The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (467 page)

(1783–1872).
The preeminent American portrait painter of his period, active mainly in Philadelphia. He was born in England, but went to America as a child. Subsequently he made two visits to England, in 1809, when he studied with
West
, and in 1837–8, to paint Queen Victoria for the St George Society of Philadelphia (a preliminary version is in the Wallace Coll., London). His style, distinguished by fluid, glossy brushwork and romantic warmth and dash, reveals his great admiration for
Lawrence
. In his later work, however, he tended towards a genteel sentimentality. Sully was highly successful and extremely productive. He is said to have painted some 2,000 portraits (he also made
miniatures
), but his best-known work is probably one of his (also very numerous) history paintings—
Washington Crossing the Delaware
(Mus. of Fine Arts, Boston, 1819).

 
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Superrealism
.

Style of painting (and to a lesser extent sculpture), popular from the late 1960s, particularly in the USA and Britain, in which subjects are depicted with a minute and impersonal exactitude of detail. Hyperrealism and Photographic Realism (or Photorealism) are alternative names, and some artists who practise the style do indeed work from photographs (sometimes using colour slides projected on the canvas); sharpness of detail is evenly distributed over the whole picture (except where out-of-focus effects in the photograph are faithfully recorded), but the scale is sometimes greatly enlarged. (Some critics prefer to use the terms ‘Photographic Realism’ or ‘Photorealism’ only when a picture has been painted direct from a photograph, but most are not so restrictive.) The immediate progenitor of Superrealism was
Pop art
; banal subject-matter from the consumer society was common to both, and certain artists, such as Malcolm
Morley
(who coined the word Superrealism) and Mel
Ramos
, overlap both fields. The kind of humour found in Pop is very rare in Superrealism, however, which tends to be cool and impersonal, with subjects often chosen because they are technically challenging (involving multiple reflections, for example). Like Pop, Superrealism was a hit commercially, but it was less well received critically. Some critics, indeed, regard it as involving a great deal of painstaking work but very little else; others think that its exponents can achieve a strange kind of intensity, the effect of the indiscriminate attention to detail being—somewhat paradoxically—to create a strong feeling of unreality.
The leading American Superrealist painters include: Chuck Close (1940– ), whose speciality is giant portrait heads; Don Eddy (1944– ), notable for scenes involving reflections in shop windows; Richard Estes (1936– ), most of whose work is devoted to the urban landscape; and Audrey Flack (1931– ), who is unusual in that she aims for emotional effect in her still lifes of religious symbols and images of vanity and death. Philip
Pearlstein
is sometimes labelled a Superrealist but stands somewhat apart. British Superrealist painters include Graham Dean (1951– ), Michael English (1943– ), and Michael Leonard (1933– ), whose work includes highly detailed portrait drawings in a style mimicking the Old Masters. The leading Superrealist sculptors are the Americans John
De Andrea
and Duane
Hanson
, who often use real clothes or props and attend to minutiae such as body hair.

 
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support
.

The material—
canvas
, wooden
panel
,
paper
, or other substance—on which a painting is executed; it is usually distinguishable from the
ground
.

 
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Suprematism
.

Russian abstract art movement, developed by
Malevich
from about 1913 and officially launched by him in 1915. His Suprematist paintings were the most radically pure abstract works created up to that date, for he limited himself to basic geometric shapes—the square, rectangle, circle, cross, and triangle—and a narrow range of colours, reaching the ultimate distillation of his ideas in a series of paintings of a white square on a white ground (
c.
1918) after which he announced the end of Suprematism. In constrast to
Constructivism
, where the stress was on the utilitarian function of art, Suprematism was a vehicle for Malevich's spiritual ideas; he wrote that ‘The Suprematists have deliberately given up the objective representation of their surroundings in order to reach the summit of the “unmasked” art and from this vantage point to view life through the prism of pure artistic feeling.’ Although Malevich's direct followers in Russia were of minor account, Suprematism had great influence on the development of art and design in the West.

 
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Surikov , Vasily
.

See
WANDERERS
.

 
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