This publication accompanies the Figuration Never Died: New York Painterly Painting, 1950-1970
exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. By about 1950,
forward-looking New York painting was seen as synonymous with
abstraction- especially charged, gestural Abstract Expressionism. But
there was also a strong group of dissenters; artists, all born in the
1920s and many of them students of Hans Hofmann, who never lost their
enthusiasm for the seductive qualities of thick, malleable oil paint.
They remained, for the most part, 'painterly' painters. These rebellious
artists include Lois Dodd, Jane Freilicher, Paul Georges, Grace
Hartigan, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Albert Kresch, Robert de Niro Sr., Paul
Resika, and Anne Tabachnick. The compelling figurative work they made
between about 1950 and 1970, in contrast to the prevailing Abstract
Expressionism of the time, constitutes a significant chapter in the
history of recent American Modernism.

Contributions by: Karen Wilkin, Danny Lichtenfeld
Foreword by: Bruce Weber