America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Although long considered the most important modern art form, painting fell out of fashion in the contemporary art world of the late 1960s. Regarded by many as outmoded, even dying, the medium was challenged, on the one hand, by the forceful presence and novel processes of Minimal and Post-Minimal sculpture and, on the other, by Conceptual art’s emphasis on language and photography. Yet it was precisely painting’s diminished status that made it ripe for reinvention—a space to play not only with paint itself but also with critical taboos like figuration and bad taste.

The paintings on view in this chapter represent a variety of experimental approaches to the medium from the late 1960s through the 1970s. Some, such as Robert Reed’s and Jack Whitten’s canvases, involve almost sculptural processes, such as pouring, smearing, and layering, while Elizabeth Murray’s painting toys with eccentric graphic forms and jarring high-key colors. Having abandoned his Abstract Expressionist style for cartoonish symbols in the late 1960s, Philip Guston paved the way for younger artists reengaging the figure within psychologically charged tableaus. Several of them appeared under the mantle of New Image Painting, a provocative 1978 Whitney exhibition that included the work of Neil Jenney and Susan Rothenberg. These artists rejected both abstraction and the smoothly rendered images of Pop in order to pursue oblique imagined narratives—whether comic or foreboding—within loosely painted fields. The freedom they espoused in their handwork, symbolism, and humor revivified a medium that some left for dead and continues to inspire younger generations of painters today.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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Philip Guston, Cabal, 1977

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Narrator: Artist Carroll Dunham talks about Philip Guston’s painting titled Cabal.

Carroll Dunham: It seems pretty grim. You know? Piles of heads in a very desolate setting. The fact that there's so much white used to delineate the shapes seems like it reinforces this idea of nocturnal atmosphere, and ghostliness. I really think that all his paintings, even the ones that appear to deal with the most particular subjects, are all about evoking a kind of mood space. You know, a psychological and emotional weather, that is carried by the methodology, as much as it is by the images.

Narrator: To hear Dunham talk about public reaction to Guston’s work and his influence on other artists, please tap the button to continue.

In Philip Guston’s Cabal, a heap of disembodied eyeballs, ears, and heads huddle against an opaque black field, floating in what appears to be a sea of blood. It is cartoonish yet creepy, suggesting paranoia and latent threat. The title’s evocation of conspiracy would have been particularly poignant in the late 1970s, when the Watergate scandal was still a raw wound—one that Guston addressed in numerous contemptuous depictions of President Richard Nixon. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Guston had been one of the most lyrical of the Abstract Expressionists. The upheavals of 1960s, however, led him to doubt that abstraction could fully express the range of human experience. He reintroduced figurative imagery into his work, making paintings that imply both personal and political subtexts. The images they contain have precedents in Guston’s satirical social commentaries from the 1930s and 1940s.

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America Is Hard to See

Threat and Sanctuary

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PHILIP GUSTON (1913-1980), CABAL, 1977

Philip Guston, Cabal, 1977

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Explore works from this exhibition
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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Threat and Sanctuary

13

PHILIP GUSTON (1913-1980), CABAL, 1977

Philip Guston, Cabal, 1977

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection