- Showcases artists' work featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern art, and more -
Accompanies an exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center,
Brattleboro, Vermont opening in October 2020 This publication
accompanies the Figuration Never Died: New York Painterly Painting,
1950-1970 exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. By about
1950, forward-looking New York painting was seen as synonymous with
abstraction- especially charged, gestural Abstract Expressionism. But
there was also a strong group of dissenters; artists, all born in the
1920s and many of them students of Hans Hofmann, who never lost their
enthusiasm for the seductive qualities of thick, malleable oil paint.
They remained, for the most part, 'painterly' painters. These rebellious
artists include Lois Dodd, Jane Freilicher, Paul Georges, Grace
Hartigan, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Albert Kresch, Robert de Niro Sr., Paul
Resika, and Anne Tabachnick. The compelling figurative work they made
between about 1950 and 1970, in contrast to the prevailing Abstract
Expressionism of the time, constitutes a significant chapter in the
history of recent American Modernism.