Bad Painting

"Bad" Painting is the name critic and curator Marcia Tucker gave to a tendency in American figurative painting of the 1970s, and to the exhibition she organized at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1978. Tucker's scare quotes matter: "bad" meant deliberately at odds with prevailing standards of good painting, not incompetent. The fourteen artists - mostly unknown in New York at the time - discarded classical drawing modes to present humorous, sardonic, intensely personal visions, mixing art-historical references with comics and other non-art sources. The show defined no movement; its loose, iconoclastic, often funny pictures offered an alternative to the period's Minimalism and Photorealism, and it is often read as a precursor of Neo-Expressionism and of the bad-painting debates of the 1980s.

Defining characteristics

• Deliberate deformation of the figure, flouting classical drawing
• Art-historical references mixed with non-art sources, especially comics and commercial illustration
• Fantastic, irreverent, often sardonic content that scorns good taste
• Loose, casual brushwork and deliberately "bad" drawing used as a stance, not a failing
• Humor and parody held together with intensely personal fantasy

Key figures

• Marcia Tucker (1940-2006) — Critic and New Museum founder who named the trend and curated the 1978 exhibition
• Neil Jenney (b. 1945) — Painter of simply outlined objects on roughly brushed grounds (Girl and Vase)
• Joan Brown (1938-1990) — Bay Area painter whose Woman Wearing a Mask was a standout of the exhibition
• Judith Linhares (b. 1940) — Painter of decorative, centrally placed motifs in loose, bright brushwork

Example works

• Woman Wearing a Mask — Joan Brown (1972)
• Girl and Vase — Neil Jenney (1969)
• Turkey — Judith Linhares (1977)

Sources

• Bad Painting - Wikipedia encyclopedia

← Back to the catalog