In this captivating and instructive show, “figurative
expressionist” refers to those artists who, in Michael
Rosenfeld’s words, “rejected the tenets of abstract expressionism
and embraced the human figure.” Unlike the so-called second
generation of Abstract Expressionists, followers of Willem de
Kooning who also embraced representation in the Fifties,
Rosenfeld’s artists did not fall neatly into any one school or
style. What primarily distinguishes them as a group is their use
of the figure at a time when abstraction held sway over most
artistic imaginations and by the fact that they did not presage
the rise of pop art in the early Sixties. The group included the
African-American artists Beauford Delaney (1901–
1979) and Bob
Thompson (1937–1966), Leon Golub, Red Grooms, Lester Johnson, and
the German-born American Jan Müller (1922–1958).
Golub, perhaps the most famous among them, is represented by
three works, all in his characteristic primitive style—derived in part from art brut. Head I (1966), for example,
employs bare, stabbing strokes of black, mauve, and white acrylic
on linen to describe the unclothed torso and head of a man. His
pained visage and tense, muscled body harmonize ideally—and
typically for Golub—with the stark means and materials with which
they are painted. Like Golub, Johnson approaches the figure with
similarly stripped-down methods. Using broad strokes of thick
oil paint and few colors,
he records only the outlines of
his haunting figures, allowing the paint itself—its drips,
globs, pools, and fluid passages—to imbue them with emotion and
individual traits.