AMERICAN FIGURATIVE EXPRESSIONISM

In America, starting in the 1950s--the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and New York’s takeover of the center of the artworld – a number of artists, in New York, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and around the country, decided to return to the figure.  But as they were profoundly committed to the energetic Abstract Expressionist way of painting that had been formative of their styles, they would not give it up, choosing instead to adapt it to their equally profound need to paint recognizable imagery. The paintings of twenty-seven of these American Figurative Expressionists have been organized by Kresge Art Museum Curator April Kingsley into an exhibition which will open at the museum in fall /winter 2010 and then travel to participating venues.  The fifty-one large paintings date from different periods in the artists’ careers demonstrating how they came into this way of painting, how it evolved over the years, and continued to be an effective and satisfying method to use.  Its reception by the art establishment and its role in artworld developments of the last half century will also be explored. 

These Figurative Expressionists were on the horns of a dilemma: rejected by the various contemporary schools of realism for being too abstract, they were simultaneously denounced by the committed abstractionists who believed paint was itself expressive and had purged representation from their work.  Succeeding decades brought little change.  These artists were (and remain) too humanistic  to accept either the camp ironies of Pop Art or the cartoonish exaggerations of the Chicago School as these styles developed in the 1960s.  Too painterly for Photorealism, too “hot” for Minimalism’s cool rationality, the 1970s went by them in a similar fashion.  The 1980s would seem more welcoming, and retrospective exhibitions studied the artists and the phenomenon, but, as happened in figurative surveys during the 1950s,  the expressionists were lumped in with their emotional opposites, artists like Alex Katz and Fairfield Porter, whose work was bereft of expressivity. 

Individually, Figurative Expressionists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Grace Hartigan, Lester Johnson, Robert Beauchamp, Nathan Oliviera, George McNeil, Willem de Kooning and Bob Thompson have all received major retrospectives. While each painter’s style is unique to them, they are all involved with the primacy of paint, with finding their imagery in the process of painting itself.  Robert De Niro, Grace Hartigan, Willem De Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn and George McNeil had already built, or begun to build major reputations for themselves as Abstract Expressionists by the 1950s and therefore can be seen as true bridge figures.  Selina Trieff, Lester Johnson, Nicholas Marsicano, Sideo Fromboluti, and Sherman Drexler have an almost classicizing attitude toward the figure as shape that lends their paintings a more sedate, stable quality which is often contradicted by the loose, free way they handle paint, letting it drip down over the canvas, running, clotting, and partially burying the forms.   Nora Speyer and Selina Trieff replay ancient themes --  Speyer, The Expulsion, and Trieff, the Vanitas portrait, the former in thick masses of built-up pigment, the latter in thin streams of line and color.  Even more than McNeil, who derives his images in part from the everyday world, Robert Beauchamp and Irving Kriesberg work out of their imaginations, their fevered imagery recalling painters like Hieronymous Bosch and James Ensor.  All three artists, though, allow the paint to provide the cues to let fantasy fly rather than coming to the canvas with a preconceived subject in mind.
           
But this is true for all of these artists whether they work from the figure or their imaginations.  The physical process of painting is an open one, full of surprises, lucky accidents, or sometimes, disasters, which they have to be on their toes to handle.  Painting for them is an active, physical, exciting activity, not a cool meditative or intellectual undertaking. They don’t depict emotions, but rather trust the painting process itself to convey felt emotion.  In this they make an irrevocable break with traditional figurative expressions and representational modes of the past, such as those of Kathe Kollwitz or Ben Shahn.  Miriam Beerman lives in a darkly imagined world of never-ending holocaust haunted by humanity’s inhumanity. No one frolics there except the evildoers at play.  Nell Blaine’s world is the opposite – sunny, warm, and filled with friends, very like Wolf Kahn’s pleasant surroundings in our painting September Light.  Robert Henry’s world falls somewhere between those of Beerman and Blaine, sometimes very close to one or the other.  Early on, not long after studies with Hans Hofmann, his concern was with vision and spatial relations as in Hilda’s Tower, 1956, which places the strangeness factor (practically the only constant in Henry’s work) in his (and our) squinting eyesight.  In the other two paintings in the exhibition, as is typical of his later work, the strangeness factor is in the protagonist, the man who is Up Against it and Miss Butterfly.
 
Strangeness also plays a role in the paintings of Robert Beauchamp, George McNeil, Irving Kriesberg, Bob Thompson, Oliver Jackson and Philip Guston.  Beauchamp’s flying horses, homunculi, blue monkeys, flaming apples and Black Sabbath revels make his later paintings of his dying brother Gene seem classically calm by comparison.  McNeil’s Waiting figure seems to be about to pounce on someone or thing and devour it with his big teeth, while his distorted Philadelphia Woman appears to have two faces, one where her midsection should be. Working from memory and imagination, Irving Kriesberg lets birds, monkeys, owls, and storks stand in for people, giving them humanoid limbs and gestures to act out human plots while Bob Thompson painted humans interacting with hybrid creatures, part animal, part avian, and all are painted solid colors – red, green, yellow, orange and blue. Oliver Jackson’s elemental figures are often drawn into circles or seen ringing an abyss, or emerging from one.  They dance rituals, they trumpet angels, they judge, and they consort with monsters.  Jackson calls them “paint people” and the universe they inhabit is that of brushstrokes and paint massings in non-landscapes rife with free-fall areas.    And when Philip Guston returned to representational painting in the late 1960s after two decades of abstraction, he went back to a subject that had occupied him as a young Jewish artist – the Ku Klux Klan (which had terrorized Jews in the California of his childhood) and took up a new one -- his own bad habits, such as smoking and drinking, and lazing in bed reading.  All painted with a cartoon-mimicing simplicity.
Some of these Figurative Expressionists are inspired by literature, or simply great themes in art, usually religion-based.  Nora Speyer, for example, has been painting The Expulsion from Eden her whole worklife though she isn’t intending any moral lessons or religious instruction.  Jay Milder bases many of his paintings and painting series on Biblical themes.  His visionary treatment of these subjects can border on the hallucinatory as he packs every inch of the canvas with imagery.  Miriam Beerman and Vera Klement both are deeply involved with certain writers and dedicate paintings to them, make paintings about their subjects or that are influenced by their ideas. The writings of Kafka particularly fascinate Beerman, while Klement’s background in Russian led to reading and translating favorite Russian writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam whose poetry’s images find their way into her paintings. The sources of Grace Hartigan’s imagery are as varied as an encyclopedia.  Of the three paintings in the exhibition Le Mort D’Arthur concerns Arthurian legend, for Interventions she used her doctor  husband’s medical anatomy book to reconstruct a body modernistically from the inside, and The Second Mrs. Nash, refers to the wife of Richard (Beau) Nash, Master of Ceremonies in Bath, England ‘s resort town, who “unhinged by grief” at his death in 1761 went to live in a tree for the rest of her life.

The rest of the artists in this exhibition handle the figure more or less traditionally without sacrificing their vigorous brushwork. The New York painters, with the exceptions of Sideo Fromboluti and Sherman Drexler, have an edginess that borders on near violence at times which Hiram Williams of Florida seems to share.  Nicholas Marsicano and Lester Johnson let their paint run down the surface in rivulets as though painted with tremendous speed and both De Koonings, Willem and Elaine, use speeding lines as well. His was called a “whip-lash” line.  Robert De Niro’s line is impatient and rarely ingratiating. Like most New Yorkers, these artists always seem to be in a hurry.  One senses anxiety even in Louis Finkelstein’s richly colored painting, Drexler’s woman disappearing into the mists, and Fromboluti’s waiting wife. One is tempted to speak of  “Existential Man” in their presence, just as you are with much of the West Coast Figurative Expressionism.  Nathan Oliviera’s figures emerge from the paint the way Giacometti’s seem to coalesce out of empty space.  They stand alone, indecisive.  Paul Wonner’s figure verges on disappearing.  .Joan Savo, Richard Diebenkorn and David Park all make strong figures out of thick strokes of paint, which lock them firmly into the picture space. On the west coast the artists speak of “building the figure out of paint” and the results have a sturdiness not apparent in the east.  New York painters speak rather of “finding the image in the paint.”

Miriam Beerman, Sherman Drexler, Sideo Fromboluti, Grace Hartigan, Robert Henry, Oliver Jackson , Lester Johnson, Vera Klement, Irving Kriesberg, Jay Milder, Nathan Oliviera, Nora Speyer, Selina Trieff, and Paul Wonner are still busy painting.  Fromboluti and Wonner have been concentrating on still lifes, the former using his ever-active brush, the latter moving into magic realism for this subject, but retaining his moody, brushed surfaces for figures.  Jackson and  Oliveira have taken up large sculpture-making as well.  Speyer and Trieff have been letting symbols of death into their paintings more frequently, and Lester Johnson has been getting more specific by the decade in detailing the actions and apparel of the man and woman in the street, his lifelong subject.  Grace Hartigan has become stronger compositionally, abstracting fragments from life and de-emphasizing their specifics. Jay Milder has begun making expressionistic figure sculptures and making his paintings more physical as well, by adding volcanic ash, earth, raw pigment, linen and cotton fiber to his surfaces.  Robert Henry experimented with using other artist’s paint scrapings (usually those of his friends Nora and Sideo’s piled on paper plates) on his own surfaces, Miriam Beerman began making open-ended wall drawing/collages that grew to fill the walls and then whole room, and Vera Klement began experimenting by combining her photographs of fallen trees in the snow with painted panels containing heads or objects.  She also made new, smaller collage/drawings with text fragments from Rilke and Kafka. All this has been happening in the 21st century, with undiminished spirit. 
                                                                                    April Kingsley
                                                                                    Curator