The Figurative ‘50s--for Sentimental Reasons : <i> McNeil: Back to the Figure--Unconsciously </i>

George McNeil once told an interviewer that the figure allowed him to “get down to very basic drives such as sexuality and fantasy� and express “the problematic, irrational nature of modern life.�

In a phone interview from his Brooklyn studio, the 80-year-old painter said that even during his abstract period in the ‘30s--when he studied with Hans Hofmann and helped to form the American Abstract Artists group--�I never felt I left the figure.�

A trip to Cuba in 1940 inspired a group of paintings of cafe revelers with mask-like faces. But otherwise McNeil painted in a geometric Cubist style until his Navy days in World War II, “when there was a complete lacuna, to use a fancy word, in my work.�

In 1948, McNeil became “caught up in all the enthusiasm of the Abstract Expressionism group.�

And then “without my doing it consciously, my work began to take on a figurative (direction).

“I did a work in 1957 which came out looking like a figure with a candle. It was an unconscious development, but then a little bit later my friend Mercedes Matter started a figure group. Artists came together and we met once a week and drew from the figure.

McNeil says he “never reasoned it out, never started my paintings with figures in mind. I started my paintings with figures and they developed into figures.

“I am not an intellectual; I depend massively on feelings. . . . I tried to make my paintings exceedingly alive, and I did that with figures but I would have done it with abstraction. . . . Ever since 1960 I have started my works abstractly and they configurate into figures.�

The process of “configurating� is one readily apparent to the eye; in McNeil’s early ‘60s paintings in the exhibition, robust female figures are high-keyed patches of color that seem to coalesce out of a flat universe of color planes.

Working in isolation, McNeil doesn’t recall much exchange of ideas among artists during the ‘50s. “Artists are so prejudiced,� he said. “You step on people’s toes and they step on your toes when you talk about art.�

Yet a significant influence on his work came from Existentialism.

“In the early ‘50s I was reading Kierkegaard and Sartre and Camus and that kind of thing was very much in the air.�

So he felt that he was working intuitively yet he was also influenced by Existentialism?

“It was a philosophy of feeling. Existentialism has never been acknowledged by the formal philosophers. They don’t consider someone like Sartre to be (worthy). I feel that way about post-modernism!�

During the past couple of decades, McNeil has been working in an vividly colored, sexually ripe Expressionist style. (“I deal with distortion a great deal and with absurdity.�)

But “a certain kind of seriousness� has always been paramount to his world view. “When someone like Warhol (used) cartoon figures in a very obvious way,� McNeil said, “I found it somewhat shocking.�