Don Eddy

For the Major League Baseball pitcher, see Don Eddy (baseball). For the basketball coach, see Don Eddy (basketball).
Don Eddy
Born(1944-11-04)November 4, 1944
Long Beach, California
NationalityAmerican
EducationUniversity of Hawaiʻi, University of California, Santa Barbara
Known forPainting
SpouseLeigh Behnke
WebsiteDon Eddy
Don Eddy, New Shoes for H, acrylic on canvas, 44" x 48", 1973. Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

Don Eddy (born 1944) is a contemporary representational painter.[1][2] He gained recognition in American art around 1970 amid a group of artists that critics and dealers identified as Photorealists or Hyperrealists, based on their work's high degree of verisimilitude and use of photography as a resource material.[3][4][5][6] Critics such as Donald Kuspit (as well as Eddy himself) have resisted such labels as superficially focused on obvious aspects of his painting while ignoring its specific sociological and conceptual bases, dialectical relationship to abstraction, and metaphysical investigations into perception and being; Kuspit wrote: "Eddy is a kind of an alchemist … [his] art transmutes the profane into the sacred—transcendentalizes the base things of everyday reality so that they seem like sacred mysteries."[7][8][9] Eddy has worked in cycles, which treat various imagery from different formal and conceptual viewpoints, moving from detailed, formal images of automobile sections and storefront window displays in the 1970s to perceptually challenging mash-ups of still lifes and figurative/landscapes scenes in the 1980s to mysterious multi-panel paintings in his latter career.[10][11][7] He lives in New York City with his wife, painter Leigh Behnke.[12][13]

  1. ^ Martin, Alvin. "Spaces of the Mind: New paintings by Don Eddy," Arts, February 1987, p. 22–3.
  2. ^ Baker, Kenneth. "Don Eddy," Artforum, March 1972. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  3. ^ Rosenberg, Harold. Review, "Sharp-Focus Realism," The New Yorker, February 5, 1972.
  4. ^ Schjeldahl, Peter. "Realism—A Retreat to the Fundamentals?" The New York Times, December 24, 1972. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  5. ^ Chase, Linda, Nancy Foote and Ted McBurnett. "The Photo-Realists: 12 Interviews," Art in America, November–December 1972.
  6. ^ Battcock, Gregory. Super Realism: A Critical Anthology, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  7. ^ a b Kuspit, Donald. Don Eddy: The Art of Paradox, New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2002.
  8. ^ Eddy, Don. "The Movement That Was Not," RH Art Magazine, 2012.
  9. ^ Wallach, Amei. "Reflections of Things Not Seen: The Paintings of Don Eddy," Don Eddy: From Logic to Mystery, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Museum of Art, 2000.
  10. ^ Raynor, Vivien. "Whitney Exhibit Looks Into the World of the Car," The New York Times, May 6, 1984, Sect. CN, page 11. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  11. ^ Raynor, Vivien. "The Window' in 20th-Century Works," The New York Times, January 2, 1987. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  12. ^ Harrison, Helen A. "Art Reviews: 'Together Working,'" The New York Times, February 27, 2000. Retrieved November 8, 2019.
  13. ^ Smithsonian American Archives of Art. "Don Eddy and Leigh Behnke Papers," Collection. Retrieved November 8, 2019.