Making the case for figuration.

Every city has its little, uncrowded museums offering special pleasures to the initiated. In Paris, there's the Musee Dapper, with its superb exhibitions of African art, hidden behind a bourgeois apartment house. In London, there are Sir John Soane's Museum, in Holborn, a marriage of rationalism and idiosyncracy, and the Soane-designed Dulwich Picture Gallery, in the depths of SE 21, a rare combination of marvelous paintings and innovative architecture; each of them is celebrated in its way, but so sparsely visited that I tend to think of them as private treasures. In London, too, I'm partial to the Sigmund Freud Museum: the house where he lived and worked for the last year of his life, a slice of Mitteleuropa transplanted from Vienna to a quiet Hampstead street--library, antiquities, and all, including, of course, the famous desk and couch. What may be the ultimate obscure attraction--another favorite--is to be found in Venice, near the furthest end of the Fondamente Nuove: a cycle of splendid frescos by Palma Giovane in the tiny Oratorio dei Crociferi, which is open only between April and October, three days a week for a couple of hours, either morning or afternoon, depending.

New York has its share of such quirky, even cranky, institutions. There's the Dahesh Museum, a shrine to academic exoticism, and a truly bizarre institution on the Upper West Side, with a permanent exhibition of the works of Nicholas Roerich, known to balletomanes as the designer of the sets and costumes for the first production of The Rite of Spring, who turns out to have produced innumerable (forgettable) paintings of remote, frozen places fraught with mystical and spiritual overtones. And since last April, we have the Center for Figurative Painting, a labyrinth of clean, white rooms on the second floor of an office building on a block of West 30th Street otherwise given over to furriers. Describing itself as "an academically oriented exhibition space, with a permanent collection of over 100 works by major American painters" the Center is dedicated to enlarging public awareness of what it calls "New York postwar representational painting." This, in the Center's view, is one of modernism's vital, continuing traditions, one that embodies "the pursuit and commitment to serious ... painting at its highest levels" but whose history has not yet been properly told. At the Center, "New York postwar representational painting" translates, with some exceptions, into those members of the New York School's second generation--born mainly in the 1920s and 1930s--who trained at Hans Hofmann's legendary school, absorbed his principles of formal structure, and then went on to paint not firmly constructed, color-based abstractions, as you might expect of Hofmann students, but instead devoted themselves to recognizable images rooted in perception. Or, as the Center's printed material describes it, they applied "an abstract sense of space and color" to -traditional genres of painting-still life, landscape, and the figure"

Like the more or less contemporaneous "School of London," the group of casually associated figurative artists, including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, R. B. Kitaj, and Euan Uglow, who came to prominence in England in the wake of the Second World War, "New York postwar representational painting" seems to have been less a formal movement than a state of mind. Yet in New York, as in London, insisting on figuration was a radical, if unfashionable, approach, in the years when Abstract Expressionism was seen as painting's most fruitful direction, and remained radical--and largely unfashionable--through the advent of Color-Field painting, Pop Art, Minimalism, and the vagaries of postmodernism. Unlike the artists associated with the School of London today, most of the exponents of "New York postwar representational painting" are not widely acclaimed. This is not to say that the Center for Figurative Painting is dedicated to the work of unknowns or "marginalized" figures. While most of the painters the Center espouses are anything but household names, they have considerable reputations as both practitioners and teachers, admired not only by their like-minded colleagues, but also by loyal collectors, museum curators, and supportive critics. Yet it is probably safe to say that none of them is likely to be offered a retrospective at the Guggenheim or the Whitney in the foreseeable future. (Neither are a good many first-rate abstract painters of the same generation, alas.) Hence the Center for Figurative Painting, whose optimistic mission is to make it possible for people to see "great examples" of this alternative tradition of "painting at its highest levels"

Hard as it is to deny the appeal of such deep, whole-hearted enthusiasm, it is also impossible to ignore the awkward questions provoked by the underlying premise of the Center. An exhibition space devoted exclusively to figurative painting presupposes that images that resemble something recognizable are entirely different from images that don't--a slippery notion, at best. Hofmann, for one, would almost certainly have argued that all paintings depend on the same kind of formal, structural underpinnings, no matter what their nominal subject. How, then, to justify the ghettoization of representational painting implicit in the Center's very existence? In the present freewheeling, all-is-permitted art world, figuration no longer seems to require defending the way it did in the 1950s or the way abstraction did in the early part of the twentieth century (and may still today). But even if we agree that non-ironic art based on perceptions of the visible world needs a little extra help these days, why exclude figurative sculpture? (Yes, I know sculpture is harder to transport, install, and store than painting.)

The most awkward question, of course, is whether the Center's program lives up to its high-minded goals, and it's too soon to tell. The collection can not yet be described as comprehensive, including as it does only works by Paul Georges, Leland Bell, Peter Heinemann, Aristodemos Kaldis, and Albert Kresch. They are all painters worth attention, to be sure, and mostly far less known than their work merits, but even the most partisan observer could not call this list a representative cross-section of postwar figuration in New York. The Center's exhibition program bespeaks larger ambitions. The inaugural show was a Georges retrospective, but the current exhibition, "Reconfiguring the New York School,"(1) seems designed to retell the history of New York art by presenting a broad range of approaches to figure painting, plus the occasional landscape, during (mostly) the 1960s and 1970s. If this description seems fuzzy, it is because the show itself, unfortunately, lacks clarity, coming across as a very good idea that somehow lost direction as it became a reality. A moody Georges, Artist in Studio (1963, Center for Figurative Painting), one of his ongoing series of vigorously brushed self-portraits, in many ways sets the tone for the entire exhibition, as a celebration of the painter's roles as observer, recorder, and inventor. A selection of well-known and not so well-known artists includes self-conscious stylists such as Larry Rivers and Lester Johnson, dispassionate realists such as Fairfield Porter and Albert York, cool observers such as Philip Pearlstein and Alex Katz, and full-blown romantics such as Jan Muller and Georges, plus Lennart Anderson, Leland Bell, Nell Blaine, Robert de Niro, Sr., Jane Freilicher, Peter Heinemann, Albert Kresch, Louisa Matthiasdottir, and Paul Resika. So far, so good, if the aim was to be thorough but not entirely predictable. But the resulting mix seems either too inclusive or not comprehensive enough. The effect is rather hit or miss, albeit with the best of intentions.

On the plus side, "Reconfiguring the New York School" includes some works worth seeing in any context, along with others that, while not in the first rank, nevertheless help to broaden our understanding of just what seemed possible (or impossible) to New York painters who came of age during the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism and its aftermath. Leland Bell's rock-solid, fiercely modeled Morning H (1978-81, Center for Figurative Painting), for example, with its deep, cool shadows and glowing patches of light, proves that intellect and perception can coexist, almost in the way they do in Poussin's pictures but in wholly twentieth-century terms devoid of moralizing and conventional narrative. The painting, one of a series that rings subtle changes on an enigmatic grouping of a standing nude woman, a sleeping man, and a cat who has just deposited a dead bird beside the bed, seems at once to sum up the ordinary and point to the mysterious. Like all of Bell's mature paintings, Morning II inextricably fuses the sensual, the architectural, and the abstract. A more off-hand Bell, Croquet Party (1965, Center for Figurative Painting), is like a dissection of a holiday snapshot, noteworthy ...