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Truly bad art is always sincere, and there is a kind of forcible vulgarity, as American as a meatball hero, that takes itself for genius; Jacqueline Susann died believing she was the peer of Charles Dickens. "My peers," Schnabel told the New York Times last winter, "are the artists who speak to me: Giotto, Duccio, Van Gogh." Doubtless this list will change if he tries a ceiling, but Schnabel has never learned to draw; in graphic terms, his art has barely got beyond the lumpy pastiches of Max Beckmann and Richard Lindner he did as a student in Houston. The dull, uninflected megalomania of his kitsch- expressionist imagery (Sex, Death, God and Me) is rant, a bogus "appropriation" of profundity.
Yet the word neo-expressionism is misapplied to American art in the '80s. The marks that convey heaviness and heat -- turgid, lava-like floods of paint, fulgurous color, primitive and mythic imagery, and the like -- are, as any art student knows by now, conventional signs that can be (and usually are) manipulated as lightly and coldly as Coke bottles in a Warhol. In this republic, the "expressive" comes down to another form of pop art, retooled for an audience strung out on fictions of personal authenticity.
The best new painting being done by American artists whose careers have come into full focus in the '80s puts itself at a remove from such matters. To start, there are Neil Jenney, 39, and Brice Marden, 46. Jenney's career is long for his age -- he started exhibiting sculpture in the mid-1960s before turning to painting -- and his work is dense with critical thought. The look of his current paintings, when first experienced, is puzzling: impacted "views" of nature that are not really views at all, but icons concentrated by cropping and framing.
Jenney carries the traditional view-through-the-window idea of realist painting to an extreme. The frame is part of the work, and within it -- always a wide, heavily molded, dark construction, its inner edges toned so that a white glow seems to be emanating from the picture itself -- one catches a glimpse of, say, a broad horizon, a band of achingly pure and silent sky, the trunk of a pine. The frame becomes a prison for a sign of traditional vastness, the 19th century view of limitless America. But look closer and the ideal landscape is fatally cankered, the America of Natty Bumppo is no more: acid rain has stripped the needles off the pine, or a sinister cloud spreads upward from a distant ground zero. Technical perfection evokes a compromised world.
The only thing Marden's paintings have in common with Jenney's, apart from their intelligence, is the way their surfaces invite meditation. Marden is wholly an abstract painter, and the effect of his work hinges on the proportional intensities of blocks of color. He is a minimalist, but without the fierce abolitionism the word suggests.