George McNeil

B. New York, NY, 1908
D. Brooklyn, NY, 1995

George McNeil (b. 1908, New York, d. 1995, New York) constantly explored the boundaries of figuration and abstraction to achieve unmediated expression on canvas. McNeil trained at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students’ League before studying with Hans Hoffmann from 1932 until 1936. During this decade, McNeil joined the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration and helped to establish the American Abstract Artists alongside Josef Albers, Ibram Lassaw, Mercedes Matter, and other New York artists advocating for the acceptance of abstract art in the United States. During World-War II, McNeil served in the U.S. Navy. When he returned from service in 1946, he began teaching, for two years at the University of Wyoming at Laramie and then at Pratt Institute and the New York Studio School in New York. When school was not in session, he spent summers in the art colony of Provincetown, MA. A first-generation Abstract Expressionist, he began showing at Charles Egan Gallery in 1950 and participated in the historic Ninth Street Show the following year. His paintings of the early 1950s reflect his formalist training and his interest in modern painting ranging from German Expressionism to Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse. It was not until the mid-1950s that, as he recalled, “I realized that there was a distinctly free style called ‘Expressionism’ and that other modern styles had their own unique types of expression. Without any great theorizing or soul searching, my painting ideas crystalized into a unified compulsion to achieve ever-increasing sensateness.” Over the next four decades, McNeil strove to create immediacy within his work.

In the mid-1950s, McNeil was a prominent member of the Abstract Expressionist scene. He began showing with the Poindexter Gallery and had a solo exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in 1956. McNeil remained committed to putting an expression true to his experiences and emotional life onto the canvas. As Irving Sandler wrote in 1959, “Not only are McNeil’s pictures passionate records of a personal search for order, but they are also profound insights into man’s condition – his perpetual striving to create order in chaos; hope being found in momentary resolutions and in the ability to continue to struggle,” and ultimately described McNeil as “one of the most uncompromising Action Painters in New York.”

By 1960, McNeil reintroduced figuration into his compositions, using abstracted subject matter as a means to achieve greater psychological effects within his paintings. He had joined a life-drawing group where, alongside Matter, Philip Pearlstein, and Philip Guston, he drew the female figure. His works made between 1960 and 1961, such as Augury, mark the beginning of his preoccupation with the figure. These paintings, with their sharply delineated bodies painted in bright, contrasting colors, integrate subject matter into an abstract composition. As Judith Higgins wrote in the exhibition catalogue for The Figurative Fifties, in Augury, “McNeil deliberately ‘implores, grasps, and outlines’ the improvised figure as it emerges from the interplay of lines, shapes, and colors – a practice that he would follow with increasing intensity in the years to come.”

In 1960, he had his first solo exhibition at Howard Wise Gallery, frequently showing there for the next decade. McNeil has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and has been included in group shows at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is in numerous public collections including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA.