Oil on canvas, 1987. 940x760 mm; 37x30 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left recto.
McNeil (1908-1995) was born and studied in New York, at the Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and Columbia University. Studying with Hans Hoffmann, McNeil shared a studio with Lee Krasner and through her met Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Esteban Vicente. In 1936, McNeil and a group of other artists formed the American Abstract Artists. They painted in a geometric cubist style, though at the same time McNeil was beginning to create a different expressionist kind of art. He painted full time, but with the outbreak of World War II McNeil spent time in the Navy. After the war, in 1946, his first regular job was teaching at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. He continued to teach throughout his career and ultimately became director of the Pratt Institute's evening program.
During the 1950s, McNeil's style was fully abstract and he began exhibiting at the Egan Gallery, New York. At this time he was associated with the other artists who exhibited at the Egan Gallery such as Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Franz Kline and Jack Tworkov, with Kline a close friend. He exhibited in the first "Ninth Street Show (9th Street Exhibition)" in 1951, the watershed New York School Abstract Expressionist show, and also exhibited in five of the subsequent "New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals" at the Stable Gallery, New York through 1956. From the early 1960s, his transition to Figurative Expressionism made him a clear precursor for the Neo-Expressionist movement of the 1980s.
The current work does not appear in the inventory records, studio notes, ledgers, photographic representation of works, nor archives of the artist which were established and are maintained by the Estate of George McNeil.
