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Issue Number 20
April 27, 2001
Copyright C 2001, Charles Giuliano

Figurative Expressionism

A Lost Generation of American Artists

During what Irving Sandler has described as the, Triumph of American Art, the emergence of the generation of Abstract Expressionism after World War II, or Formalism, championed by Clement Greenberg that followed through the 1950s and early 1960s, the figure and representation became anathema to the avant-garde.

These notions of Triumph and Taboo, however, are the pronouncements of critics, curators and art historians. Artists think differently. The suggestion of forbidden fruit stimulates the taste buds. While the abstract expressionists were celebrating their international Triumph, there were already rumblings in the studios and at the boisterous meetings of the Artists’ Club, in New York City, of an impending, "Return to the figure."

This was occurring during zeitgeist of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the Beat Generation. To art historian, Serge Guillbaut, in a now debunked but widely debated book, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Sandler’s, Triumph, Harold Rosenberg’s, Action Painting, and Greenberg’s "flatness," and, "all over painting," was a CIA organized jingoistic plot to foist American art and culture on the world. A mind boggling but now refuted notion.

Among artists of the next wave there was a sense of lining up the ducks as to who would emerge as the frontrunners of an inevitable reemergence of figurative art. This new work would both incorporate and react to aspects of action painting particularly its loose and aggressive brush stroke, uncorrected drips, pentimenti, and strong palette.

The seminal exhibition that partly but incorrectly focused on this development was, New Images of Man, curated by Peter Selz, in 1959, for the Museum of Modern Art. In hindsight, that ambitious but flawed project may have done more harm than good. Its thesis and selection of artists was so ill-conceived that it proved to be a crucial misfire of an attempt to define a new generation of figurative expressionists resulting in what I have come to regard as a lost generation of major American artists.

The Selz show, for example, instead of focusing on emerging American artists included such established European artists as the sculptor, Giacometti, the Cobra painter, Appel, the French Art Brut painter, Dubuffet, the sculptor, Cesar, England’s Francis Bacon. In addition to these important artists Selz also included artists whose reputations have since slipped; Leonard Baskin, Reginald Butler, Rico Lebrun, Germaine Richier and Fritz Wotruba. The exhibition included the abstract expressionists Pollock and de Kooning, as well as the important young artists, Leon Golub and Jan Muller.

MoMA poorly organized, New Images of Man, right idea, wrong artists, killed the potential emergence of of Figurative Expressionists. The hype and media accompanying Pop Art eclipsed attention for all other movements of art. Despite being launched by a major MoMA show, the Responsive Eye, the Op art movement, for example, quickly faded.

The feeding frenzy surrounding Pop art squelched any potential effort to organize a major museum exhibition for the Figurative Expressionist movement.

Later attempts to define Figurative Expressionism have been mostly unsuccessful. The 1989 exhibition, The Figurative Fifties, New York Figurative Expressionism, (Newport Harbor Art Museum) included several of the major artists but had a broader and distracting agenda. Again, the abstract expressionists, deKooning and Pollock, who clearly belong to an earlier generation were included. They should have been discussed in the catalogue as precursors and influences but they do not belong to the figurative expressionist movement. I also question the inclusion of such minor abstract expressionists as Elaine deKooning and Grace Hartigan. Particularly in a show that included only 13 artists to define a movement. Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz and Larry Rivers are important artists but not figurative expressionists. Robert Beauchamp belonged in this mix, but there are stronger possibilities than Robert Goodnough and George McNeil.

That show, organized by Paul Schimmel and Judith E. Stein, did, indeed, include the essential leaders of Figurative Expressionism, Jan Muller, Bob Thompson and Lester Johnson.

What these three artists had in common was summers in Provincetown where they showed at the Sun Gallery. Others that showed at the experimental Cape Cod gallery included Alan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Tony Vevers, Robert Beauchamp, Jay Milder, and Red Grooms. New York’s Hansa Gallery also showed many of these artists.

While these were important East Coast exponents of Figurative Expressionism, others include George Segal (the early figure painting), Gandy Brodie, Paul Georges, Emilio Cruz, Earl Pilgrim, Benny Andrews, George McNeil, and the later Rhino Horn painters, Bill Barrell and Peter Dean. While the focus of exhibitions and research has been on the East Coast artists Figurative Expressionism was also a national movement.

With a superb and insightful exhibition and catalogue, the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, in New York City, has recently made that point. That project, Out of the Fifties-Into the Sixties, 6 Figurative Expressionists included, Beauford Delaney, an expatriate living in Paris, Chicago’s Leon Golub, Red Grooms, Lester Johnson, Jan Muller and Bob Thompson. This show might have been expanded to include the Bay Area Figure Painters from San Francisco, David Park, Richard Diebenkorn (who showed in New Images of Man), Joan Brown and Elmer Bischoff.

Further complicating the failure of the movement to get off the ground, two of the major three artists, died young, Muller, in 1958, as a result of heart failure, and Thompson, a junkie following complications of gall bladder surgery, in 1966. While Muller (Guggenheim, in 1962) and Thompson (Whitney, in 1998) have had major New York retrospectives, so far, Johnson has been passed over.

To date there has been no effort to show these three artists together in depth. The Thompson exhibition and catalogue, curated by Judith Wilson, made a limited attempt to present the African American artist within the historical context of figurative expressionism. Similarly, when I worked with Johnson on the catalogue for a traveling show, organized by the Westmoreland Museum of Art, in 1987, through his daughter, he insisted that all references to other artists, or issues related to the movement of Figurative Expressionism, be deleted from my essay.

So, now decades later, a great and important chapter in Post War American Art remains to be researched, shown and published. While the superb and stunningly beautiful Rosenberg Gallery show was small, and I question the inclusion of the obscure and minor Delaney in this distinguished selection of major artists, it clearly got my juices flowing. There is something irresistible about the taste of forbidden fruit.

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