Atmospheric Formation #6 (Primary Title)
Neil Jenney, American, born 1945 (Artist)
The true artist is a philosophical craftsman. –Neil Jenney
Jenney came to prominence in the late 1960s as a leader of the New Image movement—Pop-inspired realism that shunned the conventions of classic painting and adopted the name Bad Painting. However, in the 1970s, Jenney tightened his brushwork and developed the style he called Ideal Illusionism to which Atmospheric Formation #6 belongs. To his use of thick black frames and large painted words beneath images, Jenney now added carefully rendered views of deep spaces.
Atmospheric Formation #6 offers the glory of blue sky, faint clouds, and a hint of dawn or dusk. Shades of gray on the frame and shelf imply that the image’s light spills into real space. Like 19th-century Hudson River School and Luminist painters, Jenney embraces the sublime American landscape as his subject. But unlike his predecessors’ nationalistic themes of Manifest Destiny, Jenney’s concern is postindustrial. The pink glow on the horizon suggests pollution as much as nature’s majesty, making the silver-lettered “atmosphere” both herald and lament for this precious resource.
[1] Accessioned Deember 7, 2004.
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