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Ab/Ex Highlights from the 1963 Buying Trip

  1. Charles Cajori (1921) Small Figure, 1962, Oil on Canvas
  2. Elaine de Kooning (1918) Portrait of Eddie #2, 1961, Oil on Masonite
  3. George McNeil (1908) Longing, 1962-1963, Oil on Plywood

Sixty years ago the Student Union Art Acquisition Committee was formed and planned its first-ever art-buying trip to New York City that would turn Wake Forest into a university with an affluent and ever-growing art collection. The 1960s were a time in United States history full of political and social change: an unprecedented economic boom, the competitive space race, the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of the feminism movement and the Feminine Mystique, and the assassination of JFK. From the 1940s to the early 1960s, a contemporary art movement dominated the field- the Abstract Expressionist movement. This movement, developed by American painters, highlights the spontaneity of brushstrokes thus creating abstract forms that evoke an emotional response. Themes around Abstract Expressionism were developed from surrealist thought and the idea that art should develop from the subconscious, a different approach to art than the pre-WWII Early Abstraction and Surrealist art movements. Specifically, the years 1962 and 1963 were important for modern art: Abstract Expressionism was put on the back burner while Pop Art started trending. While Pop Art was on the rise, Ab/Ex continued to inspire artists, including those we know hold in our collection. We will highlight three works from the 1963 buying trip that these action painters, George McNeil and Charles Cajori, executed with an Ab/Ex style in mind, while the artist Elaine de Kooning incorporated figuration into her piece, a style that she never fully abandoned.

Lilly Reed '23

Ab-Ex-ing

The terms applied to art periods, movements and styles reflect the human intellectual impulse to create heuristics – shorthands – for complex and various works that are exceptions as often as they are adherents to a category’s parameters. Two of the three paintings here are more, or less, figurative. Yet “orthodox” Abstract Expressionism, the school, tendency or “style” they are often associated with, abjured figuration. At least in the influential critic/promoter Clement Grenberg’s pontifications, the work was to be concerned with its own means of production, large-scale, non-mimetic, flat, with gesticulates or nimbuses of “pure” painting; certainly not depictive of recognizable subjects.

Elaine de Kooning’s 1961 Portrait of Eddie #2, like much of her work, although loose and gestural, is clearly is a likeness of a human figure. She seems implicated by association with Ab-Ex through the person of her husband, Willem de Kooning (who more closely followed – or created – many of the movement’s strictures).

Charles Cajori’s paint handling in Small Figure of the following year would have passed for Ab-Ex, but the artist stumbled with the title, which directs us to quickly coalesce a figure out of its softened, allusive, planar masses, looking as if Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase had tripped and ended up on the landing of the stairs.

Of the three, only George McNeil’s 1962-3 Longing would check most of the Greenbergian boxes (though it is a little small), with its engaging indulgences of thickly-applied paint, allegedly indicative of nothing but its own bittersweet pleasures.

Paul , Director of Hanes Art Gallery

The FOCUS series features one artwork per month from the Wake Forest University Art Collections. Reflections from students, faculty, staff and alumni are encouraged. To include your voice in the dialogue, contact artcollections@wfu.edu.

Works Purchased on the 1963 Student Buying Trip

Copyrights retained by the artists or artist representatives, and © David Findlay, Jr. (Small Figure)
www.wakethearts.wfu.edu