For example, in his "Review of Exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists, Jacques Lipchitz, and Jackson Pollock," Greenberg says: "It is possible to accuse the painter Jackson Pollock, too, of bad taste; but it would be wrong, for what is thought to be Pollock's bad taste is in reality simply his willingness to be ugly in terms of contemporary taste.
A tantalizing exhibition of McNeil’s paintings at the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries gives a rough synopsis of his underappreciated career—from founder of the American Abstract Artists group to first-generation member of the New York School to, ultimately, a figurative painter of fierce and joyous power.
Along with addressing the transcendent subject matter of the American Abstract Artists with whom he exhibited, Lewis continued throughout his oeuvre to attenuate his own presence in the world, never forgetting the particulars of the African-American experience--embodied by the narratives of urban families and workers--that governed his earlier realist style.
Greenberg, like many other observers at the time, regarded Morris and the artists congregated around the American Abstract Artists (the AAA) as derivative lightweights.
The American Abstract Artists group modeled a utopian vision of universal harmony using a geometric, nonobjective art of order and stability, devoid of references to the real world.
Maturing after the American abstract artists of the '30s, persisting during the regency of Abstract Expressionism and preceding the Minimalists by a good ten years, he maintains a devotion to the mysteries of nature in its cosmic dimensions, still working at his peak--but now, ironically, within the scrappy arena of the revivalism of Neo-Geo.
Yet Krasner seems to have backed away, at first, from the implications of these early works, preferring to flatten their pulsing surfaces and rein in their expansiveness with clear geometry--not surprisingly, in retrospect, since she had recently become a member of American Abstract Artists, a group so devoted to the geometric purity of what was then referred to as "non-objective" painting that Mondrian joined them on his arrival in the United States.
