For many people in the art world, especially those who come
to the scene straight from their college survey courses, the history of
American painting in the last half of the 20th century goes more or less like
this: In the beginning, there was Abstract Expressionism, otherwise known as
the New York School, followed by Neo-Dada and Pop Art (along with Minimalism
and Conceptual Art), which were succeeded by Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Geo,
Post-Minimalism and a variety of Post-this and Neo-that diversions generally
categorized as Postmodernism, followed by … what? Neo-Postmodernism, I suppose.
Or-God forbid!-Post-Neomodernism. Or maybe just a lot more of Post-Duchamp and
Neo-Warhol.
There was a lot of figurative painting contemporaneous with
all these movements and anti-movements that could not easily be fitted into any
of the reigning categories. Some of it used to be called Realism, but this
often meant nothing more specific than the likelihood that the paintings could
be seen to have subjects derived from nature, the human figure, the studio or
some other easily recognized object of common experience.
Painting of this persuasion tends-in our time, anyway-not to
belong to any “school” or movement. It is the art of highly individual talents
consciously working to align their experience of the world with what they
especially admire in the paintings of older or earlier masters. The principal
aesthetic denominator of such painting is likely to be its resistance to the
temptations of facile vanguardism and its reverence for painting itself as a
medium of high art. It is mainly owing to this combination of resistance and
reverence that painting of this persuasion receives so little consistent or
sustained attention from museum curators of contemporary art, who remain, for
the most part, fixated upon a remorseless search for an avant-garde that hasn’t
actually existed anywhere but in their own wishful thinking for decades.
In an effort to deal with this lopsided situation, and to
restore some historical balance to the public’s understanding of the history of
American painting in the last half of the 20th century, a number of figurative
painters-none of them in their first youth-have joined in establishing an
alternative exhibition space of their own in midtown Manhattan. The Center for
Figurative Painting, as this new gallery and discussion center is called,
opened in May, promising to bring us a “compelling account of New York postwar
[post–World War II, that is] representational painting.”
The Center certainly makes good on this promise with its
current exhibition, called Reconfiguring
the New York School . Some of the painters in this show-Fairfield Porter and
Alex Katz, for example-are well-known and have made it into the museums with
important exhibitions. Here, they are represented by early works that few of us
have seen before: Porter’s View Through
the Laundry Room Window (1951) and Katz’s Kathy (1960). Some of the other painters may be less familiar-Albert
Kresch, for example, whose small, dazzling landscape called Large Tree (1997) will make you eager to
see more of this work.
In my view, the single most spectacular painting in the show
is a very large-eight feet wide-figures-in-a-landscape composition by Lennart
Anderson called Idyll III (1979-99),
which, as its dates indicate, occupied the artist for some 20 years. With its
ultra-traditional theme of an earthly paradise and its subtle pictorial
allusions to, among other masters, Titian and Ingres, this is a painting that
openly declares its allegiance to the classics of great painting, and to the
kind of craft and vision that such an allegiance entails. In a saner art world
than ours, museums would be vying for the honor of mounting a major retrospective
of Mr. Anderson’s work, but that is not something likely to happen anytime
soon. Which is all the more reason to have a look at this amazing painting in
the current exhibition.
Given his aesthetic loyalties, it is no surprise to learn
that Mr. Anderson studied with the late Edwin Dickinson-an earlier American
master of similar loyalties-at the Art Students League back in the 1950’s. Some
of the painters in this show-Nell Blaine, Paul Georges, Jane Freilicher, Louisa
Matthiasdottir and Paul Resika-studied with Hans Hofmann, while others-Peter
Heinemann and Robert De Niro Sr.-had classes with Josef Albers. Some studied
with both of these masters of abstraction, and some began their own careers as
abstract painters before returning to one or another figurative tradition. All
were firmly grounded in the aesthetics of modern painting, and some were
directly influenced in their figurative paintings by the scale and ambition of
the Abstract Expressionists.
I am not sure myself that the best way to present these and
some of the other painters in this exhibition-Leland Bell, Lester Johnson, Jan
Müller and Albert York-is as members of the New York School, a rubric so firmly
established as a reference to Abstract Expressionism. I am certain that the
late Leland Bell, for example, would have been unequivocal in rejecting such a
classification, if only because Bell’s ideas about painting were so much closer
to those of the School of Paris than to the practices of the New York School.
It’s too late, in any case, to revise a term like “New York School” to include
the kind of painting that did, after all, reject abstraction as an aesthetic
option.
Still, while a better title than Reconfiguring the New York School might have been chosen, the
exhibition itself is a salutary reminder of the kind of pictorial achievements
we do not often get to see in the museums. It remains on view at the Center for
Figurative Painting, 115 West 30th Street, Suite 202, through Jan. 27. The
Center’s hours are Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m.
