beach: in the foreground, a nude woman sunbathes on a floating mattress, while a child plunges into the water at her side, exploring the ocean floor with a snorkeling mask. Behind them, a man and a teenager stand beside a windsurf board and a rubber boat. The teenaged boy is the only subject who is not in the nude. The scene depicted in the second canvas is not as serene. The sky and the sea are gloomy and agitated, while on the beach individuals struggle to bring Haitian refugees to safety after a shipwreck. For some of them, it appears to be too late: their seminude bodies are stretched out on the sand. One of their bodies assumes the same diagonal placement of the sunbathing woman on the adjacent panel, while the man in the foreground, face-down on his stomach, is covered by two pieces of cloth that recall the color of the sea and the bodies from the neighboring canvas.

This alignment of thematic interests on behalf of Feuerman and Fischl is marked by the turmoil and contradictions of a period often labeled as politically disengaged, and whose implications are illustrated in EN2. 02.78, as well as in other works by Feuerman. If we place this work alongside Survival of Serena, created much later, we find the same impetus behind Fischl’s A Visit To / A Visit From / The Island. 

Another recurring theme in art at the turn of the 20th century, on par with bathers, is that of dancers. In 1981, Feuerman took on this theme with a series of sculptures featuring a fragmented body (Aspiration, Audition, Carole’s Toe Shoes, Dress Rehearsal, Hands Breaking in the Toe Shoes, A little Workout, Relevé): legs with tensed muscles, feet in the fifth position sporting pink ballet slippers, hands clutching toe shoes to break them in and tying their laces and the lower portion of a body balancing on the tip of one foot. They are body parts that render the energy, efforts and struggles of a female body that we attempt to reconstruct mentally, as we might do with the fragments of ancient statues in an archeological site. In Feuerman’s case, we are not dealing with the remains of a work shattered to pieces. Rather, they are pieces that have been carefully chosen for the energy they emit, despite being wrapped in delicate pink satin, as well as for their ability to evoke female strength. Another work from that same period, Bubbles (1981), presents a fragmented body. It is comprised of two legs, severed under the thigh and above the calf, two hands holding a bottle of bubble solution and a wand with a bubble still attached, as well as the lower portion of a face, lips curled, as if in the act of blowing. The stumps are bent, sitting atop a piece of a bench. The individual parts of the body seem to emerge from the wall, much like a terrifying hallucination, made even harsher by the heaps of clumpy material accumulated along the lines of the truncations. Bubbles sits in stark contrast with Feuerman’s peaceful seaside female figures who soak up the sun. 

How are we to justify a representation of such harshness—realistic in its detail, unrealistic in its composition—within Feuerman’s artistic production? This incompleteness is not only physical; it evokes a profound inner distress. It is quite clear that for Feuerman, the body is not only epitomized by healthy athletes, dancers and swimmers—it is also the site of physical and mental suffering.

The art of the twentieth century, far removed from breaking with tradition, has been repeatedly confronted with past motifs, explorations, turning points, strongholds and even minor expressions that preceded it. The human body is one of the most widely explored subjects by artists seeking to discover its mysteries. It has been meticulously copied and even distorted in anti-naturalistic recreations. One of the leading motifs involving the body is that of bathers, a theme heavily frequented between the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, and treated in different manners in Feuerman’s sculptural iterations.

In painting, bathers are typically surrounded by a context. The air, land, vegetation, sky, light and trees are fundamental elements in these compositions. In a classical sculpture, the context is conjured up by the observer. In Feuerman’s sculptures, however, the context is understood by the subjects’ skin, and is provided by clues like droplets of water, their complexion, their sun-kissed faces and their tan lines. 

In the second half of the sixties, the earliest Hyperrealists looked not to the history of art but to reality. Conversely, in Feuerman’s sculptures, there are continuous references to art history. This would suggest that Feuerman’s position has, from the very beginning, been that of a Postmodern artist, while the Hyperrealists were still rooted in Modernism. Feuerman’s swimmers bring an echo of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s and Joaquín Sorolla’s bathers, Thomas Eakins’ young people on the beach, subjects from Greco-Roman and Egyptian statues, as well as French Neoclassical paintings and Italian magical Realism from the 1930s. There is a particular affinity between Feuerman’s subjects and the Post-Impressionist paintings of Sorolla, in which the Valencian artist captures a blissful moment on the beach. Of course, I am not referring to style, but to the spirit that guides the two artists in their quest to capture the sense of enchantment and plenitude experienced when we plunge into the ocean’s water or bask in the heat of the sun, leaving our skin to be dried by the wind. Both artists place importance on the depiction of water and light; though while Feuerman focuses on the body, Sorolla focuses on the nature in which the body is immersed.

The comparison with Sorolla, while intrepid, can help us understand the singularity of Feuerman’s work with respect to that of die-hard Hyperrealists, whose work brings forth a more objective vision. By dampening all emotion, they are, in a way, more akin to the Minimalists. What Feuerman presents through her sculptures is not so much a photograph of reality as the reflection of a feeling formed in her mind while observing bathers on the beaches of Long Island. Feuerman’s swimmers and bathers feature harmonious bodies. Their faces show not a hint of turmoil; even their posture is relaxed. And yet, this idyllic representation is marred by the transitoriness often felt at the very moment in which everything seems to be perfect. The bitter aftertaste of this sense of fleetingness is rendered through the tiny droplets of water that dot the swimmers’ bodies. The shimmering light they reflect signal a change is about to take place. In turn, even the beauty of these figures with flawless bodies transmits a sense of caducity. 

The iconographic theme of bathers places the spectator in the position of a voyeur, hiding during an intimate moment, admiring sensual bodies that often assume a demure stance or cover themselves. This stance can be seen in many classical statues or ancient paintings of Aphrodite Anadyomene.

Unlike the majority of these representations throughout history, the sensuality of Feuerman’s bathers is not contingent on the gaze of others, to which they appear entirely indifferent. They live in the here and now; they are alone with themselves. Anyone can get close to them and look at them without altering their sense of utter concentration. The gaze of others appears to not even reach the thoughts of these women, which, in turn, extinguishes their erotic potential. Feuerman’s bathers are a world of their own, much like the islands that often lend them their names. Just like an island, they arise from the sea and draw their strength from the water. It is in fact on the island of Cyprus that Aphrodite—whom Feuerman has depicted on more than one occasion—first touched land, after being born from the foam of the sea.

Just like the goddess herself, water is a symbol of rebirth and of life’s continuity. It is a recurring element in the iconography of the deity, including Feuerman’s sculpture Reflections (In Paradiso) from 1985, which depicts a naked woman, arms raised, drying her hair with a towel. Irrespective of their subject, the common thread uniting Feuerman’s sculptures is the human body as a moment of harmonious balance with the natural elements—hence her various subjects featuring Zen-like poses, her athletes balancing on their arms in an ephemeral moment of psychophysical wellbeing, as well as others marked by the awareness of the precariousness of existence. 

© Demetrio Paparoni, 2024

1 Carole A. Feuerman, e-mail to the author, November 14, 2023.

2 Carole A. Feuerman, e-mail to the author, January 3, 2024.

3 Phyllis Tuchman, “Fragments and Painted Plasters,” in Eadem, Segal, New York: Abbeville Press, 1992, pp. 71–72.

4 Carole A. Feuerman, e-mail to the author, January 2, 2024.