User:WikiArchitect/New New Painting

Introduction
"The New New Painters" is a group with a core of nine abstract artists that developed in 1978 coincident with the invention and development of acrylic gel paint by the paint chemist Sam Golden. The NNP as they are now called, came from the roots of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism, The New York School, The Baltimore Group (including Morris Louis), Color Field (founded by Helen Frankenthaler), Black Mountain painter Kenneth Noland, Russian-born Color Field artist Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, and Darby Bannard. Peter Bradley also had a direct influence on this group. The Color Field artists working thinly often on raw canvas, worked in close value, high key colors, often large scale. The artists of The New New Painters came together due to a desire to move forward into a new kind of painting using acrylic gels. Unofficially the group members were exhibiting together in smaller groups up until 1992 when Gerald Piltzer asked Kenworth W. Moffett to curate an exhibit in his new gallery in Paris, France.

Driven by a similar desire for more color and 3 dimensional effects, the group was brought together in 1992 for the first time by Piltzer and Moffett under the name "The New New Painters" derived from a prior group Lucy Baker had organized in the early 1980's called "Boston Painters and Sculptors". The name "New New Painters" was coined in a conversation between Graham Peacock and John Gittins and was used by Piltzer for the Paris Show.

Kenworth W. Moffett championed this group from its earliest inception, despite resistance from The Color Field painters, the art world at large, and Clement Greenberg, art critic. Moffett has staunchly submitted that The New New Painters have been overlooked by the New York City art world. Moffett wrote in 1992 in the Paris Exhibition catalogue "While not a formal organization, the artists featured in this book all know each other and feel themselves to be part of a group with a shared sensibility and common interests, just like the Impressionists, the Fauves, the Cubists, the Surrealists and the Abstract Expressionists before them. They all live in North America--in small towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts in the United States, and in the larger cities of Toronto and Edmonton in Canada. Many of them are still in their forties and in my view constitute the most exciting new movement or 'wave' of painters to appear in twenty-five years. For the first time since Color Field and Minimalism, modernist art has a whole new look and feel. It stands out by its aggressiveness--aggressiveness of relief, texture, color and drawing."

"Two strikingly novel features of the new work are very bright color--often fluorescent, and very thick, plastic paint" and from Marcel Paquet: "Thus, far from having been just a quick-fire, Abstract Expressionism has cleared the path to a new aesthetics, to a non-organic, multi-sensorial space in which the New Acrylic Painters are already ranking quite high. These young and resolute painters harbour the proof that art did not die at the end of Renaissance, but that it is just confronted at entirely new tasks-the first being to create a beauty of a new world."

Discussion
It would certainly be valid to begin a discussion of New New Painting with its origins stemming from the likes of Pollock and Hofmann and later Bush, Louis, Noland, Olitski, and Poons, but let’s begin with the medium that allowed the New New Painters to move from the high key, close value of Color Field to the intensely colored, thickly painted works they would become known for: the acrylic gel of Sam Golden.

Sam started out manufacturing paints for the artist community with his uncle Leonard Bocour in New York City. Bocour Artist Colors became a hangout for artists of the day including Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Morris Louis. After World War II, Sam rediscovered a “sticky goo” he had been working on and in subsequent years, refined it and developed a business around it of supplying emerging artists of the late ‘70s with the material sought out.

The Core

 * Lucy Baker
 * Steve Brent
 * Joseph Drapell
 * John Gittins
 * Roy Lerner
 * Anne Low
 * Marjorie Minkin
 * Irene Neal
 * Graham Peacock
 * Bruce Piermarini
 * Jerald Webster

The Others

 * Bram Bogart
 * Eduardo da Rosa
 * Tom Fertig