The Figurative ‘50s--for Sentimental Reasons : <i> McNeil: Back to the Figure--Unconsciously </i>

George McNeil once told an interviewer that the figure allowed him to “get down to very basic drives such as sexuality and fantasy” and express “the problematic, irrational nature of modern life.”

In a phone interview from his Brooklyn studio, the 80-year-old painter said that even during his abstract period in the ‘30s--when he studied with Hans Hofmann and helped to form the American Abstract Artists group--”I never felt I left the figure.”

A trip to Cuba in 1940 inspired a group of paintings of cafe revelers with mask-like faces. But otherwise McNeil painted in a geometric Cubist style until his Navy days in World War II, “when there was a complete lacuna, to use a fancy word, in my work.”

In 1948, McNeil became “caught up in all the enthusiasm of the Abstract Expressionism group.”

And then “without my doing it consciously, my work began to take on a figurative (direction).

“I did a work in 1957 which came out looking like a figure with a candle. It was an unconscious development, but then a little bit later my friend Mercedes Matter started a figure group. Artists came together and we met once a week and drew from the figure.

McNeil says he “never reasoned it out, never started my paintings with figures in mind. I started my paintings with figures and they developed into figures.

“I am not an intellectual; I depend massively on feelings. . . . I tried to make my paintings exceedingly alive, and I did that with figures but I would have done it with abstraction. . . . Ever since 1960 I have started my works abstractly and they configurate into figures.”

The process of “configurating” is one readily apparent to the eye; in McNeil’s early ‘60s paintings in the exhibition, robust female figures are high-keyed patches of color that seem to coalesce out of a flat universe of color planes.

Working in isolation, McNeil doesn’t recall much exchange of ideas among artists during the ‘50s. “Artists are so prejudiced,” he said. “You step on people’s toes and they step on your toes when you talk about art.”

Yet a significant influence on his work came from Existentialism.

“In the early ‘50s I was reading Kierkegaard and Sartre and Camus and that kind of thing was very much in the air.”

So he felt that he was working intuitively yet he was also influenced by Existentialism?

“It was a philosophy of feeling. Existentialism has never been acknowledged by the formal philosophers. They don’t consider someone like Sartre to be (worthy). I feel that way about post-modernism!”

During the past couple of decades, McNeil has been working in an vividly colored, sexually ripe Expressionist style. (“I deal with distortion a great deal and with absurdity.”)

But “a certain kind of seriousness” has always been paramount to his world view. “When someone like Warhol (used) cartoon figures in a very obvious way,” McNeil said, “I found it somewhat shocking.”