1 minute read
Expressive Works On Paper
Cartoon Formalism explores the 1960s and ‘70s.
CARTOON FORMALISM in the Works on Paper gallery explores how artists returned to figurative expression in the 1960s.
Advertisement
The style began with the Bay Area Figurative Movement in San Francisco in the 1950s, where artists like Joan Brown and Richard Diebenkorn developed a whimsical, more figurative style. Other works featured in Cartoon Formalism come from the San Francisco Funk era, which evolved parallel to the Beatnik movement in the late 1950s, and blended pop culture with cartoonish drawings. Roy De Forest prints, for example, feature narrative scenes in vivid colors, often depicting dogs and people. In fact, it was the De Forest print in the Albuquerque Museum permanent collection that sparked Preparator Chris Bratton to start a list of artists with a similar aesthetic. “The idea really solidified after Titus O’Brien, then-assistant curator of art, and I were talking about psychedelic art,” he says. While not directly connected, both figurative expressionist art and psychedelic art began in the Bay Area and were outgrowths of the burgeoning counterculture of the times.
The use of the word ‘cartoon’ in the exhibition title refers to the sketch-like immediacy of the artist’s hand. “While the subject matter varies from pets to social satire, the work conveys something personal or intimate, functioning in a similar fashion to a diary,” says Bratton, who curated the exhibition.
Funk is an intensely personal process, contrasting the formal characteristics of the happy cartoon to address intense and serious topics. Other artists featured in Cartoon Formalism include Robert Colescott, Andy Warhol, and William T. Wiley. Artist Jim Melchert described funk as an “attempt to resolve those two essences of mankind: one a striving toward perfectibility, the other a kind of gross realization that we’re all just animals.” This exhibition will be the first time most of this work is displayed.
ON VIEW
OPENS FEBRUARY 1
Cartoon Formalism
Carol Summers, Burning Mountain (#88/100), date unknown, color lithograph, gift of Dr. and Mrs. Richard Cronin
