From the archive: Scott Burton," George McNeil and the Figure," Artnews (Oct.1967)
Cover of the October 1967 issue of Artnews featuring McNeil’s painting “High Society".”
George McNeil, 1967
Photo by Dena
By Scott Burton
First generation Abstract-Expressionist shows vehement gestural paintings of vehemently gesturing women, at Howard Wise to October 7
George McNeil's new work makes it necessary to distinguish between figurative and figure painting. In the latter, an image of the body is clearly discernible, but identification does not extend to place. The figure inhabits paint. Such pictures, at once representational and non-illusionist, usually seek visual wholeness through attack. Painters like McNeil, with their Expressionist heritage, knit together figure and ground in strokes and streaks. The figure is affirmed as surface; the surround only hints at environment—room? landscape? night? If, as in the recent McNeil, the rectangular format is ignored, that other “modernist" article of faith, flatness, is crucial. When the right arm, say, of one of these figures is larger than the left, we are quick to see it conventionally, as being somehow closer to us, yet we are at the same time denied that interpretation by the artist's insistence on a tactile two-dimensionality. The ambiguity is apparent. Further, though you can't count the toes or fingers on a McNeil nude, you do see the right number of limbs, breasts, etc.; an ambiguity more than spatial is involved. The contest between expressive distortion and the representational impulse is more evenly matched in the McNeil than in, say, a late Pollock head. However, in both there co-exist two different types of painting.
Caucasian Dance
1967
Figurative painting, on the other hand, whether or not it is of the figure (the distinction depends on more than subject matter), conceives all its parts in the same kind of space and is more homogeneous in impulse. Any anti-illusionism belongs to the picture as a whole. Recently, figurative painting is becoming more and more unequivocally illusionist—a direction which looks, these days, more radical than conservative.
The ambiguities of action-figure-painting, which McNeil faces with vigor, have challenged most of the Abstract Expressionists. The fraternity to which McNeil's recent work admits him has included de Kooning, of course, and Pollock, as well as Tworkov, Elaine de Kooning, Rivers, Marsicano, Lester Johnson, Beauchamp, Hartigan, George Segal, Cajori and others. Though McNeil's images may remind one at times more of European styles—Appel, for example—than of American, he has been involved in the development of our native tradition for many years. Educated at Pratt, where he has taught since 1948, he then studied with Hofmann (1933-36). An early member of the American Abstract Artists, he became one of the "first generation" Abstract-Expressionists. He was shown annually in New York by Charles Egan in 1950-54. Since about 1960 he has been painting increasingly recognizable figures; most recently, double ones.
Actually, what is more recent in McNeil's work than its representationalism is its deliberate violations of taste. His paintings always looked attractive: muted tonal transitions, large balanced forms, deep colors carefully worked, clear tempo changes. Now, however, not only do the figures look grotesque, but the surface is nervous, the composition willful, the lights and darks abrupt. The palette is discordant, a de-theorized Fauve range of acidulous yellows and greens, shrill reds arid electric blues. It is as if the artist had purposely reversed himself.
McNeil's new aggressiveness avoids the monotonous pathos of much European Expressionist figure painting. His nudes are hardly passive, flayed victims. In fact, though working in a style to which gesture is central, McNeil has made the figures more gestural than the painting itself. In de Kooning, the figure is invaded by the tangled arabesques of the painter's act, and is opened up so far that it keeps disappearing. It bobs up and down on the waves of de Kooning's gestures, whereas McNeil's figure rests stolidly on top, dominating the picture and dictating its gesture. McNeil seems to paint out process in favor of the clear image, making it possible for his picture to arrive at a "finished" state, something foreign to a restless, ever-becoming de Kooning.
All Abstract-Expressionist figure painting, whether McNeil's new Dancer series or de Kooning's Women, involves ambiguity of intention as well as of space. For over a hundred years, pictorial ambiguity has excited artists, be they representational or abstract. ("Abstract" and "illusionist" are not antonyms—witness the recent Stella.) But the esthetic of Action-Painting joined with the representational impulse seems particularly two-sided. How does one accommodate the implicit spontaneity of a style like McNeil’s with the conscious, demands of portraying something? In other words, what is that figure doing there?
There are two possibilities: the artist started with a figure, or the figure appeared during the painting. These have very different implications. In the former case subject matter is a catalyst, and is firmly established in the repertory of strategies to lull the awareness so that a deeper part of the psyche may awaken. A concise expression of it is James Brooks' 1955 statement (for the Whitney's "New Decade" catalogue): "Any conscious involvement (even thinking of a battle or standing before a still-life) is good if it permits the unknown to enter the painting almost unnoticed." The maneuver survives, mutatis mutandis, in Larry Poons, for example, who obviously begins with a system, however it is determined, but who so complicates (or simplifies) it that to figure it out becomes impossible. It is the aberrations, the departures—from the system or the still-Iife—which give the picture life.
The second possibility, the slow or sudden emergence of an image under its own volition, might be called the Uninvited Guest phenomenon. Its appeal can be traced to the psycho-mythicism of the early phase of the New York School. Thus, de Kooning's women were for a long time classified as "goddesses" (and, indeed, they do have the obsessive presence and autonomous authority to convince one that the Furies behind the drawing-room drapes are real). Automatism is here considered a gateway to the archetypal; the creator "does not know what he is doing" until after he has done it.
To McNeil, the figure is there in the second way. He expresses surprise at the emergence of his images. He makes many drawings, from Hofmannesque still-lifes; in these, it is clear that the subject matter is catalytic, provoking the hand and the imagination. But in painting he seems rather to allow the figure to happen.
Then he seizes on it, traps it with heavy brush contours, isolates it by flattening and simplifying the surrounding color masses, until the figure asserts itself as the focal point. Dancer, 6, for example, swoops and flails her way across the picture, poised on one foot between a generalized face- and digit-less existence and a very specific human gesture. (The occasional inclusion of an illustrative detail like the white boot in Caucasian Dance reinforces in another way the specificity of McNeil's imagery.) Even Angela or Marquise, though they sit more inertly than many of their sisters, seem reluctant to exist only schematically. They are parallel to the picture plane, but not quite on it, and like most of McNeil’s figures, begin to assert themselves as volumes. They participate in a vigorous contest of wills with their author about the nature of representational and abstract, flat and illusionist painting.