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.

The Missing Link

By the late 1970s, art criticism had begun to question the formalist ideals that dominated the era of the New York School, which defined painting as an absolute and universal form of art, and some critics—such as Douglas Crimp (b. 1944), Yves-Alain Bois (b. 1952), Carter Ratcliff (b.1941), and Barbara Rose (b.1938)—even went so far as to raise the question of whether painting was dead as an important art form (See Barbara Rose, “The Politics of Art, Part IV,” Arts Magazine 54 (December 1979): 134; Yves-Alain Bois, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” in Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture, ed. David Joselit (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 29; and Carter Ratcliff, “Modem Life,” Artforum 23 (Summer 1986). Indeed, in a 1981 article “The End of Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981), Crimp argued that painting in the 1960s had been in a terminal state. To this view, he cited such factors as the style of hard-edged Minimalism and color field painting and the use of new media, such as images appropriated from photography in painting, as evidence of a “definitive rupture with painting’s unavoidable ties to a centuries-old idealism.”