Figuration Never Died: New York Painterly Painting, 1950-1970

This publication accompanies the Figuration Never Died: New York Painterly Painting, 1950-1970 exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. By about 1950, forward-looking New York painting was seen as synonymous with abstraction- especially charged, gestural Abstract Expressionism. But there was also a strong group of dissenters; artists, all born in the 1920s and many of them students of Hans Hofmann, who never lost their enthusiasm for the seductive qualities of thick, malleable oil paint. They remained, for the most part, ‘painterly’ painters. These rebellious artists include Lois Dodd, Jane Freilicher, Paul Georges, Grace Hartigan, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Albert Kresch, Robert de Niro Sr., Paul Resika, and Anne Tabachnick. The compelling figurative work they made between about 1950 and 1970, in contrast to the prevailing Abstract Expressionism of the time, constitutes a significant chapter in the history of recent American Modernism.
AUTHORS: Karen Wilkin is an independent curator and art critic specialising in 20th-century Modernism. She has organised numerous exhibitions internationally and is the author of monographs on Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Hans Hofmann. Bruce Weber was senior curator at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts. His specialty is in American painting, sculpture, and drawings from the late-18th century to the mid-20th century, and he has also frequently curated and written on contemporary American art. Danny Lichtenfeld is the director of the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Brattleboro, Vermont.
74 colour, 10 b/w illustrations