Review (via The SUN, NY): George McNeil, an Underappreciated Hometown Boy, Highlight a Healthy Gallery Season
George McNeil, “Demonic Disco” (1984)
by Mario Naves
via The Sun, NY
‘Estate of George McNeil: Discos and Dancers’
Picture Theory, 548 W. 28th St., Suite 238
Until May 11
Here’s a question that passed through my mind as I visited Picture Theory, a newish exhibition space at Chelsea: Would George McNeil (1908-95) have stooped to posting his paintings and prints on Instagram? I say “stooped” because of the animus McNeil had for self-promotion. This was the man who bowed out of Nina Leen’s renowned portrait of The New York School, “The Irascibles,” a photo that did much to cement its primacy in the public eye.
Think about it: The Mount Rushmore of Abstract Expressionism — Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and … George McNeil? There are myriad reasons an artist’s reputation does or doesn’t scale the heights. Personality is one of them; cultural cache is another. McNeil bristled when his individuality was put under duress: no team player, he. Still, McNeil’s peers held the work in high esteem — de Kooning was a fan — and scratched their collective head at his lack of notoriety.
McNeil’s art found an audience in the mid-1980s. His late canvases — rambunctious meldings of AbEx facture and graffiti-influenced pictograms — benefited from a renewed interest in both Expressionism and figurative painting. Given the buoyant and often uproarious nature of the compositions, not a few observers thought McNeil had finally achieved maturity at the ripe old age of 70-something. “As George McNeil gets older,” a former New York Times critic, Michael Brenson, wrote, “his work gets younger.”
“Discos and Dancers,” the current exhibition of McNeil’s art at Picture Theory, puts that theory to test. Among the most striking paintings in the show, “Occasion” (1966), predates McNeil’s popular heyday by a good two decades. Its melding of ArtBrut imagery with a Bonnard-like color palette may have been fobbed off at the time as not being sufficiently innovative. Yet McNeil was less interested in the outre than in the primal. He was painting for the long game. That, and the overriding subject of his work is joy. In the end, maybe McNeil wasn’t irascible enough.
McNeil’s pictures have not gone unnoticed by our cultural institutions. The work is included in the collections of MoMA, the Met, and the Whitney — where, for the most part, it has been gathering dust in the storage racks. You’d think our hometown institutions would want to celebrate a hometown boy, particularly given how much the paintings were inspired by our local music scene. Punks, disco dollies, and headbangers, oh my.
