The New New Group

XXXXXThe English art historian, Alan Bowness, has written that “most truly original new art is the result of group activity. It appears that the conjunction of several exceptional talents results in something that is greater than the parts”. This has been true throughout history and especially in modern times, when a group of artists with a shared new vision, often find themselves isolated outside the official art world. Under these conditions, a group provides confirmation, inspiration, competition (maintaining level), the sharing of technical information, and exhibition opportunities. New York’s official art world should ponder why it is that the New New is the only such avant garde group on the scene today.

XXXXXThe name “New New Painting” is meant in part ironically but also seriously. It is a challenge and bespeaks a brassy confidence. The New New have a New York attitude and might be called the “New York School Outside New York”. They are an international group of individuals, most of whom are Americans, and all of whom visit New York City often, but none of whom live or work there. They live in towns in New England and New York State, with individual members in Toronto, Edmonton and Paris. Outside New York, it is cheaper to live and one avoids becoming part of the intense matrix that is New York and its art world. One is more easily in touch with oneself. Already with Pollock’s move to East Hampton in 1945, New York School painting, which was all about getting and keeping in touch with oneself, felt more at home outside New York City. This was repeated with the Washington Color School and the group at Bennington Vermont in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Although scattered between France and Western Canada, the New New are their own audience, like the original New York School. Each is strongly independent and geographically isolated. Ease of travel and cyberspace lets painting's avant garde exist today without urban watering holes like cafes and bars.

What is New New Painting?

New New painting can be said to spring from three sources:

1. All of the New New painters see themselves as successors of Jackson Pollock and The New York School: Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. They see this as the Modernist Mainstream, a continuous, self-aware, “tradition of the new”, which began with Pollock and has been unfolding over the last 60 years. Second generation Colorfield painters and especially Jules Olitski were the dominant figures, within this tradition in the '70s, and early '80s, when the New New were young artists searching for themselves. Almost all of them had an early Olitski - influenced phase. They worship Olitski as the painter’s painter, the non plus ultra of exquisite refinement and sublimity. They also love Morris Louis’ passionate purity and sweeping power as well as Kenneth Noland’s bold, brilliant, pure color improvisations. They have been inspired by Larry Poon’s indulgence and audacity in handling the medium. Helen Frankenthaler, Friedel Dzubus and Jack Bush were also among their heroes. And they were confirmed by Walter Darby Bannard, Dan Christensen, Peter Bradley, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Jill Nathanson, Sandi Slone, Darryl Hughto, Susan Roth and many others.

It is testimony to the largeness of Olitski’s art that he dominated the Mainstream, New York School painting, for so long. Only in 1982 did a challenger appear, one who was strong enough, large enough, and unique enough, to challenge Olitski and set Modernist painting on a new course. This was Lucy Baker. Neither a pure colorist like Noland, nor a pure painter like Olitski, she is an expressionist, sculptor – draughtsman type, like Picasso, David Smith or Pollock, who constantly returns to the human figure, and who knows how to make paint serve the artistic will. Baker electrifies Color Field with her ferocious drawing even as she set gross physicality against its disembodied opticality. Instead of a light and color inflected field, there is a clash of extremes. Almost simultaneously, Baker’s colleague, Graham Peacock, an Englishman living in Canada, created his own version of pure color plus raw expressionism and the New New was born.