Painting When Painting was Dead

Even for someone who was a toddler during the period covered by "High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–75," the show exerts a powerful pull. This lively, intelligent, informative survey of experimental abstract painting makes déjà vu seem to waft out from the National Academy's fabric walls. What must this show feel like for people who lived through those years? Many of these disheveled yet sparky paintings and paint-based objects have the trippy, hippy look of the years of the flower power, civil rights, and ecology movements, and emerging feminism and gay liberation. It was the era of spray guns and masking tape, so even brightly colored works have a limp, tie-dye, impoverished quality. Everything is rough at the edges, made from cheap or recycled materials, informal or provisional in arrangement, sometimes ethnic looking, other times futuristic, and always at once earnest and nonchalant — in harmony with what one knows (or projects) of bohemia, the city, and youth culture at that time.

The show looks at painting in a truly transitional moment. The medium was under sustained assault from an avant garde that, empowered by the ascendancy of sculpture, installation, performance, and film/video, insisted that painting was dead. Of course, hundreds of painters worked experimentally and optimistically through such rhetoric, but some were determined to be part of the revolution who nonetheless wanted to paint. For them, according to the exhibition's curator, Katy Siegel, the radical critique of painting was liberating, "an opportunity, not a pink slip." (Ms. Siegel was advised by painter David Reed, who originated the idea for the show.)

Indeed, the insistence on painting's demise was itself macho, authoritarian, and locked into an earlier aesthetic, which by the late 1960s was an institutionalized revolution. These artists found a space between the dogmatics of minimal and conceptual art on the one hand and the formalist abstraction championed by the critic Clement Greenberg, on the other. They wanted to have their cake and eat it — to enjoy playing with shape, form, color, and material and structurally question the language of art in the process.

This new painting was obviously a backlash against the prim, austere negations of minimal art, but it would be simplistic to see it as a pendulum swing back toward the defiant gestures of Abstract Expressionism. If there is one artist in the show of whom this might be the case it is Joan Synder, whose painting "The Storm" (1974) has a rich, romantic mythic sensibility. Generally, however, even if their forms looked open and loose, the artists were interested in upfrontness and process, not in mystery and nebulousness.

The first galleries have the most pictorially conventional canvases of the show. "Pavo" (1968), a Dan Christensen painting of 9 feet by 11 feet, has overlapping fuzzy circles spray-painted in bright colors. Kenneth Showell's "Besped" (1967) is a warped grid of spray-painted little squares bent into trapezoids and parallelepipeds. The spray in both paintings is at once illusionist and a literal fact of process. Jo Baer's "Speculum" (1970) is a precisionist geometric abstraction. On its front the picture is mostly monochrome, with most of the composition taking place along the deep edges.

Once the visitor moves to the large second-floor gallery, order and precision give way to scatter and flop. But still, however limp they have become, grids still predominate. "Put a Name on It Please" (1972), by Alan Shields, a diagonal grid that looks at first like a badminton net caught in a gale, is made of cotton belting embellished by strings of bead. Its mix of a structural element from high modernism and almost louche use of cheap and unlikely materials sets the tone for a kind of hippie abstraction. Howardena Pindell's "Untitled" (1968–70), an open grid of sausagelike rolls of canvas joined by metal grommets, and Louise Fishman's "Untitled" (1971), string sewn into strips of canvas, are limpid grids that tease this signifier of order and regularity. For many feminist artists, a use of craft elements like sewing in their painting was a selfconsciously political gesture, a critique of masculine authority.

Women dominate this show in terms of originality and quality. There is Lynda Benglis with "Blatt" (1969), a floor piece formed of poured pigment and latex that curdled into a free-standing puddle without any canvas or support. Mary Heilmann's "The Book of Night" (1970) is a deep-stained black canvas, free of stretcher, that also lies horizontally, in this case with a kink in it on a chest-high pedestal. Dorothea Rockburne's "Intersection" (1971) is a kind of oil sandwich in which viscous black oil is contained within transparent plastic sheeting laid out of the floor. Imprinted on the plastic is, once again, a grid. Carolee Schneemann, a pioneer of performance and feminist art, is represented by a video of her 1967 piece, "Body Collage," in which she dabbed her naked body in glue and rolled around over bits of paper and fabric. Her inclusion is a provocative statement even in a show where so many practitioners so assiduously stretched the definition of painting — an insistence that process, gesture, and intention trump product or effect. It is significant that she described herself, in early group shows, as a painter.

Many of the artists in this show have fallen from attention, while others, like Ms. Heilmann and Ms. Rockburne, returned to conventional formats in their mature careers. What also happened is that shortly after the time frame of this exhibition, New York witnessed a resurgence of abstract painting. Figures who now dominate that genre — such as Thomas Nozkowski, Sean Scully, Bill Jensen, Melissa Meyer, and Mr. Reed — all found their feet in the wake of these years of "way out" experiment. There is a clear tradeoff between radicalness and quality in such artists. They are more conservative in format but more nuanced in painterly achievement than their predecessors. But for sheer permission to play, they owe a debt to those who scaled the hard, high times.

Until April 22 (1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th Street, 212-369-4880).