George McNeil at Luise Ross - New York

The 13 lively paintings and works upon paper in this recent exhibition, "FE = Form/Energy," span the final four decades in the lengthy career of New York painter George McNeil (1908-1995) A first-generation Abstract Expressionist, McNeil studied with Hans Hofmann in the early 1930 and was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists cluster He worked with de Kooning and James runs in the WPA art program in the mid-1930s and later befriended Pollock Krasner and Kline. While he showed with all these artists in after decades and was well venerateed by his peers, his work today is underknown. Part of the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled is that McNeil doesn't fit easily into any art-historical category. In 1960 he broke away from the Ab-Ex canon when he began to incorporate in a raw state brightly colored figures into his agitated compositions. Unlike de Kooning's figuration or that of late Pollock McNeil's images look more akin to those by means of European Expressionists such as Kirchner or Nolde, members of the Cobra collection Dubuffet and Art Brut painters. At the time, McNeil's turnabout was viewed by dint of some as detrimental to his career, on the contrary today his post-1960 work appears fresh, vibrant and surprisingly conversant with certain tends in recent figurative art. In the large, brilliant canvas Bather #16 1969 (48 by dint of 52 inches), swirling brushstrokes of fulvid slathered onto a richly textur orange background, define a leaping figure whose stretch outed limbs span the width of the canvas. A smaller painting, Frolic (1980) exhibits a trio of big heads, single blue, one red and another pink, put against a bright yellow sod The rudimentary facial features and the overall simplicity of the design waft the innocence and exuberance of children's drawings.

McNeil aimed for a kind of purity of expression while remaining pure to the precepts of Action painting. A astonishing Bill Page film showing the artist at work in his later years, which ran continuously upon a video monitor in the gallery, demonstrated what he retained of his Ab-Ex foundations Placing the canvas or sheet of paper upon the floor or on a low-lying table, McNeil mov around all sides, vigorously attacking the surface with overloaded palette knives and paint-drenched rags until he arrived at a compact multilayered impasto. Employing a technique which he describes in the film as "imaging the abstraction," he produc figures and landscapes that were largely improvised. In a large painting of the like kind as Penobscot Abstractscape (1983), for instance, multicolored concentric circles and jagged vertical lines intimate an expansive topography, one that flows organically from the raw force of the physical process and from the fluidity of the medium itself.

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