Word: neoexpressionists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Director Tom Armstrong valiantly tries to establish a link by pointing, in a catalog note, to Sargent's "highly expressive manner and his treatment of subject matter and narrative content, all of which are of great interest to contemporary artists." However, Sargent's "manner" was not that of a neoexpressionist but of a virtuoso; his drawing lacks the tenacity of an Eakins, let alone a Cezanne, yet it was drawing of a high order, heartless sometimes, but rarely less than dazzling in its fluency; and there is nothing like it in American art today. Sargent was certainly no modernist...
...very small as metaphor of the very large without being very explicit about it. The paint surface is too rough for that: heavily worked over, it is long on touch but short on info. At the same time, its muddy strength has little of the impetuous fervor of recent neoexpressionist painting. It is crusty and rather stolid. So what is going...
Winters thinks of the thick paint as "one of the tools and devices associated with expressionism"--but no more than that. He objects to being tagged as a neoexpressionist. "Whatever else it is about," he insists, "my work is not about the self. I want to get at something outside myself; one gets sick of looking at indulgent expressionist pictures that suck all the air out of the room." He prefers to think of his paintings as "diagrams that describe the way the world works," but one has to take this with a grain of salt. Actually, they come...
...could hardly be less like the ideal clarity and openness of traditional American abstract painting. It sounds like a terrible mess, but it does not cook out that way, for two reasons. The first is the strength of Alexander's imagery; the second, his formal control. Since most neoexpressionist painting is given to conventional signs for intensity but lacks formal rigor (a gut pile without shape), Alexander's work repays inspection...
| 1 |