New Images of Man and Woman

New Images of Man and Woman

December 4, 2009 - January 30, 2010, Alphonse Berber Gallery, Berkeley, California

Introduction

It is fifty years now since I curated the exhibition New Images of Man at the Museum of Modern Art. This show and its catalogue have become iconic for its recognition that even in an age in which abstraction was the dominant style, the human image continued to be of great concern to artists who reaffirmed its persistent presence even after Auschwitz and Hiroshima.  In addition to presenting the work of leading figurative artists: Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon and painters Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, who turned to figuration at the time, I was able to introduce Europeans including Karl Appel, César, Germaine Richier and Eduardo Paolozzi to the American public as well as Americans, little known in New York at that time, such as Leon Golub, H. C. Westermann, Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira. Now, fifty years later, after Pop Art and Op Art, Conceptual Art, Video, Happenings and Performance Art, Earth Art and Land Art made their mark, painters and sculptors continue to create images of human beings, because, as Leonard Baskin affirmed fifty years ago: "Our human frame, our gutted mansion, our enveloping sack of beef and ash is yet a glory. Glorious in defining sodality and glorious in defining utter uniqueness" (1). The artists chosen for this exhibition have not broken new ground toward pictorial formulations, they are not often on the cutting edge, but then we've seen too many sharp edges go blunt too soon. It was Georges Braque, a great innovator himself, who said: "I am not a revolutionary painter; I am not seeking exaltation. Fervor is enough for me" (2).

by Peter Selz

(1) "Our human frame, our gutted mansion, our enveloping sack of beef and ash is yet a glory. Glorious in defining our universal sodality and glorious in defining our utter uniqueness. The human figure is the image of all men and of one man. It contains all and it can express all…to search the maze of man’s physicality, to wander the body’s magnitudes is to search for the image of man. And in the act of discovery lies the act of communication. A common communal communication of necessity." – Leonard Baskin (1922-2000), Northampton, Massachusetts, April 23, 1959
(2) "Je ne fais pas comme je veux, je fais comme je peux .. . Je prends mon bien partout où il me trouve... L'émotion ne s'ajoute ni ne s'imite: elle est le germe, et l'œuvre est l'éclosion... J'aime l'émotion qui corrige la règle, et la règle qui corrige l'émotion... La noblesse vient de l'émotion contenue... L'artiste qui ne rencontre plus de résistance touche à la perfection, mais ce n'est qu'une perfection technique... La personnalité de l'artiste n'est pas faite de l'ensemble de ses tics... Je ne suis pas un peintre révolutionnaire. Je ne cherche pas l'exaltation, la ferveur me suffit." - Georges Braque, Cahier de Georges Braque. 1917-1947 (Paris, Maeght Editeur 1948) p.34

artist-info.com Exhibition Page
https://www.artist-info.com/exhibition/Alphonse-Berber-Gallery-Id386941