For those (and they are legion) who know that a lot of good figurative painting went on in this country in the Fifties, the show called “The Figurative Fifties: New York Figurative Expressionism,” mounted in October at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, came as no revelation. And the academic boxing of the subject—it stuck arbitrarily to one decade, and predictably excluded non-New York painters like Richard Diebenkorn—was hardly very compelling either. But the selection was rather a good one, and it also served as a welcome reminder of the halcyon days when New York had not yet been invaded by the art-sociopaths—those people who mouth the lingo of aesthetics the way hardened criminals talk of justice and remorse.
Among the artists represented were Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lester Johnson, Robert Goodnough, and Robert Beauchamp. Grace Hartigan’s work showed her to be growing rapidly out of a sort of black period into a different mode, while George McNeil’s reminded one of how hard he has struggled to achieve his extraordinary imagery of the past decade or so. Most interesting to this viewer, however—and I suppose it was largely a matter of the pictures offered—were the rooms devoted to Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Jan Müller, and Bob Thompson.
Larry Rivers’s paintings combined stylistic elements from Géricault, Pascin, Bonnard, Edwin Dickinson.
Larry Rivers’s paintings combined stylistic elements from Géricault, Pascin, Bonnard, Edwin Dickinson—apparently whatever he’d been looking at when
