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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While sketching on a canvas scrap in 1974, Susan Rothenberg intuitively drew a horse outlined in profile and bifurcated by a vertical line. Despite the lingering dominance of nonfigurative abstraction in painting, she was captivated by the animal form and went on to depict numerous horses—in side view and frontally, stationary and moving—during the following decade, rendering each composition by squeezing paint onto her brush and mixing colors directly on the canvas.

In For the Light, the beast charges toward the viewer. Rothenberg wedged a bonelike shape between its head and the picture plane, interrupting the sensation of the horse’s forward momentum. The artist did not differentiate between the figure and the ground on which it runs, a choice that allowed her to “stick to the philosophy of the day—keeping the painting flat and anti-illusionist,” as she recalled, even as she championed “this big, soft, heavy, strong, powerful form.”

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America Is Hard to See

Threat and Sanctuary

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SUSAN ROTHENBERG (B. 1945), FOR THE LIGHT, 1978-79

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Threat and Sanctuary

13

SUSAN ROTHENBERG (B. 1945), FOR THE LIGHT, 1978-79

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection