Pioneers from Provincetown: The Roots of Figurative Expressionism

Installation shot of “Pioneers from Provincetown: The Roots of Figurative Expressionism” curated by Adam Zucker at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum during the summer of 2013.

In the summer of 2013, my research on the East Coast Figurative Expressionist movement had culminated in the form of an exhibition at the Provincetown Arts Association and Museum, as well as an accompanying exhibition catalog. For me, this marked the beginning to a mapping of the aesthetic and social aspects of this under represented movement. Picking the artists was no easy task, Provincetown was a hotbed for the avant-garde expressionists and creative minds, especially during the 1950s and 60s. There are artists who I’d have liked to include, and a much larger and more extensive Provincetown-centric survey would certainly include several additional artists. Notably Benny Andrews, Peter Dean, Nanno de Groot, Rosalyn Drexler, Sherman Drexler, Mary Frank, Nicholas Sperakis, and Anne Tabachnick. Below, I have condensed and edited my catalog essay into a concise overview of the rise of avant-garde painting in Provincetown. To read more, please consider purchasing a copy of the exhibition catalog. In future posts, the Figurative Expressionist zeitgeist will be mapped out from New York City, to Chicago, to the West Coast Bay Area.

George McNeil: About Place

Installation view of George McNeil: About Place at ACME Fine Art in Boston

Originally published in Berkshire Fine Art.

George McNeil (1908-1995) was an influential artist who rose to prominence during the Post-World War II era of American art. As a student in the late 1920s and early 1930s, McNeil attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and The Art Students’ League in New York. From 1932 to 1936, McNeil was a student and class monitor for Hans Hofmann both at the Art Students’ League and The Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts.

McNeil emerged as one of the First Generation Abstract Expressionist and New York School painters during the late thirties. He was shown in the New York Worlds Fair in 1939, and in 1935 he was a member of the W.P.A. and served on the Federal Art project with artists such as Willem de Kooning and James Brooks. McNeil painted a mural intended for the Williamsburg Housing Project, which was supervised by the artist Burgoyne Diller. McNeil’s mural was never used and unfortunately disappeared during World War II.

American Figurative Expressionism of the Second Generation and Beyond

Installation shot of “Pioneers from Provincetown: The Roots of Figurative Expressionism” curated by Adam Zucker at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum during the summer of 2013. From L to R: Robert Beauchamp’s “Two Apples”, George McNeil’s “Bather #25” & “Clandestine”, and Jay Milder’s “Untitled (Subway Faces)”

Many of the Abstract Expressionists remained successful throughout the 1950s without ever returning to figurative representation. However, Pollock and de Kooning (and, in the late 1970s, Philip Guston) eventually reverted to more obvious attempts at figuration. After all, the direct quality that Greenberg valued so highly, unmediated by “rules” of painterly representation, need not in fact exclude the expression of recognizable images, especially those as basic to the human experience as the face or body. Thus, not only did Pollock produce, toward the end of his life, a series of black and white quasi-figurative works, he stated of his own work that he was “very representational some of the time and a little all of the time,” and he pointed out that “when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.” Similarly, De Kooning shocked many of his contemporaries by painting recognizable depictions of women using the same technique that he had used in completely abstract paintings. In this regard, Thomas B. Hess (1920-1978), critic and editor of Art News, recounted the following anecdote in his 1967 book about de Kooning’s then-recent work: “‘It is impossible today to paint a face,’ pontificated the critic Clement Greenberg around 1950. ‘That’s right,’ said de Kooning, ‘and it‘s impossible not to.’”