FOREWORD
I
am excited to write this foreword to Karen Wilkin’s publication that will accompany the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center’s exhibition, Figuration Never Died. Her essay adds a new dimension to the history of a most significant chapter in recent Modernism,
enlarging our conception of New York School painting and providing a fuller context for our greater understanding and appreciation of today’s multiplicity of approaches to art. Wilkin has frequently touched on this topic in her extensive writing on twentieth-century American art, but this publication gives her a unique opportunity to further develop her insights and to bring together at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center examples from two momentous decades of what she calls “New York painterly paintings.” Wilkin reveals to us how, during the days when Abstract Expressionism dominated the New York–centered international art scene, the very act of insisting on figuration was considered a gesture simultaneously radical and anachronistic—or at the least, hopelessly unfashionable. Yet, as she points out in her essay, that figurative “gesture” persisted, remaining both radical and unfashionable, throughout the movements of Color Field, Pop art, Minimalism, and Post-Modernism that followed Abstract Expressionism. Focusing primarily on 10 artists, Robert De Niro, Sr., Lois Dodd, Jane Freilicher, Paul Georges, Grace Hartigan, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Albert Kresch, Paul Resika, and Anne Tabachnick, Wilkin explains how many of them moved forward from their early interest in abstraction to engage in traditional painting genres while infusing an energetic, painterly approach into their work and continuing to ground their style and structure in abstraction. Many of the artists emerged from the shadow cast by Abstract Expressionism even as they continued to draw on numerous principles and precepts of that American school. The artists who dissented from abstract orthodoxy were united in their insistence on the enduring significance of figuration. Many embraced landscape and still-life painting specifically, even when these subjects also seemed irretrievably out of fashion. All felt in some degree limited by abstraction and were, in fact, part of a much larger group of American artists emerging at the time who wanted to go beyond it. They aspired, as the landscape painter and art writer Rackstraw Downes noted, to “enlarge and increase the resources of painting.”1
Lois Dodd, View from the Window, May, June, 1968. Oil on Masonite, 15½ x 17 in. (39.4 x 43.2 cm). Private collection, Portland, ME. © Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY. © 2020 Lois Dodd / Licensed by VAGA at Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.
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