Education:
Pratt Institute
Art Students League
Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts
Columbia University
Teaching Positions:
University of Wyoming, 1946-1948
Pratt Institute, 1948-1980
University of California, Berkeley, 1956-1957
New York Studio School, 1966-1980
Awards and Fellowships:
Ford Foundation Purchase, 1963
National Council on the Arts, 1967
Guggenheim Fellow, 1969
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1982
Tamarind Artist in Residence, 1971, 1975-1976, 1984
Avery Chair, Bard College, Blum Institute, 1985
Exhibitions:
New York Worlds Fair, 1939
Art Institute of Chicago, 1947
Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 1950, 1990
Museum of Modern Art, 1951, 1969, 1985
9th Street Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, 1951
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1953, 1957, 1961, 1965, 1968, 1984
Stable Gallery, 1954-1955
De Young Museum, San Francisco, (solo), 1956
Carnegie Institute, 1958
Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, 1960
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1961
Cleveland Museum of Art, 1961
Yale University Art Gallery, 1961
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1962, 1966
Wadsworth Atheneum, 1962
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1963
Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas, Austin, 1964, 1966, 1968
Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, 1966
Des Moines Art Center, 1969
Brooklyn Museum, 1972, 1987
University Art Gallery, University of New Mexico, 1977
Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, 1982 (solo)
Jorgensen Gallery, University of Connecticut, Storrs, 1982 (solo)
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, 1983
Artists’ Choice Museum, New York, 1984 (solo)
State University of New York, Binghamton, 1985 (solo)
Kansas City Art Institute, 1985
Blum Institute, Bard College, 1985
University of Bridgeport, Carlson Gallery, 1986 (solo)
Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986
Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA, 1988
University of Hartford, 1989 (solo)
Montclair Art Museum, 1991 (solo)
Smith College Museum of Art, 1991
Tuscon Museum of Art, 1992
New York Studio School, 1993 (solo)
Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, 1993
Hyde Collection Art Museum, 1999 (solo)
North Dakota Museum of Art, 1999 (solo)
Member:
American Abstract Artists
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
Collections:
Whitney Museum of American Art
Museum of Modern Art
Smithsonian Institution
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Provincetown Art Association and Museum
Smith College Art Museum
Mead Art Museum, Amherst College
Michener Collection, University of Texas, Austin
University of Michigan Art Museum
New York University, Gray Art Gallery
Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale
Newark Museum of Art
Brooklyn Museum of Art
Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina
Oklahoma City Art Museum
University of New Mexico Art Museum
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England
Commentary:
George McNeil was one of the most important and influential New York School
artists and teachers of his generation. There is no period during his six-decade
long career in which his work is not highly regarded. McNeil’s work has
been prominently and widely exhibited ever since his debut as one of only five
non-objective painters in the New York World’s Fair Show of 1939. Today,
his work can be found in such important collections as: the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn
Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Los Angeles, to name a few.
Looking back on his lengthy career,
McNeil must be considered one of the preeminent American expressionist painters
of the 20th Century. His work evolved successfully from the post cubist abstract
expressionism of his Hofmann School days, through the figurative expressionism
of his mid-career during the 1960’s and 1970’s, to emerge as full-blown
neo-expressionism in the 1980’s and 1990’s. With “avant-gardism”
as his watchword McNeil was always at the forefront of the American expressionist
movement. His extraordinary body of work pays tribute to his enormous talent
and his uncompromising commitment to artistic growth.
In a statement prepared for a solo exhibition of his work at the State University
of New York at Binghamton in 1985 McNeil commented, “I have been told
that my abstract landscapes and my beat up figures make me a part of the New
Expressionist movement. This disconcerts me because I have been an old expressionist
for so long that it isn’t funny. I am like Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain
who was surprised to learn he had been speaking prose all his life.”
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