American (1908-1995)

he artworld is in the midst of a reassessment of the contributions of forgotten or overlooked artists to the development of post-war American art. One of these figures, interestingly, is George McNeil, even though he participated in the

seminal 9th Street Show, is in included in numerous museum collections and had more than 40 solo exhibitions during his lifetime.

Born in 1908, he was four years younger than de Kooning and four years older than Pollock. He belonged to their world, and when the dealer Charles Egan began to exhibit work by the painters of that generation, McNeil was included. His shows received respectful notice, deservedly so. A powerfully inventive artist throughout his career—McNeil died in 1995, having worked and exhibited until the end—he is the subject of an extensive critical bibliography. Yet he was always to be found on the peripheries of all the New York School maps, the ones with Pollock at the center as well as those that give pride of place to de Kooning or Rothko.

It’s not easy to say why this is so, given the strength and sheer quantity of McNeil’s work. It may have something to do with the unreserved passion of his commitment, not only to the art of painting but to the idea of individuality that has driven ambitious painters since the Romantic era. It’s possible, in other words, that McNeil was always too much the self-sufficient individual.

In 1932 McNeil studied with Hans Hofmann at the League and, later, in the private classes Hofmann conducted in downtown Manhattan. He became a member of the Abstract Artists of America, a group formed to give a sense of solidarity to New Yorkers who were painting in modernist styles and receiving no attention from Museum of Modern Art. During the Great Depression, McNeil joined the WPA and became friends with Burgoyne Diller, the geometric painter who headed the mural division. Other friends included de Kooning, Giorgio Cavallon, David Smith, Irene Rice Pereira, George Byron Browne, and Mark Rothko—all equals in those years of hard scrambling and persistent neglect, though of course a few of them emerged later as historical monuments.

After the war, much changed in the art world, to say the least. McNeil was especially impressed by Pollock’s reinvention of painting. By 1950, the year of his first show at Egan, he had begun, like Pollock, to begin with a blank canvas unrolled on the studio floor. Unlike Pollock, he continued to apply paint with a brush, working from all four sides of the canvas with an eye for what he called—in an

echo of the modernist doctrines of the pre-War decades—“plastic expression.” For McNeil to be satisfied, a painting had to work pictorially, as sheer form. And his abstract paintings from this period often do. He can be a dauntingly complex composer. At the same time, he is relentlessly direct.

There are none of the ironies in his touch that one sees in de Kooning’s brushwork—those recollections of academic training that he allows to become visible, only to hold them up to question. And McNeil never cultivated that grandly glum and sooty New York palette that one sees in the paintings of de Kooning, Pollock, and Robert Motherwell, and of course in the sweepingly calligraphic works of Franz Kline.

As the 1960s began, McNeil’s painterly gestures started to gesture back at him, persuading him to let patterns of color turn into images of anatomies. Or that is one way to understand the step-by-step appearance of the figures that inhabited his paintings from the mid-’60s onward. This painting is an example of that evolution. Is it an abstraction that has strayed toward figuration or the opposite?

His work can be found in the collections of the MFA, Boston; the Brooklyn Museum; the MET; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Walker Art Center, among others.