Word: expressionist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DIED. Alice Neel, 84, unconventional expressionist painter who specialized in representational but psychologically revealing portraits (including an occasional TIME cover: Feminist Kate Millett, 1970, Franklin Roosevelt, 1982) of cancer; in New York City. Neel starved during the Depression but eventually partook of the New Deal's WPA assistance. Long submerged in the tide of abstract expressionism, she was rediscovered in the late 1960s, and following a 1974 retrospective at New York City's Whitney Museum had numerous one-woman and group shows...
DIED. Lee Krasner, 75, pioneer abstract expressionist painter of the New York School, whose mastery of draftsmanship and color, informed by an angry toughness and an exceptionally strong sense of rhythm, showed the influence of Matisse and Picasso as well as Jackson Pollock, her husband from 1945 until his death in 1956; after a long illness; in New York City. When they met in 1936, the Brooklyn-born Krasner was the better credentialed of the two and helped move Pollock toward the avantgarde. She continued to paint in a mutually respectful, noncompetitive partnership with him during the years of poverty...
...this case, the foreground counts most. It is a simplification, but not a gross one, to say that Morley and the late Philip Guston were the twin unlatchers of "new figuration," at least in America. Morley was an expressionist artist when most of the current crop of neoexpressionists were still, aesthetically speaking, in diapers. His mix of mass-media cliche with intimate confession, his abrupt shifts of gear in imagery and format, and his therapeutic desire to shovel his whole life-traumas, lusts, memories, hopes-onto the canvas, struck many younger painters as a fresh model of artistic character...
...paint on the canvas looks sluggish and frozen, like cake icing. (In the early '60s, Morley did put the pigment on with icing nozzles.) Its dull turbulence parodies the violence implicit in expressionist paint handling. The heavy brush stroke is no longer an index of earnestness; it quotes strong feeling without necessarily endorsing it. Morley's blend of coolness and violence has some of the hypnotic impact of early Warhol. But it is far more complicated and nuanced, and it is free from overtones of chic...
...smile, originally cut from a LIFE magazine ad and stuck on; in Woman and Bicycle, 1952-53, there are two smiles, one where it should be, the other arranged like a necklace of teeth around the throat. With such paintings de Kooning brought off the near impossible joining of expressionist archaism with pop-style '50s femininity...