Dancer XXVII

Description

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, George McNeil began his career in the city studying painting at Pratt Institute and, later, at the Art Students League with the painter and instructor Hans Hofmann. Rejecting the formal representation and regionalism of American artists of an earlier generation, McNeil’s earliest works of the 1930s were bold, intricate abstractions that introduced his characteristically vivid palette. The following decade he dedicated almost entirely to teaching painting, a profession that would support him throughout his life. While embracing the abstraction of the European modernists, McNeil, like Willem de Kooning, never fully abandoned the figure in his work and in the 1960s and 1970s focused exclusively upon the human form.
Dancer XXVII is a work from McNeil’s Dancer series. The surface of the canvas is densely layered with oil paint in some areas, while bare canvas is visible in others. This surface texture is the result of the artist working and reworking the canvas over a period of nearly five years in which heavy areas of oil paint were burned off with a blow torch and sealed with gesso. The colors, contrasts, and texture suggest an abstract composition yet the human figure is not only apparent but the focal point of the work. McNeil’s handling of the paint, the gestural application apparent in the energetic and rhythmic stroke, mirror the movement of the dancer. The viewer’s perspective, focused on the figure’s lower torso, illustrates by bended knee and extended leg the stance of a dancer and in its gestural, linear stroke suggests movement, perhaps that of the dancer caught in mid-step.
Katie Weiss, Research Assistant, on the occasion of the exhibition The New York School: Abstract Expressionism and Beyond and Beyond, July 20, 2002 – January 19, 2003