FIGURATION NEVER DIED
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n May 1962, Recent Painting USA: The Figure opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a major exhibition selected by the museum’s director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., from an open call. The museum’s last large overview of current art, shown in early 1951, was
Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America. Nonrepresentational art dominated the selection, as the title promised, although there were three paintings by Stuart Davis who always insisted that he was not an abstract artist, as well as works by John Marin that, while hardly literal, included recognizable elements. MoMA’s focus had largely been on abstraction during the decade between Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America and Recent Painting USA: The Figure, but it could be argued that current figurative art was not entirely ignored. Dorothy C. Miller’s surveys of the contemporary scene—beginning with 15 Americans, in 1952, and Twelve Americans in 1956—stressed abstraction; William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clifford Still were featured in 1952; and James Brooks, Sam Francis, Philip Guston, and Franz Kline in 1956. But artists who made explicit reference to perception and the figure, including Edwin Dickinson, Grace Hartigan, and Larry Rivers, were also part of the mix. In 1959, however, 16 Americans was devoted exclusively to abstract artists, including Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, and Frank Stella. The 1963 iteration, titled simply Americans, tilted heavily toward abstraction but also included unabashedly figurative work by Richard Lindner, Marisol, and James Rosenquist. Nonetheless, most of MoMA’s shows in the 1950s and 1960s favored the nonobjective and the invented over the perceptual, and the few solo exhibitions awarded to painters in those years included Pollock, Rothko, Arshile Gorky, and Hans Hofmann. Recent Painting USA: The Figure seems to have been intended to redress the imbalance. Not everyone was convinced. Previewing Recent Painting USA: The Figure, the painter and writer Fairfield Porter wrote in Art in Its Own Terms: The exhibition opening at the Museum of Modern Art in May has the purpose of “exploring recent directions in one aspect of American painting: the renewed
Grace Hartigan, Showcase, 1955.
interest in the human figure.” Since painters have never stopped painting the
Oil on canvas, 69 7/16 x 80 5 /16 in. (176.1 x 204.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Purchase, Roy R. and Marie S. Neuberger Foundation Inc., gift, 1956, 56.199. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.
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