Insights to Figurative ‘50s : Artists at Newport Museum Relive Spirited New York Era

After Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline watched Wanamaker’s Department Store burning a few blocks away from his Manhattan studio, he painted “Wanamaker’s Block.”

The work was included in the “Twelve Americans” exhibit of Abstract Expressionists in 1956 at the Museum of Modern Art. Painter Grace Hartigan, whose work was also in the exhibit, brought her father to see the show. Proud as he was of his daughter, he was baffled by abstract art.

Still, walking up to the Kline painting, he said: “Now that looks just like a burned-out building to me!”

Hartigan, who told the story Monday night at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, drew a hearty laugh from her audience.

The painter’s down-to-earth forcefulness, and fellow artist George McNeil’s impassioned seriousness, gave the panel discussion on the museum’s current exhibit----”The Figurative ‘50s: New York Figurative Expressionism”-- a zest and clarity that kept a capacity crowd absorbed for more than two hours.

Also on the panel were Harry Gaugh, professor of art history at Skidmore College, and the exhibit’s co-curators, Paul Schimmel, who is chief curator at Newport Harbor, and Judy Stein, associate curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Gaugh quoted a remark of Hartigan from a 1958 Art News magazine article: “I don’t want to find out what I know but what I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to find it out in my mind, but in my painting.”

Hartigan told her Newport Harbor audience that in the late ‘40s, when she was in her mid-20s and had been working as a mechanical draftsman, she made up her mind to spend her life as a painter.

Although she could draw machine parts to a tolerance of one-64th of an inch and (thanks to several years of art lessons) paint still lifes in the manner of Henri Matisse, Hartigan had never learned anything about the art of the past.

But she had met Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, “the most influential artists in the postwar world.” Learning ‘that you could create a painting out of drips,” as Pollock was doing, came as a great surprise to her.

A few years later, visits to the New York museums gave her a crash course in art history. Particularly attracted by the Spanish-court art of Velasquez and Goya, she worked her way through their influence. Her ultimate discovery was a way of incorporating figures into her paintings while retaining the gestural freedom of abstraction.

“Nobody was interested in my work so I felt very free to do whatever I wanted,” Hartigan said. “Then it got to be a habit to do whatever I wanted. . . . There was never any either-or. I had the freedom to do what I wanted to do, to go as far in each direction as I could. . . .”

When McNeil addressed the audience, he noted that--after hundreds of years of art centered on the figure, landscape or still life--from 1910 to 1960 “perhaps 90% of the most important artists in the Western world moved toward abstract art.”

By about 1955, McNeil continued, abstraction became “normalized” as just another approach for the artist to deal with. But abstraction had a great problem: It “deteriorated” into mere decorativeness.

“A certain seriousness in dealing with humankind had to come back,” he said. Because, after all, people were still concerned with the human condition.

“It has to be that the figure will continue to be represented by artists in a vivid, powerful, impassioned way.”

After the artists spoke, members of the panel posed questions to them, and the discussion was eventually opened to the audience.

The artists were asked how it was possible for the Figurative Expressionists to stick to their way of painting after the waves of other styles from Pop to Minimalism.

“What are you supposed to do, change your style every three years?” McNeil asked. “To hell with what is fashionable. You just have to do what you think is right.”

The artists were also asked how they feel today about their paintings from the ‘50s and early ‘60s.

McNeil was 50 in 1958 when he began painting in a Figurative Expressionist style, so he wasn’t, as he remarked, an early bloomer. But he has been working in the same style ever since. Seeing the early work was “a verification that I didn’t make a wrong start,” he said.

“I feel very close to (the ‘50s paintings) even though I don’t think I could do them again,” Hartigan said. “They address problems I’m still concerned with. . . .

“I begin with clarity. I set it into chaos. What I end up with, I hope, is truth.”

Later, someone asked Hartigan to explain her method more fully.

She said she first chooses a subject--like bride mannequins in a shop window (the subject of her 1954 painting, “Grand Street Brides,” as well as that of a recent painting, “Society Wedding”). In the studio, she staples her canvas to the wall and begins “a placement of veils and bouquets and roses.” Then the canvas goes on the floor and she begins to “destroy” it.

“I throw paint on it, I step on it, I punish it.”

In doing this, she finds “the painting’s memories.” By separating herself from the direct image of the way things look, she is able to go back into the painting and find a “truer” way of getting at their essence.

McNeil remarked that his painting process is the complete opposite, somewhat like reading a Rorschach ink blot. He works at random with “very liquid” paint until a figure begins to appear.

“I find this very thrilling--I never know what’s going to come up. When an inkling of the figure emerges, I try to seize it. I then compose, working around the canvas from all sides.”

Another question from the audience asked how the art community has changed since the ‘50s.

In the early ‘50s, “there was no power and no fame and no money,” Hartigan replied. “By the late ‘50s, some people were comparatively well-known. They were exhibited and collected by the major museums. Power, fame and money came into the picture. That destroys communities.”

“The artists were intensely ambitious,” McNeil said, “But they were ambitious in terms of art. . . . Now the focus is . . . to be a great public figure.”

“A lot of artists aren’t humble enough,” Hartigan added. “Feeling a powerlessness in the face of your own power, a fear the magic will never come again, will keep a serious artist very humble. . . . The world wants artists to be better than they are--and we do our best.”

“The Figurative ‘50s: New York Figurative Expressionism” exhibit continues through Sept. 18 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Admission: $2 to $3. Information: (714) 759-1122.