George McNeil at Luise Ross - New York

The 13 lively paintings and works on paper in this recent exhibition, "FE = Form/Energy," span the final four decades in the long career of New York painter George McNeil (1908-1995). A first-generation Abstract Expressionist, McNeil studied with Hans Hofmann in the early 1930s and was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group. He worked with de Kooning and James Brooks in the WPA art program in the mid-1930s and later befriended Pollock, Krasner and Kline. While he showed with all these artists in subsequent decades and was well respected by his peers, his work today is underknown. Part of the problem 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 crude, brightly colored figures into his agitated compositions. Unlike de Kooning's figuration or that of late Pollock, McNeil's images seem more akin to those by European Expressionists such as Kirchner or Nolde, members of the Cobra group, Dubuffet and Art Brut painters. At the time, McNeil's turnabout was viewed by some as detrimental to his career, but today his post-1960 work seems fresh, vibrant and surprisingly conversant with certain trends in recent figurative art. In the large, brilliant canvas Bather #16, 1969 (48 by 52 inches), swirling brushstrokes of yellow, slathered onto a richly textured orange background, define a leaping figure whose extended limbs span the width of the canvas. A smaller painting, Frolic (1980), shows a trio of big heads, one blue, one red and another pink, set against a bright yellow ground. The rudimentary facial features and the overall simplicity of the design convey the innocence and exuberance of children's drawings.

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

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