Bad Painting

"Bad" Painting is the name given to a trend in American figurative painting in the 1970s by critic and curator, Marcia Tucker (1940–2006). She curated an exhibition of the same name, featuring the work of fourteen artists, most unknown in New York at the time, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. The exhibition ran from January 14 to February 28, 1978. "Bad" Painting was not a demonstration of technical incompetence, poor artistic judgement, amateur or outsider dabbling, the term is commonly used for these. For Tucker, it denoted a more focused or deliberate disrespect for recent styles. The press release for the exhibition summarised "Bad" Painting as ‘…an ironic title for ‘good painting’, which is characterized by deformation of the figure, a mixture of art-historical and non-art resources, and fantastic and irreverent content. In its disregard for accurate representation and its rejection of conventional attitudes about art, ‘bad’ painting is at once funny and moving, and often scandalous in its scorn for the standards of good taste.’ Her use of quotation marks around "Bad" points to this special meaning. "Bad" here, is thus a term of approval for the more eccentric and amusing variations on certain accepted styles, at that time.

Artists included in the exhibition were James Albertson (1944–2015), Joan Brown (1938–1990), Eduardo Carrillo (1937–1997), James Chatelain (b. 1947), Cply (alias William Copley) (1919–1996), Charles Garabedian (1923–2016), Robert Chambless Hendon (1936–2014), Joseph Hilton (b. 1946), Neil Jenney (b. 1945), Judith Linhares (b. 1940), P. Walter Siler (b. 1939), Earl Staley (b. 1938), Shari Urquhart (b. 1938), and William Wegman (b. 1943).

On paper, Tucker’s criterion for "Bad" Painting is rather generous, allowing merely that “The artists whose work will be shown have discarded classical drawing modes in order to present a humorous, often sardonic, intensely personal view of the world”. But this alone would simply permit work with Expressionist or Surrealist tendencies, not to say caricature, styles already well established within a canon of good taste. In practice though, Tucker’s criterion is much stricter, and excludes for example, the established Expressionism of a Leon Golub (1922–2004) or Jack Levine (1915–2010), the caricature of a Peter Saul (b. 1934) or Philip Guston (1913–1980), the fantasy of later Honoré Sharrer (1920–2009). Some further condition was obviously at work in her criterion.

...
Wikipedia