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Lot Essay
“Abstraction and realism exist side by side, but one is always dominant. For many years realism dominated. But around 1900, with the passing of the French Academy, realism started to become impotent. Freud’s influence took artists further from realism and into Surrealism. Gradually, the cycle shifted to abstraction. In the 60s, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art mutated into Minimalism. Years ago I predicted that a return to realism was inevitable. A realism that is a kind of expressionism.”
(N. Jenney quoted by P. Gardner, Neil Jenney: The Bad Years, 1969-70, New York, 2001, p. 6)
Created during the period known, rather ironically, as Neil Jenney’s “Bad Years,” Beast and Burden is a striking example of the artist’s distinctive style of representational painting. Brash, cool and undaunted, in this large-scale painting, Jenney fuses gestural brushstrokes with the figurative depiction of what appears to be a bucolic scene. Reacting against the contemporaneous movements of Minimalism and Photorealism, Jenney rose to fame in the late 1960s with his unique representational style of painting that pared down features to their most essential colors and forms, rendering simple relationships among humans, objects, and landscape in large, visible brushstrokes.
Beast and Burden features a large, old-fashioned plow and muscular brown bull placed side by side, standing in a field of grass. Although the field is large and receding, Jenney’s high vantage point, simplified use of color, and cropping of the composition create a scene that is insolently flat; while the gestural treatment of brushstrokes and reduced forms epitomize Jenney’s distinctive stylistic approach to realism. As Jenney stated, “The photo-realists tried to be perfect, to hide the brushstrokes, so… I’ll show the brushstrokes, really smeary, I won’t spend time refining lines and details because I’m not trying to mimic a photograph” (N. Jenney quoted by P. Gardner, Neil Jenney: The Bad Years, 1969-70, New York, 2001, p. 11). Below the painted image, Jenney has written the title, Beast of Burden, in bolded, silver, capitalized letters on the black artist’s frame.
Neil Jenney’s distinctive style emerged in the late 1960s in direct response to the concurrent dominance of Minimalism and Photorealism. Rejecting the high-gloss precision of these respective movements, Jenney sought to create a new form of figurative art in which narrative truth was found in the simple relationships of objects. As demonstrated in Beast and Burden, Jenney's subsequent style was purposefully rough and gestural, yet quintessentially figurative in nature–a style which epitomizes the fusion of realism and expressionism that Jenney strived for. Jenney’s deceivingly simple imagery and textural juxtapositions convey the temporality of his scenes in both the real, and imagined, world, while his clever fusion of representation, expressionism and the conceptual implications of his inclusion of text make his paintings as thought-provoking as they are playfully brazen.
The years 1969-1970 are often referred to as Jenney’s “Bad Years,” in which he intentionally sought to make “bad” paintings that defied the austerity of both minimalism and hyperrealism. Ironically, Jenney’s paintings from the “Bad Years” are also his most prized, and institutionally recognized. In 1978, Marcia Tucker curated an eponymous group exhibition entitled “Bad Painting,” a show of so-called ‘bad’ paintings and drawings by fourteen artists who consciously rejected the traditional concepts of draftsmanship in favor of personal styles of figuration, which included the work of Jenney and his contemporaries. Tucker meant her title to be ironic: the work was not actually “bad,” but rather defiant. Opposed to finished surfaces, this work was iconoclastic in its boldly nonchalant representation, and its challenges to prevailing norms of skill, technique, and finish.
As such, Jenney’s Beast and Burden is the perfect example of this “Bad Painting.” In his willfully rapid, faux-naïve approach to painting, Jenney’s work utterly defies the classical cannons of draftsmanship and painting, in such a profound way as to question the very nature of value judgments of art. In such, Jenney’s idiosyncratic and revolutionary approach to painting can be accredited with anticipating the burgeoning spread of representational art and Neo-Expressionist movement that would come in the years to follow. In her review of Jenney’s 2001 exhibition New York Times critic, Roberta Smith accurately summarizes the artist’s vibrant oeuvre as follows: “Mr. Jenney helped put representational painting on a new course and established precedents for the art of the 1970's, 80's and 90's in ways that have yet to be fully recognized” (R. Smith in “ART REVIEW: And When He Was Bad, He Certainly Was Busy,” The New York Times, March 30, 2001).
(N. Jenney quoted by P. Gardner, Neil Jenney: The Bad Years, 1969-70, New York, 2001, p. 6)
Created during the period known, rather ironically, as Neil Jenney’s “Bad Years,” Beast and Burden is a striking example of the artist’s distinctive style of representational painting. Brash, cool and undaunted, in this large-scale painting, Jenney fuses gestural brushstrokes with the figurative depiction of what appears to be a bucolic scene. Reacting against the contemporaneous movements of Minimalism and Photorealism, Jenney rose to fame in the late 1960s with his unique representational style of painting that pared down features to their most essential colors and forms, rendering simple relationships among humans, objects, and landscape in large, visible brushstrokes.
Beast and Burden features a large, old-fashioned plow and muscular brown bull placed side by side, standing in a field of grass. Although the field is large and receding, Jenney’s high vantage point, simplified use of color, and cropping of the composition create a scene that is insolently flat; while the gestural treatment of brushstrokes and reduced forms epitomize Jenney’s distinctive stylistic approach to realism. As Jenney stated, “The photo-realists tried to be perfect, to hide the brushstrokes, so… I’ll show the brushstrokes, really smeary, I won’t spend time refining lines and details because I’m not trying to mimic a photograph” (N. Jenney quoted by P. Gardner, Neil Jenney: The Bad Years, 1969-70, New York, 2001, p. 11). Below the painted image, Jenney has written the title, Beast of Burden, in bolded, silver, capitalized letters on the black artist’s frame.
Neil Jenney’s distinctive style emerged in the late 1960s in direct response to the concurrent dominance of Minimalism and Photorealism. Rejecting the high-gloss precision of these respective movements, Jenney sought to create a new form of figurative art in which narrative truth was found in the simple relationships of objects. As demonstrated in Beast and Burden, Jenney's subsequent style was purposefully rough and gestural, yet quintessentially figurative in nature–a style which epitomizes the fusion of realism and expressionism that Jenney strived for. Jenney’s deceivingly simple imagery and textural juxtapositions convey the temporality of his scenes in both the real, and imagined, world, while his clever fusion of representation, expressionism and the conceptual implications of his inclusion of text make his paintings as thought-provoking as they are playfully brazen.
The years 1969-1970 are often referred to as Jenney’s “Bad Years,” in which he intentionally sought to make “bad” paintings that defied the austerity of both minimalism and hyperrealism. Ironically, Jenney’s paintings from the “Bad Years” are also his most prized, and institutionally recognized. In 1978, Marcia Tucker curated an eponymous group exhibition entitled “Bad Painting,” a show of so-called ‘bad’ paintings and drawings by fourteen artists who consciously rejected the traditional concepts of draftsmanship in favor of personal styles of figuration, which included the work of Jenney and his contemporaries. Tucker meant her title to be ironic: the work was not actually “bad,” but rather defiant. Opposed to finished surfaces, this work was iconoclastic in its boldly nonchalant representation, and its challenges to prevailing norms of skill, technique, and finish.
As such, Jenney’s Beast and Burden is the perfect example of this “Bad Painting.” In his willfully rapid, faux-naïve approach to painting, Jenney’s work utterly defies the classical cannons of draftsmanship and painting, in such a profound way as to question the very nature of value judgments of art. In such, Jenney’s idiosyncratic and revolutionary approach to painting can be accredited with anticipating the burgeoning spread of representational art and Neo-Expressionist movement that would come in the years to follow. In her review of Jenney’s 2001 exhibition New York Times critic, Roberta Smith accurately summarizes the artist’s vibrant oeuvre as follows: “Mr. Jenney helped put representational painting on a new course and established precedents for the art of the 1970's, 80's and 90's in ways that have yet to be fully recognized” (R. Smith in “ART REVIEW: And When He Was Bad, He Certainly Was Busy,” The New York Times, March 30, 2001).