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.





1 / 7 Chevron Chevron Courtesy Estate of Robert Colescott and Whitney Museum of American Art Robert Colescott, “The Three Graces: Art, Sex and Death” (1981).

Fischl, from Long Island, by way of Arizona, and a CalArts classmate of Salle’s, is a painterly storyteller, whose initial tales stung as dramatizations of psychological and social disarray. His bravura paint-handling has the simultaneously agonized and exhilarated tenor of someone spilling secrets long suffered in silence. His painting in the show—“A Visit To/A Visit From/The Island” (1983)—is unusually political, for him, but consistent in spirit. A diptych, it pairs a scene of an anxious, androgynous teen-ager in a long T-shirt amid callously naked grownups, at what may be a luxurious beach resort, with a nightmarish vision, likely derived from photographs of Haitian refugees, of a storm-lashed shore, where people struggle, lament, and lie drowned. Poisoned privilege meets appalled conscience. A slow, small disaster, to a young soul, and a rapid, very large one, to human existence, are related in a manner that demands and defeats resolution. “Irony” is too weak a word for it. Like many a meteoric fiction writer, Fischl used up his strongest stories early on, even as he became a more skillful painter. But he was always strikingly, even helplessly, sincere.

In a coup of installation, the Fischl confronts, across a room, “White Squad I” (1982), by Leon Golub, a terrific painter whose long career—he died at eighty-two, in 2004—earned him scant reward, owing to his insistently political content. On a vast, unstretched canvas, against a solid ground of Pompeian red, three louche soldiers from a Latin American death squad joke around, over two corpses. The picture’s scalding effect owes partly to its violent technique, with the paint scraped down to the canvas, but chiefly to a felt identification with the murderers’ grotesque jollity. Golub wanted to imagine for himself, and to make us acknowledge, the personhood of tyranny’s agents. His stubborn integrity made him an artist’s artist of special standing, revered by younger painters whose more ingratiating work has made them more successful than he was. Similarly unyielding was Nancy Spero, Golub’s wife, whose fiercely feminist graphic art, which features ancient-seeming archetypes of female suffering and rebellion, is represented in the show by one of sixteen small works grouped salon style on a wall.

Salutes to the rough glories of the period’s downtown scene begin with wallpaper, by Keith Haring, printed with linear webs made in his sprightly style. Mounted on that are a cartoony phantasmagoria by Kenny Scharf and a vigorously scribbled composition by Basquiat, who seems overqualified, in both originality and formal mastery, for the juxtaposition. (Basquiat mightily influenced the scene early on with his graffiti art, tagged “Samo,” but his talent quickly elevated him to global esteem.) A canvas, by Martin Wong, of a rusted security gate on a boarded-up storefront memorializes fear and squalor on the eve of gentrification. Julia Wachtel provides a lively lampoon of Salle: a diptych of two African tribal sculptures teamed with a nebbishy creature, likely copied from a joke greeting card, who sheds a tear while hoisting an immense daisy.

A beautiful abstraction by Ross Bleckner, of wandering blurred lights aglow in a wax-infused black ground, elegizes the decade’s overwhelming catastrophe of AIDS, which decimated the city’s cultural circles. Strong works by Susan Rothenberg and Terry Winters—schematic horse shapes in her case, botanical ones in his—evince the careful evolution of painters who entered the eighties with loyalty to the rigor of the New York abstract artists of the fifties. Robert Colescott’s “The Three Graces: Art, Sex and Death” (1981) friskily symbolizes the love life of the artist, who had as much as anticipated the new figuration. A lyrical rendering of a fingerprint, by Moira Dryer; a blue-and-white abstraction that’s as fresh as a sea breeze, by Mary Heilmann; and a stencilled word painting, by Christopher Wool, epitomize the dénouement of the period.

Collectors, famished by the low-calorie fare of the seventies’ avant-garde, adored the sensuous, cheeky, and grand efflorescence in the painting of the eighties. But, by the end of the decade, a boom market in the work flagged, and commercial fashion swung from hot pictures to cool objects—by, for the prime example, Jeff Koons. The next generation of leading artists took up themes of multiculturalism and identity politics, with audience-oriented sculptural and photographic installations. What was abandoned is the forte of painting as the medium of creative solitude: the individual artist engaging the individual viewer with stroke-by-stroke intimacy and nuanced eloquence. It’s harder now than it was then to stand out from the crowds that are marshalled by our politics and shepherded by much of our culture. But the will to do so always scans for chances to break out. This show preserves hints of what such moments can be like. ♦