Existing comment:
1980-1982
The idealism of the sixties gradually wore away during the seventies with the war and the draft, political scandals, addiction, inflation, rising poverty and malaise, culminating in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, just as the AIDS epidemic was lurking just around the corner. Reagan's Inaugural Ball featured Donny and Marie Osmond as the entertainment, which was fairly emblematic of the Reagan era's repudiation of the counterculture.
Though Tom Green never became a figurative artist, he did develop his own iconography, and as non-objective as Green's paintings are, one can sense his firm grasp of reality, and tragedy, as he addressed overtly political and social conditions in his hybrid abstractions. Beirut brings the geographically remote human tragedy, the Siege of Beirut, then reported nightly on our television screens into our consciousness today. It asks us to consider our culpability in this and future tragedies, to bear witness.
Robin Rose's color-saturated, formal, minimal abstractions indicate that he is an heir to the Washington Color School, though his mastery of the encaustic technique and the numinous play of light and texture he achieves makes him his own one-man "School." Rapture directs our attention to the mysteries and spiritual possibilities made visible in his art in a way that makes Color School paintings appear stuck in the ground, flat, unable to fly.
Sam Gilliam broke all the rules by innovating, experimenting, looking forward. He took the Color School as his jumping off point and kept pushing and expanding the medium. Muse III is one of a four-painting series that displays his experimental collaging of thick layers of color-saturated acrylic polymer on a shaped canvas, recalling color patterns and shapes of African American quilt-making traditions from slavery up to the present. He broke the rectangle's tyranny by attaching a D-shaped enameled aluminum object to the lower right-hand corner. Gilliam made his own rules, disrupting the cool of the Color School.
Robert D'Arista represents the opposite end of the artistic spectrum. He was a major influence at American University and helped keep figurative and expressionist painting relevant. He arrived from Boston University freshly mentored by Phillip Guston, but his art looked back, past Alberto Giacometti and Giorgio Morandi, all the way back to the Italian Renaissance.
A comparison of D'Arista's Figure and Gilliam's Muse III says a lot about where we were in Washington then, and where we are today. Though differing wildly in scale, medium, and subject matter, both embraced the physicality of paint, and the expressive gesture of the brush, or in Gilliam's case, the rake and the knife. We've shown, beginning in 1957, the White mainstream's slow departure from these qualities of painting towards flat, decorative abstraction in Washington, and observed the painterly and expressive pushback through the seventies and into the eighties, led by the growing influence of feminist and African American artists. |