Realist criticism may have been limited and, at times, misguided, but it did contribute to a climate that welcomed a reassessment of twentiethcentury American realism. The first major exhibition was Edward Hopper's bequest to the Whitney in 1971. He had, almost exceptionally for a realist artist, enjoyed a high reputation amongst Modernists, and so the reassessment confirmed, rather than greatly altered, his standing. Alloway analyses Hopper's form of realism, distinguishing him from realists such as Hogarth, Degas, or even John Sloan “whose painting has to do with transmitting a sense of constant change by means of pictorial vivacity.” Hopper emphasizes the static and Alloway memorably describes his light effects, which “do not really convey a sense of light as radiation, reflected from the surface of things and diffused by atmosphere. He paints light as if it were a kind of coating, a film over objects, a continuous liquid… [N]ot only are his paintings physically static, even the light seems slowed down. He presents the world as though immobilized by the act of painting.” Although he refers to iconographical aspects in Hopper's art—“the theme of momentous threshold”—it is not something he develops.

In 1975 Alloway noted the “multitude of revivals” of American realists, including Reginald Marsh and Thomas Hart Benton: “These are revivals that signal changes of sensibility and of aesthetics…” The extent of the change was signaled by the “recovery” of the work of Isabel Bishop, previously unknown or considered minor, who received a retrospective in 1975 and had two books published on her art. Bishop, a contemporary of Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller, depicted ordinary people in an urban environment—“nobodies” was her term, meant without condescension: her work “rests on an iconography of types—secretaries and shopgirls— as they travel between home and work or as they occupy moments of leisure—the lunch hour or after work.” The work of the three artists should not be seen just as a light-weight period piece, Alloway argues: “It is essential to bear in mind that the notion of modernity was not then restricted to a few sickly formal devices, as it is now [1975]. It denoted a sense of responsibility toward absorbing the refractory spectacle of contemporary life into a lucid canon of art.”