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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A painting of curvy shapes intersected by a zig zag line.

In 1967 Elizabeth Murray left the Midwest and arrived in a New York art world dominated by the cool, spare, and cerebral modes of Minimalism and Conceptualism. Although she experimented in these veins, her preferred medium was painting, then under critical scrutiny and often disdained. Over the course of the next four decades, Murray pioneered a spirited pictorial practice that drew as much from popular art sources such as cartoons as from revered art-historical antecedents, including Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. The distinction between figuration and abstraction was another divide with which Murray’s boldly expressive art readily dispensed, and it similarly ignored the prohibition on high art bearing personal, domestic, or biographical associations. Serious and sensuous at once, Murray’s lively, large-scale canvases took shape in a variety of formats, some contoured, layered, fractured, or multipanel.

Children Meeting was executed just as Murray was beginning to consolidate her signature style; in her words, the painting “grew out of a confidence about being able to lay down the colors and put in the goofy shapes that were beginning to emerge. . . . I’d never allowed myself to use that zany purple.” This vibrant violet strikes an uneasy balance with the adjacent emerald hue, in turn underscoring other unexpected harmonies—the conjunction of zigzags and rectilinear outlines, for example, or the meeting of hard-edged forms with organic shapes. Murray’s central biomorphs, while resolutely abstract, seem simultaneously to take on an embodied presence: perhaps they are the children of the painting’s title.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 274. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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ELIZABETH MURRAY (1940-2007), CHILDREN MEETING, 1978

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America Is Hard to See

Threat and Sanctuary

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ELIZABETH MURRAY (1940-2007), CHILDREN MEETING, 1978

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection