Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, which was probably the chief critical influence in developing the great outpouring of American abstractionism of the last 15 years, this week puts on a significant show of new U.S. figure painting. The mere fact of the show certainly means that abstraction is going to have to move over and make room for a new kind of U.S. representationalism. Yet much of the excitement of the figure paintings traces back to abstraction. The paintings come from artists who learned color, brushwork, emotionalism and intuition through abstraction—or, conversely, from artists who stuck to saving faces and figures in bitter resistance to abstractionism's popularity and rich returns.
In many of the 74 paintings, the figures look as if they were refugees from a nightmare; and even when portrayed with all their limbs and features intact, they are often placed in strange and disturbing settings. Whereas the Greeks celebrated the figure for its external beauty, today's U.S.
figure painters use it to express internal tension or even combustion.
Work began on the show two years ago when the museum sent thousands of letters to U.S. artists, galleries and art schools asking them to submit photographs of figurative work done since 1958.
By the end of March 1961, the museum had received 9,495 photographs from 1,841 painters. A trio of curators winnowed these down, asked 150 artists to send along the actual paintings, from which Director Alfred H. Barr Jr. made the final selection. The whole procedure, while precluding definitiveness, has its diplomatic advantages. When viewers note the absence of their personal favorites, the museum can quote the catalogue: "The selection was determined by the entries received." Within these limitations, the show covers an astonishing range, which should prove to even the most doctrinaire of abstractionists that an attachment to reality is not necessarily a manacle for the mind. As Alfred Barr puts it: "Men have been painting their own image for many thousands of years, but it is probable that never before, within one time and one country, has the human figure been painted with the prodigious variety of forms even this small exhibition suggests."
The painters of the figure talk of their work and its relation to abstraction with emotions that go from gratitude to scorn. Sidney Goodman, 26, the teacher at the
Philadelphia Museum College of Art who painted Find a Way (reproduced oppo site), says gently: "I suppose I do what I want to do, and what I want to do concerns more than just shapes, forms and colors with no relation to a subject." As in many cases with figurative work, he makes vagueness a virtue. There is no definite reason why two figures should be made to float around like Zeppelins while a third remains bound to an ambiguous landscape.
Yet all the figures seem to be groping for something, and the viewer finds himself groping too. What at first seemed to be melodramatic whimsy turns out to be genuine mystery.