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.

New Images of Man and the Emergence of Rhino Horn

In 1959, a decade before the founding of the Rhino Horn group, art historian Peter Selz (b. 1919) curated a controversial exhibition of contemporary avant-garde humanist painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City entitled “New Images of Man”. This groundbreaking exhibition was one of the first at a major American museum to introduce a legitimate alternative mode of modernism in the wake of the celebrated Abstract Expressionist movement.