American Painting: The Eighties Revisited

By the late 1970s New York City was the center of the international art world. Video, photography, sculpture, and performance dominated the avant-garde. Art historian Barbara Rose (1936–2020) resisted this trend. She reasserted the supremacy of painting by curating the exhibition American Painting: The Eighties, A Critical Interpretation for New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in the Fall of 1979. It consisted of 41 paintings by 41 artists. Forty of those paintings are on view here.

Rose began writing art criticism in 1963 and gained influence through her columns in Vogue, Art International, and New York magazine. Due to her reputation, the show garnered dozens of reviews and an international tour. Critics took issue with the title of the exhibition. Though the paintings were from the 1970s and stylistically looked back to abstraction from earlier decades, the exhibition title touted that they represented the 1980s and the future. The controversy that the exhibition generated is testament to the boldness of its premise.

At the time the artists ranged in age from 27 to 52. All of them were focusing on formal concerns and the material qualities of paint. Most of them were relatively unknown. Eighteen were women at a time when women were underrepresented in the art world.

Many of the artists that Rose invited to exhibit went on to greater recognition. Forty-two years later, we have the opportunity to reflect upon how Rose’s commitment to showcasing painting may have reasserted its importance.

The Collectors
Ronnie Levinson Shore and John Shore were married in 1961 and purchased their first work of art that same year. Their collection now numbers more than 300, from ancient bronzes to contemporary paintings, and includes works by luminaries such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Over the years, they have maintained a residence in New York City to facilitate their transportation and real estate businesses, as well as their interest in art. In 1979 the Shores visited New York University’s Grey Art Gallery to see American Painting: The Eighties, A Critical Interpretation. At the time the Shores owned paintings by three of the 41 artists in the exhibition: Mark Schlesinger, Louisa Chase, and Richard Hennessey.

Art dealer Paul Haim purchased all 41 paintings in the exhibition directly from the artists. After closing at the Grey Art Gallery, the show toured until late 1982. In 1984, the Shores purchased 40 of the 41 paintings from Haim with the assistance of art advisor Leslie Rankow. One painting had already been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art. From the mid-1980s to 2018, the Shores displayed a portion of the exhibition in their office in Cincinnati and in their homes in Cincinnati and Jupiter, Florida. All 40 paintings are on exhibit here.

Recently the Shores have given more than 100 artworks to institutions such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Colby College Museum of Art, and the University of Cincinnati. The gift of these paintings from American Painting: The Eighties to the Cincinnati Art Museum represents the couple’s largest single donation of art to date.

The paintings that have long defined Rothenberg’s career feature horses. In these canvases, many of them produced between 1975 and 1980, Rothenberg depicted a singular horse leaping across or standing before a vacant space. Black in Place, 1976, which was included in American Painting: The Eighties, is one of these: a black horse framed by the silhouette of an orange triangle floats on a rectangular orange background.

“The horse was a symbol of people, a self-portrait, really,” Rothenberg once said. They earned her a place in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s famed New Image Painting exhibition. They were a hit with critics: “The pictorial evocation of checked, dislocated, tortured mind/body states makes for [a kind of intensity],” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in an Artforum review. The headline of the artist’s obituary in The New York Times stated that she “….breathed new life into painting when the genre was under siege in the 1970s.

Ronnie and John Shore purchased this untitled drawing as an homage to Black in Place, which is now part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in New York City.

“Painting is an affirmation of life.”

Elizabeth Murray earned an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and was a native of that city. The bold colors and cartoon aesthetic of the Chicago Imagists informed her paintings of the late 1970s as much as New York abstraction did. The parallelogram shape of Flesh, Earth and Sky represents the beginning phase of Murray’s shaped canvases, which later developed into fractured canvases. She was enthused by the pictorial possibilities of alternatives to the rectangle. In 1991 The New York Times heralded Murray as “one of the most esteemed artists to have emerged in America in the past decade.” In 2005 she was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It affirmed that her paintings continued to reference, celebrate, and push the limits of the medium itself.

“By adding an image to the paintings, I was trying to focus on a more central form, something that would pull you in to such an extent that it would almost turn back into an abstraction.”

Red Mill is an exercise in figure/ground relations, which has held Robert Moskowitz’s attention for years. No matter what his subject, it floats on an expansive monochromatic ground.

In 1978 he participated in the exhibition New Image Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art that defined the New Image movement. His work has been described as a “significant link between the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School and the ‘New Image Abstraction’ painters of the mid-1970s.”

“I see the most critical issue in painting today as one of continual renewal without repetition or imitation.”

In the late 1960s, Sam Gilliam began staining canvases then draping them from walls and ceilings. Other artists of that period painted unsized and unstretched canvases. But Gilliam was the only one who used canvas to create environments of color, integrating actual space, so that the artwork became part sculpture, part painting, part architecture. Because of this, his work is an important contribution to the history of American Formalism. Tequila is not one of these draped canvases but rather a collage of reassembled parts of paintings that extends around the stretcher’s edge, creating dimension and literal depth. The beveled sides are a testament to Gilliam’s attention to detail and craft. About Tequila critic Hal Foster stated, “One follows, with interest, the various scale of foci and the convergences and displacements that they create.”

A Black artist, Gilliam has been criticized by some for not addressing race and identity. “Art is art,” he stated in 2015, staying true to his formalist origins. In 2007 Gilliam was the subject of a 40-year retrospective that originated at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

“An equivalence is set up between the diversity of scale in the referential abstraction and the techniques utilized. The ‘meaning’ of the painting rests on this equivalency.”

Nancy Graves graduated with an MFA from Yale University in 1964. Five years later, her career was launched when she was the youngest artist—and only the fifth woman—to be selected for a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In the early to mid-1970s, she focused on assembled sculpture that referenced fossils, bones, and animals, and late in that decade, she returned to painting. She created quasi-abstractions in bright colors, culling from documentary nature photographs, NASA satellite recordings, lunar maps, and other scientific data. Strobia is an example of this.

Graves’s research-oriented approach was prescient, as many artists today mine data and technology as a basis for subject matter. Though strobia is not a word in English, a strobe is a lamp capable of producing a brilliant burst of light. A stroboscope is a device for studying the motion of the body. Bursts of light and physical movement seem to come together in this fluid and energetic painting.

“The reality with which I work is not intellectual or conceptual . . . but rather it is the exploration of pictorial tensions of form and space.”

Elaine Cohen was a pioneer in architectural identification, creating new typefaces and signs for buildings by architects Philip Johnson and Eero Saarinen. With her husband she established Ex Libris (1972–1993), a publisher that specialized in avant-garde art and architecture books.

Cohen painted through the 1980s, focusing on hard edges and bright colors such as those in Black Pilaster III. Late in her life, the artist stated, “My life as an artist has been shaped by two passions: for graphic design created in the public sphere on the one hand, and by the exploration of a related private vision in painting, on the other.”

“The most critical issue in painting today is to reinstate the importance of painting as a means of expression.”

In the early 1970s, Thorton Willis rolled his canvases out on the floor and painted grids, but he “wanted to bring it back to a figure-ground situation . . . and started to work on the wall again. . . and honed into a triangular shape.” He began is “Wedge Series,” of which this is one, in 1974. “I don’t see them as referring to anything outside of themselves,” he shared in an interview in the late 1970s. His paintings have been described as “displaced portraits.” For an exhibition in 2018, he juxtaposed brightly colored rectangles one against the other on 16 by 20-inch canvases.

"Painting for me is a constant search to hold a feeling tangible."

Ocean is an excellent example of the type of composition for which Louisa Chase is best known: large areas of bright, saturated colors reference both body and landscape and are simultaneously humorous and disturbing. Here cartoon-style hands emit lightning bolts of energy and float amongst waves. Due to paintings with this type of imagery, palette, and composition, the artist is identified with the New Image movement, as are three other painters in this exhibition: Lois Lane, Robert Moskowitz, and Susan Rothenberg. By the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, Chase's imagery evolved to be a tangle of frenetic marks and squiggles that often covered the surface from edge to edge.

“My image has become one central, radial and open and shut shape in the plane.”

Stewart Hitch’s obituary in The New York Times stated “ . . . by 1968, Hitch was evolving an engaging style that merged modernist geometric abstraction with the saturated stained colors of Color Field painting and infused the hybrid with a light streetwise insouciance . . . His early paintings concentrated on four- or five-pronged star shapes that evoked hastily sketched corporate logos . . . .” Ghost Rider is amongst these.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Hitch floated multiple geometric forms in layers on an atmospheric haze. A 1990 commentary on his artwork stated, “Hitch’s sly, abstract paintings invite us to think about the act of perception . . . What we see reminds us of how we see . . . effervescent spots of intense color generate vivid afterimages.” This is also true of Ghost Rider.

“The problem with the 60s and 70s was one of the painters missing meaning from the act of painting . . . Palette knives appeal to me more than brushes because they record the movement of my body . . . .”

Critic Hilton Kramer commented about Ega and other paintings like it, “Thorne squeezes out tubes and tubes of the luscious pigment in thick buttery ribbons. The colors are very pretty, and the ‘action’ they trace is suitably animated (though at the same time to be terribly well mannered.)”

“My work stems from previous painting and little else,” stated Dennis Ashbaugh in 1979. This is true of Untitled. But in the late 1980s, the artist took a turn and began representing laboratory analysis of chromatography, the scientific process whereby genetic material separates to reveal molecules that make up DNA. He conveyed this process in paintings where gradations of color reference this molecular transformation. Ashbaugh’s attention to color has persisted throughout his career, evident in the strokes of blue, purple, and red of Untitled.

In 1982 the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal (the final exhibition venue of American Paintings: The Eighties) purchased Ashbaugh’s Coma-Mom, 1979, from the exhibition. Untitled, 1983, replaced it in the Shore’s collection.

“I consider the reconciliation of elements from divergent traditions of painting.”

In November 1978, Carrie Rickey of Arts Magazine wrote a scathing review of Edward Youkilis’s art, “ . . . he’s a settler in the dominion of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis . . . his canvases resemble peeling flesh . . . they’re badly derivative, half-apologetic at their pedantic homage.” Despite Rickey’s opinion, Rose chose to include Youkilis in American Painting: The Eighties, a testament to her courage to go against the grain.

Fragrant Hill conveys circles and squares and half-spheres with expressiveness, combining the rigor of geometry with the emotion of gesture. Youkilis grew up in Cincinnati, earned an MFA from Yale University, and worked as an assistant to Helen Frankenthaler. He also worked in nightclubs and restaurants. In 2001 he opened his own place, Edward’s, on West Broadway in New York City, where he serves Cincinnati cuisine such as chili and ribs.

A self-taught artist who always sketched and drew as a child, Leonard Contino first used paint to pin-stripe cars and hot rods in his Brooklyn neighborhood. In 1962, as the age of 19, he suffered a severe spinal cord injury in a diving accident, which left him with quadriplegia. While receiving treatment at Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University, he met another patient, artist Mark di Suvero.

Encouraged by di Suvero, Contino, using a brace for his hand, started to make drawings and eventually to paint. White Water is an excellent example of the hard-edged geometric abstractions that Contino is known for and that are included in many prestigious collections. The artist’s work, which has been described as precisionist and visionary, explored pictorial space using dynamic geometric forms.

“The curved support is a very general realization of my experience in space.”

Ron Gorchov’s breakthrough on the New York art scene came in 1960, when he was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Young America 1960: Thirty Painters Under Thirty-Six. By 1969 he had completed his first painting on a concave canvas. Gorchov progressively altered the stretcher’s shape, ultimately finding his signature in the shield-shaped support that is both concave and convex. Double motifs of varying biomorphic, organic shapes, sometimes almost mirroring each other, float on the often loosely painted monochromatic background. Witch is an example of this. Gorchov adopted an ambidextrous way of painting, using his left hand for the left side and then switching to his right hand for the other side.

“Painting is so ancient. It must be a very powerful form to have stayed with us for so long.”

Like Susan Rothenberg and Robert Moskowitz, whose work is also included in this exhibition, Lois Lane was included in the seminal New Image painting exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 1978. In the early 1980s, the artist experimented with color and gesture. Later in the decade she returned to the restraint and subtlety of monochrome paintings such as Untitled, exhibited here. In 1987, esteemed New York Times critic Roberta Smith applauded Lane for her return “to her earlier use of emblematic silhouettes embedded in mysterious black-on-black surfaces.”

Howard Buchwald created actual space by piercing his canvases with smooth circular tubes that literally recess, testing our perception of implied and real space, and stretching the definition of the painting’s surface. They have been called “perspectival conundrums” and have also been interpreted as the painter’s play on the Renaissance theory of “cones of sight” and perspective.

In 1982 the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon Portugal (the final exhibition venue of American Paintings: The Eighties) purchased Buchwald’s Untitled (Wheeling), 1978–79, from the exhibition. This piece replaced it in the Shore’s collection.