Other Directions in the Pursuit of the Figure

1. The Iconography of Joan Brown’s Painting,“The Bride”

Although nominally a "Bay Area" painter, Joan Brown has little in common with the others by the 1960s.  She did spend time studying at the California School of Fine Arts, and the influence can be seen in her work of the 50s, but it soon departs as she begins to develop a style which eliminates gesture and textural qualities and centralizes image and iconography.
 
untitled (Noel and Bob, the Dog), 1964 Portrait of Toby the Cat, 1980 Portrait of a Girl, 1971

Her style changes more than once in the early period of her career, moving from a more abstract, larger, and more aggressive style of painting until by the mid-60s she has begun to work on a smaller scale, producing paintings with a more decorative and contained look to them.  These paintings suggest an interest in Asian and near eastern art.  Many of her paintings from this period (including the paintings of her cat and dog) place the figures in frontal positions, resembling early portrait photography as much as they may allude to naive or untrained styles of painting.  She starts to use a fast-drying paint to which she sometimes adds glitter and other materials, in order to increase the textural qualities of the paintings.  Overall, they seem to confirm her stated desire to use the paintings as a visual documentary of her life.
 

The Bride (1970) is a large painting, over 7½ by 4½ feet, painted with commercial house paints and with glitter. The elements of the painting which we immediately see are the bride, the rat attached to her wrist from a leash, the cat in place of her face, the poppies, and the fish floating in the background which may be sky or sea; the exact sense of which is not clear.  The bride stands in the center of the painting, starkly outlined in her white dress against the blue “sky” and black ground.  There is no sense of depth behind the figure; the flowers fill the black ground in a relatively even pattern, while the fish are spaced in nearly horizontal rows across the top half of the painting.  There is very little sense of real background space-- it seems as if the female figure has been cut out and pasted over the background.  That sense is strengthened by the paper-doll dress with the pink-violet bouquet falling almost exactly in the center of the painting.  Although more than the primary colors are used, the dominant color effect is that of a childhood crayon drawing, but one done with precision and deliberation.  The cat-face, the large rat covering the bride’s feet, and the fish streaming across the background add another whimsical or fantastical touch to the painting.  Cats, fish and rats are animals which appear in many of Brown’s paintings, a fact which suggests that they have personal meaning for the artist, but they also have larger or more universal symbolic meanings.
The fish is a religious symbol and a symbol of Eden, while the rat is a symbol of infestation to most of the world, a repulsive animal, associated in a sexual dream of Brown’s with a coat worn by her father in Siberia.  Given the range of associations, the rat as used by Brown would appear to be a multivalent symbol of power and threat united, the union of sex and death.  Finally, the cat is an association she has made with herself in many paintings, either showing herself with a cat or painting a “portrait” of her cat.   The cat also alludes to the Chinese tiger and to the Egyptian sphinx; these, too, are images which have appeared in other of her paintings.  Brown was an avid swimmer, for sport and for the feeling of meditation it induced; the water which they may be swimming in is a symbol of rebirth and this painting, coming after the death of her parents, may be a commentary about her feelings of being reborn and liberated.  One interpretation suggests that The Bride is, above all, an image of Brown’s soul–that it unites the themes and imagery which characterized and continued to characterize her work, thereby representing her mind and passions, and that the symbols together depict a person who is capable of being tough and sensitive and undergoing transformation in her personal life.

2. Philip Pearlstein: against narrative?

Pearlstein: Female Nude on Platform Rocker, 1977-8 Pearlstein: Seated Nude on Green Drape, 1969 
Pearlstein: Crouching Female Nude with Mirror, 1971 Pearlstein: Female Model on chair with Red Indian Rug, 1973

Although his work looks visually different from the Bay Area artists, Pearlstein shares their investment in the “moods, colors and shapes” in the painting as opposed to the situation depicted in it.  Pearlstein fights narrative by treating all elements of the painting equally: no part of the painting seems to receive more or less attention than any other part.  But one has to question if this is really possible: when a human body is present in a painting, it is inevitably the body which draws attention before the ladder or chair does.  Pearlstein once made a very odd statement in which he spoke of rescuing the human figure “from its tormented, agonized condition” in the paintings of German expressionists, and from the distortion and dissection given it by the cubists, and from the exploitation of the human figure which it was subjected to in the work of pornographers.  Rescued the human figure and then did what to it?  Decapitated it.  He may not be exploiting the figure for pornographic or sexual reasons, and does not appear to be exploiting it for the purposes of a story or an emotion, but he exploits it nonetheless.  He exploits it in the interest of rejecting abstract expressionism, rejecting its metaphors of the unconscious and transcendence, and finally, he exploits it as a rejection of existentialism.   All the same, when we consider the "subject" of the 1994 painting of a painting within the painting, which reverses the scene we see, it seems likely that Pearlstein's real message IS his style and technique, and the impossibility of actually controlling what the viewer wants to read into the painting.
 

Pearlstein: Male Model, Minstrel Marionettes, and Unfinished Painting, 1994 (5-1/2 x 8 ft)

3. Lucian Freud's Psychological Objectivity

Freud: Girl with Kitten, 1947

The German artist Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund, seems to share some of the same visual concerns and the same superficial pretense of avoiding psychological content or narrative in his art that we find in Pearlstein. Every pore in the body of his nudes appears to have been subjected to the artist’s glance, seemingly a scientific scrutiny of the body.  But there is a sense of strangeness or “otherness” in his paintings which comes from the contorted positions–positions of ambiguity: are these failed suicides? Unwanted sex?  We don’t know, and we’re not given enough clues to piece together a narrative, but the paintings are suffused with a discomforting quality of strangeness. Part of what is disconcerting about Freud’s paintings is that the poses taken by the subjects are not studio poses but neither are they clearly natural or domestic interior poses.  It is difficult to determine the moment which came before and what will come after, a difficulty which forces us to take an objective view of his work as dispassionate studies in form, color, and brushwork.  But why use the human figure as the basis for this type of study?  Or are artists such as Pearlstein and Freud trying to make the point that there is no truly dispassionate way of viewing the human figure, but this ambivalent objectivity comes closest to reading the state of human existence at this point in time?  In the end, though, I would venture that Freud and Pearlstein are not similar: Freud does not eliminate psychological content from his paintings or allow it to intrude by accident.  Freud’s paintings, in much the same way that Bacon’s are, are paintings about the inseparability of psychological states from the physical.
 

Freud: Girl with White Dog, 1951-2 Freud: The Painter's Mother Resting II, 1976-7
Freud: Naked Girl, 1966 Freud: Naked Man with Rat, 1977-8

4. Uniting the Gestural and the Literal: Rivers and Hartigan

Rivers: The Studio, 1956 (6'10x16')

Rivers, as your textbook points out, seems to make the perverse subject almost an icon for his own persona.  Certainly, the perverse subject matter plays nicely into a larger program of challenging the mythic status of art (which abstract expressionism asserted) and notion of purity in art on several levels: his technique, his use of words in the painting, his subject matter which makes visible reference to art history even as it rejects this history, and the quality of counteracting a focus and legibility in his art.  If Alex Katz could be seen as a visual translation of John Cage's attempt to include the environment in the composition, then Rivers might be seen in the same light, with the addition of making his art look as unfocused as a stroll through the neighborhood might look.
 

Rivers: Parts of the Body--Italian Vocabulary Lesson (1962) Rivers: Golden Oldies 60s  (1977/8)

Grace Hartigan seems to share a lot of the same goals, and in her own writing and interviews, she described her art and her way of making it as a type of traveling back and forth from one influence (the abstract expressionists) to the influence of the market, of the street, and of popular culture.  In the Grand Street Brides, we see many of these influences: a painting by Goya provides the basic model for the composition, there are personal references to her own life (married twice and divorced), the shop windows from lower east side bridal stores, and her technique, which might remind us of either Golub or Frankenthaler - wiping down the surface with turpentine after having painted it, and letting the underpainting show through.
 

Grace Hartigan: Grand Street Brides, 1954 (72 x 102") Hartigan: Giftwares, 1955

Constance comes from a series of paintings in which Hartigan did two things: she began to develop an iconography of female heroines and she took those heroines from both likely and unlikely sources: 1930s movies (Constance was a movie character), Renaissance women, great empresses, and other sources which struck Hartigan as likely material for her iconography of great women.
 

Hartigan: Orange #4 (The Changing Dialectics), 1952-3 Hartigan: Constance, 1981

Hartigan: "... I think that we [artists] do it...out of tremendous inadequacy.  That is, we cannot understand life.  It doesn't make sense to us.  And we can't bear uncertainty, the hazard of not explaining it to ourselves.  So in order to survive, we want to make some kind of order out of this chaos that is presented to us.... [but if you do succeed in this venture, and other people understand it...]  that thing which begins out of incomprehension...failure...ends up hopefully a triumph."

An Attempt at a Summary

Pearlstein thinks of himself as a modernist even though he rejected mainstream modernism. This is because, he says, he and other artists began to "think in terms of concepts, to be able to deal with ideas that are inherent in technical procedures." Alfred Leslie, another figural painter,  had a different approach to modernism--he viewed it simply as "another subject" which he chose to reject. What he took from abstract expressionism, he said, was the idea that the artist was a reformer, that art was moral.  Leslie's paintings contain a psychological dimension and interaction with the viewer that Pearlstein avoids. These latter characteristics are also true of Freud whose paintings, in the end, seem to have more in common with Bacon and the use of the body as the means of communicating psychological messages.
The return of figurative painting initially seems to be dominated by two directions: artists who centralize the subject and what seems to be a narrative, and who, in many cases, choose an objective style which has more in common with the hard-edged abstraction painters than with abstract expressionism; and those for whom the process retained some ties with abstract expressionism and some of the centrality that abstract expressionism gave to process.  These artists seemed to be continuing in a direction set by de Kooning, a direction which neither ruled out abstraction nor figuration.  The Bay Area artists, in particular, seem to choose this course.  Yet other artists defy this distinction.  An artist such as Grace Hartigan, for example, has veered throughout her career between abstraction and more figural paintings of modern life; Larry Rivers, in much the same way that Hartigan does, makes the "derangement" of history his technique and his narrative.  Golub and Spero, who don’t go back and forth in that respect, share with Rivers, Hartigan, and Brown the use of eclectic references in their work: an amalgam of ancient history and modern ideas, or an amalgam of the personal and autobiographical with the universalizing overlay of history or of the technical evocations of abstract expressionism.
With all of these artists who come after abstract expressionism, the various components of the abstract expressionist “language” became elements to be isolated and used, as much for their value as a technique as for their value as a subject.  This means that in the end, the differences between the more gestural kinds of figural painting and the more literal or formal kinds are not really that great: in either case they are making a story of some kind central to the painting. One story has more to do with visible American life.  The other story has more to do with painting and art-making.  Both stories generate important styles of art: pop art comes from one story while minimalism and postminimalism come from the other.

Issues raised by the "post-abstract expressionists":