ABSTRACT
More than any other second-generation figurative artist, Larry Rivers focused on the relationship between image and process. Rivers’s mixture of academicism and modernism was confusing at the time. Robert Goodnough was one of the more abstract of gestural realists. Goodnough’s art training contributed to his bent for traditionalism and contemporaneity. Jan Muller opened up new possibilities in gesture painting by shaping it into explicit mythic and religious symbols, both abstract and figurative, and often literary in origin. Like Muller, Lester Johnson searched for images that symbolized the human condition, but he depended more on the improvisational process of painting than on literary themes. Like Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein was a realist at heart, but more than they, he submitted to the influence of gesture painting. Grace Hartigan’s imagery was verging toward the recognizable, but her move to realism had another, more urgent stimulus: the problem of meaning.
