The Joy of Eighties Art

The powerful excitement of the decade has been languishing in a blind spot of art history. An exhibit at the Whitney comes to the rescue.

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Starting in the late nineteen-seventies, young American artists plunged, pell-mell, into making figurative paintings. That seemed ridiculously backward by the lights of the time’s reigning vanguards of flinty post-minimalism, cagey conceptualism, and chaste abstraction. The affront was part of the appeal. As with contemporaneous punk music, sheer nerve rocketed impudent twentysomethings to stardom on New York’s downtown scene. The powerful excitement of that moment has been languishing in a blind spot of recent art history, but “Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s,” at the Whitney, a show of works by thirty-seven artists from the museum’s collection, comes to the rescue. Some of the names are famous: Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring. Others, less widely renowned, are solidly established: Susan Rothenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Terry Winters, Carroll Dunham. But even the relatively obscure—including such sleeper heroes as Leon Golub, Robert Colescott, Mary Heilmann, and Moira Dryer—enhance the show’s sense of timely revaluing. What the moment meant, what happened to eclipse it, and how its legacy might nourish the present are questions sharply posed.

Partly, there’s the tonic shock of encountering again, in person, works that are traduced by reproduction, which muffles their keynotes of material, touch, and scale. I am no great fan of Schnabel, the era’s bombast-in-chief, born in Brooklyn and raised in Brownsville, Texas. But his “Hope” (1982), in oils on midnight-blue velvet, more than nine feet tall and thirteen feet wide, gave me reminiscent joy. He was the ice-breaking heavyweight of neo-expressionism in New York. Sketchy images of two figures, a skull, and what might be plants are incidental to the novelty of a medium associated with kitsch. The resistance and the give of velvet to an energetic brush, causing clumps and yielding skids of paint, suggest the bliss of a musician exploring the virtues of a new instrument. Schnabel saved the picture from a risk of over-all sludge with eruptions of reds, oranges, and neon-bright greens. The possibilities for expression that he introduced in the process didn’t develop much in his later work. Schnabel’s only real subject—apart from his fine work as a movie director—has been his own willfulness. Back then, though, he was an inescapable force for change.

Salle, an Oklahoman schooled at the avant-gardist hotbed of CalArts, in Valencia, California, likewise hit on a sensationally innovative aesthetic, whose promise also stalled, in arbitrary permutations. A large painting of his in the show, “Sextant in Dogtown” (1987), belongs to a late phase of his best work, which usually involves borrowed images rendered in secondhand techniques of schematic design and opaque-projector-aided copying. Here, three abutted panels present grisaille images, clearly from photographs, of a woman awkwardly posing in a bra, with and without panties. (Offensive? Sure, and plainly on purpose, but smoothly at one with Salle’s attitude toward all his subjects.) A small inset panel pictures a dead bird. Above them, in acrid colors, are images of antique clown dolls and a cartoon of a top-hatted seafarer wielding a sextant. I was an enthusiast, early on, of Salle’s chilled suggestiveness of feelings imperfectly remembered and experiences vainly anticipated—his “icy melancholy,” as Janet Malcolm called it in this magazine. It seemed to me a distillation of the poetic powers that are essential to painting. It still does, but with less of the emotional jolt that distinguished his début.

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