A first-generation Abstract Expressionist and
figural paintings of which Joey Loves Milly
a predilection for pushing back against the
endeavored to make his forms, as he
part of the New York School, McNeil showed status quo, sometimes to the detriment of his career. McNeil famously refused to be in the legendary 1951 “Irascibles” Life magazine
photo, rebelling even against the rebellious,
in a sense. And while art history has come to deify this group of eighteen artists; Rothko,
Pollock, de Kooning, and others, McNeil took himself out of that picture, both figuratively
is part. Building from a figural basis, McNeil described, “plastically and psychologically alive by having lines, shapes and colors
bounce with energy.” This was not necessarily a new concept for McNeil, as he had long wished to explore the figure in greater
depth, even going back to his formative time studying with Andre Lhote in France.
and literally.
This representational period, beginning
Similarly, as a founding member of the
through much of his remaining years until
American Abstract Artists group, McNeil was again a prominent force, until departing for
good in 1956 – he’d been slowly reducing his role there and eventually went his own way.
Much like his friend and peer Philip Guston, McNeil found himself frustrated by what he saw as the limits of Abstract Expressionism and pushed for change. And much like
Guston experienced when he debuted his own new body of representational work
in 1970 to scathing reviews, the art world pushed back. American abstraction at
mid-century, a movement McNeil was key in building, was violently opposed to the changes McNeil and Guston offered.
Throughout the 1960s, George McNeil’s work would grow more and more representational, though he largely retained the grand scale
that he and his AbEx peers would implement – giant canvases with bold gestures. McNeil
began a series of plein-air landscapes which
now serve as a mid-point between his abstract work of the 40s and 50s and the cartoonish,
roughly in the early 70s and continuing his passing in 1995 was dubbed Neo-
Expressionism. Considering this term was
simultaneously applied to the hottest young
artists on the New York art scene in the 1980s, figures like Sandro Chia, Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl, McNeil was by far the veteran of
the movement. Yet to look at this period, it’s
easy to imagine McNeil’s late works standing alongside Basquiat, Salle and this youthful crew – there is a shared future/primitive
aesthetic; the works are reminiscent of de
Kooning’s abstracted “Women,” yet also show the influence of Dubuffet as well as CoBrA
artists such as Karel Appel and Asger Jorn.
McNeil was documenting NYC culture; disco,
punk, graffiti – loud traffic, grimy clubs, bizarre characters. And even with such seemingly crude, stylized figures, so removed from
AbEx, Hans Hoffman’s influence is still very
present – particularly the vibrancy of the color palette, the rawness of expression. McNeil’s
notoriously thick impasto providing depth and power to these toothy, contorted figures.
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