E-Mail This Article to a Friend Reality check Photorealism at the Rose, plus Leo Steinberg and Richard Serra BY RANDI HOPKINS

Photorealist paintings from the 1960s and 1970s provide a guilty pleasure, the same kind of thrill that a shiny vintage car or a colorful bakery window can elicit. In the art’s case, it stems from that simple, age-old wonder at the convincing depiction of light and three-dimensional form in paint. Those who were associated with photorealism in the 1960s and 1970s, including Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack, and Richard Estes, flaunted their technique by selecting subject matter that relied on dramatic reflected light and reflected an almost embarrassingly optimistic view of America — bright light bouncing off shop windows, gleaming diners, neon signs, garish modern "vanitas" laid out on what we used to called ladies’ vanities, super-clean views of Times Square (it was not clean then) . . . you get the picture. The Rose Art Museum has a significant group of paintings from this period in its permanent collection, paintings that have probably been feeling a bit like period pieces. Now there’s renewed interest in this underrated art movement, and the Rose is taking up the topic in two innovative exhibitions that open on May 19, "Double Take: Photorealism from the ’60s and ’70s" and "Xavier Veilhan: The Photorealist Project." The Rose also examines art and politics in a film by a young Albanian artist, "Anri Sala: Dammi i Colori."

Curated by Rose director of education Stephanie Molinard, "Double Take" features work by photorealism heavy hitters including Goings, Flack, Estes, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Ben Schonzeit, and Charles Bell. These artists studied the way photography "reproduces" the world, and they worked to re-create its appearance — distortion, cropping, uneven exposure, familiar subject matter and all. The tricky thing was, and is, that these painters weren’t simply trying to represent contemporary reality in a way that a photograph could do just as well, and much faster. They were trying to make us conscious of the many things we take for granted about photographic reality, whether in ads or in family photographs. It’s a subject that contemporary painting continues to obsess over.

Rose curator Raphaela Platow, meanwhile, brings us French artist Xavier Veilhan’s "The Photorealist Project," an architectural structure that encloses 1500 feet of the museum’s Lois Foster Wing. Veilhan’s free-standing pavilion presents five photorealist paintings, by Robert Bechtle, Richard McClean, Cottingham, Estes, and Goings, as luminous projections in a dark space, giving new interpretation to the centrality of light and reflection in the work, and in the history of painting.

Images of women reading can also be traced back through the ages, but they’ve often been seen as vaguely disconcerting, especially if you’re male and find female self-sufficiency unsettling. Renowned art historian and critic Leo Steinberg takes up this topic with wit and wisdom in his lecture "Should Women Be Allowed To Read? Uninterrupted?" at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre on May 18.

Like your sculpture big and brawny? Richard Serra works big and thinks big — his site-specific Tuhirangi Contour sculpture in New Zealand took five years of creative struggle and complex engineering to realize. Catch filmmaker Alberta Chu’s half-hour documentary about this process in a special screening at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. It’s also on May 18.

"Double Take: Photorealism from the ’60s and ’70s," "Xavier Veilhan: The Photorealist Project," and "Anri Sala: Dammi i Colori" are at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, 415 South Street in Waltham, May 19 through July 31; call (781) 736-3434. Leo Steinberg gives the free, public lecture "Should Women Be Allowed To Read? Uninterrupted?" at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy Street in Harvard Square, on May 18 at 6 p.m.; call (617) 495-9400. "Seeing the Landscape: Richard Serra’s Tuhirangi Contour" will be shown at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street in Cambridge, on May 18 at 7 p.m.; call (617) 253-4400.