The Figurative ‘50s--for Sentimental Reasons

The shiny chrome tail-finned ‘50s have taken on a fuzzy pastel penumbra of nostalgic affection. People too young or too forgetful to remember regard the era as a time of innocent and energetic optimism when America basked in the hoopla-hoop gadgetry of post-war materialism.

Some of us hanging around at the time--skinny sophomores aping European bohemians in junior colleges on Vermont Avenues--cast grudging fondness in other molds. Shiny Fords and azure-eyed pony-tailed princesses retreated forever to the future. Unattainable, they became symbols of conformity to be rejected in favor of more profound superficialities--espresso coffee in the lobby between Bergman and Kenneth Anger films, high-minded arty ads by Container Corp., a comic strip called Peanuts with religious and Proustian depths, another called Pogo that dared to make fun of the terrifying Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Nobody laughed if you read Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre or the Beats but it was still all right to think that “West Side Story” was radical.

Naturally this baggage included admiration for Adlai Stevenson and wary respect for Jackson Pollock. The social demand that everyone fit in was so pervasive that anything really subversive was held suspect even by cautious young Turks.

Abstract art was really subversive. Embracing it meant a plunge into deep water for people who always wanted to keep one hand on the dinghy. In the ‘50s art students skulked down the hall to take advertising classes and quietly earned teaching credentials--just in case.

It was an immense relief when certain serious artists who clearly knew about Abstract Expressionism and had even practiced it put recognizable figures back into their art. It was the same kind of relief you felt when Miles Davis or Charlie Parker or Shorty Rogers wove a familiar tune into a maelstrom of improvisation. Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you. Whew! You bet I will.

Drawing was to art as tunes were to music--a road map to make the territory known, a touchstone for the frightened philistine that lurked in every prisoner of the ‘50s, leading him gently to the the most urgent demand of the time: compromise.

To history’s credit it finally sorted itself out and decided that the Abstract Expressionism was the premier art of the epoch--not because its was the most radical but because its leading innovators were just plain better.

Now we have a brave exhibition at the Newport Harbor Art Museum until Sept. 18 that addresses 13 of those painters of the era who introduced or reintroduced the figure to their art.

It’s an odd exercise but one typical of museum curator Paul Schimmel, who likes to exhume contemporary art that has fallen between the cracks, presumably to see if we have missed anything of great quality or at least to find out what might be learned from work relegated to the second or third tier.

Here, Schimmel--in collaboration with Judith E. Stein of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts--has assembled about 80 paintings that incite at least a provocative muddle. The ensemble has so many edges and rushes off in such diverse directions one cannot be certain in the end whether any impressions drawn are implicit in the mix or a pure free-standing creative act on one’s own part.

The show is called “The Figurative Fifties” and subtitled “New York Figurative Expressionism” to set it off from the brushy figurative art done in the same period in the San Francisco Bay area by Richard Diebenkorn, David Park and others.

One thing accomplished here is a demonstration of the dangers of putting the finale at the beginning of the play. The first works encountered are Pollocks’ black-and-white 1952 “Number 5” plus some 15 superb works on paper by Willem de Kooning. This is thematically correct because these two contemporary titans led the way back to using the figure--De Kooning with his legendary “Woman” series and Pollock by rediscovering agonized specters in late work.

At the outset we are reminded that nobody with their head screwed on straight believes there is any real difference between figurative and non-figurative art. We seem to view the remnants of some old Punic war whose conflict has become quaint and pointless. The exhibition thus immediately calls its own premise into question. Worse yet is the fact that Jackson and De Kooning display such energy, control and originality as to doom everybody else in the exhibition to looking a trifle second-rate.

Old timers see themselves mirrored in a typical ‘50s conservative compromise.

Robert Goodnough paintings like “Devils in a Boat” retain a modicum of AE brushwork while turning back to Picasso’s terpsichorean satyrs and nymphs frolicking on the Cote d’Azur. A contingent of others aboutfaced to German Expressionism. We’ve heard of Elaine de Kooning, whose portraits look like loose Oskar Kokoschka. Others are memory tests even for people who regard themselves as amateur ‘50s art-trivia experts. If you can remember Jan Mueller’s brief ancient flicker of notoriety, it still doesn’t quite explain the presence of eight big paintings of flying white spooks. They utterly lack the intensity and bite of the original German Expressionists, so what is the point?

Wait. Look over here at the canvases of the dimly recalled Bob Thompson, who like Mueller, died young. A picture like “Garden of Music” seems to predict flower children in Central Park. Its jazzy, jig-saw patterning retains something pastoral that links it not only to Mueller’s fuzzy mythology but to Robert Beauchamp’s fantasy landscapes with their primeval animals and aboriginal seductresses as skinny and stylish as fashion models.

There really was a sweetness and idealism about the ‘50s. People actually used to fall in love. These are not angry paintings but paintings by people who believed that if you did your own art your own way everything would be all right. They are lovable like earnest graduate students who haven’t hit the marketplace. George McNeil is 80 but he has managed to remain utterly unknown on the West Coast. Looking at paintings like “Astor” is a gratifying as chewing over a friend’s art leaning in a school hall full of lockers and smelling of turpentine. They are as well-made as they are scruffy and careless of fame.

Maybe it was that casual carelessness and idealism that led to a modicum of silliness that runs through of this art. Maybe it was just ‘50s silliness. Lester Johnson painted goopy silhouettes that may have been thinking about Jean Dubuffet in Paris but they lack the Frenchman’s blasted, scared we-went-though-the-war look. Amiable Existentialism.

Grace Hartigan has to take the prize for sheer dingy Romanticism. Her “Grand Street Brides” looks like “Gone With the Wind” rewritten by Samuel Beckett.

So far, you can see echoes of De Kooning and Pollock in most everybody. Larry Rivers’ earliest painting here is a send-up of the “Woman” series called ‘Two Women Posing.” After that you could wonder what he and the rest of the remaining artists are doing here or what holds them together.

Well, they are all something like straight painters of the human figure, their glance speeded up for modern times. Rivers painted his family and friends with the exhibitionistic bravura of an old-master history painter or a show-off soft-hearted hipster like Courbet. Fairfield Porter played the part of a drop-out suburban Ivy League aristocrat who shunned fame to paint family and friends in the gentle manner of Vuillard--acting purposely minor.

Alex Katz donned the mantle of a Manhattan socialite of independent means combining Matisse’s elegance with the popular outlines of Broadway theater posters to paint his family and friends.

Family and friends, family and friends. What is this?

In the end the only tie that binds this rather lumpy exhibition is sentimentality. The artists are sentimental about art, the exhibition is sentimental about them. What the hell, the ‘50s were a sentimental time. If you went on a trip your girlfriend gave you a St. Christopher medal.

Is that all there is?

Maybe. It sure gives one pause to think about how long ago it all was. Pollock, Mueller, Porter and Thompson are dead. Katz is the youngest survivor at 61, De Kooning the oldest at 84.

Sigh.

Good art is to be seen here. Porter was a lovely intimist with his bland light a Gallic insistence on objectivity. Rivers’ exhibitionism is annoying but “The Studio” is a real showstopper.

Rivers. Isn’t there something missing?

There is not a whiff of Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns. Representational if not figurative, they were the artists who dragged this sensibility in the only direction it could really go, the only place that could contain the sentiment, silliness and national aspirations of the time. Idealism had to be sublimated to irony but the result had to be Pop.

Anything else?

Yes. The show looks familiar. It makes current Neo-Expressionism look like Neo-Neo-Expressionism. Neo-Neo is more international and cynical but just as interested in mining past history for a new direction. With any luck it will turn out to be just as much of a minor compromise on the way.