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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In 1966, Cy Twombly began a series of paintings, drawings, and collages that resembled chalkboards. To create the paintings in the series, including Untitled, he drew on wet gray paint with crayon, incising white, graffiti-like marks into the surface. The work’s gestural appearance relates to Abstract Expressionism, which dominated the art world when Twombly began developing his art in the 1950s. At the same time, the canvas’s austere surface evokes the Minimalist and Conceptual work being produced contemporaneously by fellow American artists. Here, Twombly’s cascade of lines, shapes, and notations resembles a diagram, but one that has been written over and reworked to create a layered depth and to suggest the passage of time. These diagrammatic markings may be attributed in part to the artist’s fascination with the drawings in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks—especially the sketches of maelstroms and water currents. The words “water chart” scrawled at the painting’s top right may refer to Leonardo’s drawings, as well as to the remains of the ancient aqueducts that surround the city of Rome, where Twombly moved in 1957.

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America Is Hard to See

Threat and Sanctuary

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CY TWOMBLY (1928-2011), UNTITLED, 1968

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Threat and Sanctuary

13

CY TWOMBLY (1928-2011), UNTITLED, 1968

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection