Extra ordinary

de Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, Philip Eliasoph

""Extra Ordinary," which accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Georgia Museum of Art, surveys a range of American artists who embraced realism, representation, and classical artistic techniques in the face of the rising tide of abstraction at mid-century. Through sharp focus, suggestive ambiguity and an uncanny assemblage of ordinary things, their works not only show that the extraordinary is possible, but also conjure the strangeness and wonder of everyday life. It takes as its point of departure the 1943 show "American Realists and Magic Realists" at the Museum of Modern Art - when the term "magic realism" entered the American art historical lexicon - and will feature a suite of paintings originally included in MoMA's show. By bringing together significant works by Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, Philip Evergood, Jared French, Henry Koerner, George Tooker and John Wilde, along with a number of lesser known artists, "Extra Ordinary" reveals the slippery task of categorizing this eccentric group of painters into a single style"--