ABSTRACT
Much of pattern and decoration painting, for instance, that of Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, and Robert Zakanitch, contained simple recognizable subjects. Little attention was paid to them at the time; they were thought of as just another decorative component, like the flat repetitive designs. In a 1979 review of current figurative art, David Salle remarked: One senses imagery creeping into the arena of New York painting and sculpture at a time when the formalist hegemony, with its concerns for "pure" perception, is breaking up. The new image painters looked for inspiration to the seemingly crude painterly figuration of Philip Guston with an eye to the gestural imagery of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock and the color fields of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. Working in the interface between abstraction and figuration, the new image painters rejected recently established realist styles, notably the new perceptual realism of Philip Pearlstein and the photorealism of Chuck Close and Richard Estes.
