Integrity exacts a price from an artist. Take the case of painter George McNeil (1908-1995). A fixture of the New York School, McNeil refused to pose with his peers in a 1950 photo shoot for Time magazine. As the story has come down through his family, McNeil took umbrage at being pictured as a team player in a milieu rife with personality conflicts and political maneuvering. The photograph he skipped out on, taken by Nina Leen, came to be called The Irascibles. It featured 15 New York artists who had signed a letter addressed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art deriding the institution’s hostility to “advanced art.” No one could have known it at the time, but Leen’s group shot would become an iconographic staple of postwar American art. It’s hard to measure the impact of the picture on the participating artists’ careers. It certainly didn’t hurt Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman or Ad Reinhardt. (It wasn’t a foolproof catalyst for fame: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, James Brooks and Hedda Sterne have largely been consigned to storage.) All the same, Leen’s image—the Mount Rushmore of Abstract Expressionism, if you will—conferred a degree of legitimacy on a movement that would make New York the center of world art.
more from the NY Observer here.