"Bad" Painting is the name given by critic and curator Marcia Tucker to a trend in American figurative painting in the 1970s. Tucker curated an exhibition of the same name at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, featuring the work of fourteen artists mostly unknown in New York at the time. The exhibition ran from January 14 to February 28, 1978.
Tucker defined "Bad" Painting as a focused or deliberate disrespect for recent styles of painting, not the more common sense of technical incompetence, poor artistic judgement, or amateur or outsider dabbling. The press release for the exhibition summarized "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." "Bad," as Tucker's use of scare quotes suggests, is thus a term of approval for eccentric and amusing deviations from accepted styles at the time.
Artists
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), Cham 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).
Style
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.
In the catalogue essay, a context of the preceding fifteen years is sketched, in which Minimalism and Photo-realism represent a prevalent "classicizing" style for American painting and against which "Bad" Painting presents a challenge (although not a movement). At best, this explains the selection as a retreat from photographic or "classicizing" standards for figuration to an older style. Tucker identifies a shared theme of iconoclasm, and a preference for parody and antagonism for her selection, but again, these are qualities common to Expressionism and Surrealism, and even some Photo-realism. A further feature noted is the use of "non-high-art sources", the most prevalent being comics. Yet curiously, Tucker makes no mention of Pop Art, as inspiration or opposition. High and non-high (or low) art cannot be a matter of imagery or iconography, since high-art features as much irreverence and caricature as it does realism and veneration (for example, the work of Goya or Daumier, Lautrec or Arcimboldo). Nor can the difference rest purely upon technique, since paintings may be high or low-art. Yet, comics as a source, along with other commercial illustration cited, surely separates "Bad" Painting from earlier Expressionism and Surrealism, surely picks out a crucial trait across this otherwise disparate group. Tucker's essay cannot quite put her finger on it, but one might tease this out by considering preceding developments in figurative painting in the 1960s and 70s, a little closer.