American Figurative Expressionism

also: Figurative Expressionism

movement 1930s-present United States

American Figurative Expressionism took hold in 1930s Boston among immigrant artists - Karl Zerbe, Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine - and spread across the United States as the humanist counterweight to Abstract Expressionism. Its name arose as a deliberate counter-distinction to abstraction: these painters kept the figure, the face, and the story while borrowing the emphatic brushwork, bold color, and emotional charge of German Expressionism. The tendency had regional lives - the Boston group, New York's figurative fifties, Chicago's Monster Roster, and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of David Park and Richard Diebenkorn - and each wrestled with the same question: how to be modern and still picture human experience. Critics have always found it hard to define; its constant is a radical, rather than reactionary, commitment to the figure.

Lead image of the Wikipedia article "American Figurative Expressionism".
Lead image of the Wikipedia article "American Figurative Expressionism".CC BY-SA 3.0 · source

Defining characteristics

  • The human figure kept as the central subject, handled with radical rather than academic technique
  • Emphatic, visible brushwork and bold, often dissonant color
  • Emotional and psychological weight: grief, fantasy, allegory, mortality, satire
  • Painterly surfaces where the figure borders on abstraction at the edges
  • Socially engaged subjects - the artist as witness to violence, corruption, and war

Key figures

  • Hyman Bloom (1913-2009) — Boston painter of mystical and macabre subjects, once hailed as 'the first abstract expressionist'
  • Jack Levine (1915-2010) — Socially biting painter of politicians, police, and urban life
  • Karl Zerbe (1903-1972) — German-born teacher at Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts who seeded the movement
  • David Park (1911-1960) — Spark of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, who burned his abstractions to return to the figure
  • Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) — Bay Area painter who moved between figuration and abstraction

Example works

  • The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti — Ben Shahn (1931-32)
  • Kids on Bikes — David Park (1951)

Sources

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