Neil Jenney

Neil Jenney, a maverick of twentieth-century American art, is known for his pursuit of realism as both a style and a philosophy. He seeks to achieve a return to the classical ideal of truth by integrating form and content while avoiding what he perceives as the decorative and expressive qualities of modern abstraction.

Biography of Neil Jenney

Neil Jenney was born in 1945 in Torrington, Connecticut. During his two years at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, from 1964 to 1966, Jenney created hard-edge paintings and Minimalist sculpture, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of contemporary art. However, when he tried to sell his work, it was rejected by all Boston galleries. This disappointment made Jenney realize that he couldn't rely on selling art to make a living in Boston and that he couldn't afford to continue as a student. With the few part-time jobs already taken, he realized that working his way through school wasn't an option.

In 1966, Jenney began driving a Checker cab for Town Taxi. After completing sixty-three days of full-time driving, he moved to 723 East 6th Street, New York, and started working on his "Anti-Minimal Sculpture with an Electric Light Piece." Although the project was never completed, parts of it were later used for the last "Light Piece" of 1967, which was acquired by Kasper Koenig. In the same year, Jenney started working on the "Linear Series," which consisted of groups of half-inch aluminum bars coated with flexible multicolored paint and arranged on the floor. These pieces introduced a new anti-minimal element: the random crooked line.

Jenney then expanded upon this concept with "The Volumetric Series": irregularly shaped masses of fabric formed over chicken wire and arranged in groups of three or four on the floor. In the spring of 1967, the artist's dealer, Richard Bellamy, sold the best "Volumetric" piece to Robert Scull, marking Jenney's first New York sale, for $300.

Following the "Volumetric Series," Jenney delved into the "Found (free) Material Series," creating large floor arrangements often described by critics as "environmental," "theatrical," or "maximal." 

The format of the "environmental" "Found Material Pieces" of 1968 gradually evolved into a simple structure of "these things and those things relating": tanks of circulating water and plants (1968), exhibited at Noah Goldowsky/Richard Bellamy Gallery, New York, in the spring of 1968; a desk and office chair with lighted neon on top (1968), displayed in West Germany at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner in November 1968; soapy water in hanging vinyl containers and washed wood (1968), showcased at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner in November 1968; two corrugated aluminum structures with three fluorescent lights (1968), exhibited at David Whitney Gallery, New York, in November 1970.

Jenney's life involved searching dumpsters daily as he couldn't afford materials. Often, he couldn't find what he needed, and the good items were often buried under other items, making retrieval difficult. This made the process of creating art slow and frustrating.

At a certain point, Jenney pondered that if he were creating paintings, he could simply paint whatever he needed, and these paintings could be displayed on the wall, where the market was. He realized that "things relating to other things, not just spatially, but through their identity as objects" (the structural format of the sculptures) could be expressed in painting form. He recognized that this form of realism was distinctly different from the prevailing Pop art and straightforward American symbolism of the time.

Jenney believed that Pop art was a form of "superficial veneration" that focused on American consumerism and popular culture, such as Campbell's Soup, movie stars, pickup trucks, and storefronts. He felt that the world was ready for a more profound and relevant form of art, one that dealt with timely and pertinent themes that were largely ignored by the art world. Jenney sought to create a brand new style of realism that would deliver this message as directly as possible. He used acrylic paint to draw and paint his subjects in a single sitting, eschewing traditional techniques and creating a new form of realism that began in 1969 and ended in 1970.

In 1969, Marcia Tucker, the newly appointed curator at the Whitney Museum, paid a visit to Neil Jenney's studio in New York City. Tucker was impressed with Jenney's work and decided to feature his new realism style in the Whitney Annual of 1969.

In late 1970, Jenney realized that his ideal painting approach would be "Good Drawing" and "Slow Painting," which allowed for complete refinement. However, this approach presented a challenge as it required dealing with the complexities of oil pigment, a medium with which Jenney had no prior experience. To overcome this obstacle, the artist decided to work on wood as it offered greater precision and control. He began by conducting extensive research in the library, seeking technical answers and insights from ancient experts. He discovered the Greek notion that a painting is akin to a scene viewed through a window, whereby the frame serves as the architectural foreground and the window presents an illusion. As such, frames were deemed functional rather than merely decorative.

Jenney categorized his works from 1971 onwards, which were all executed on wooden surfaces, as "Good Painting." These works emphasized the "intimate" rather than the "panoramic." Jenney now describes the early new realism of the 1960s as "Bad Painting," a term attributed to Marcia Tucker.

Jenney noticed that the oil-on-wood paintings with their frames had become too heavy to move without assistance. This annoyed him as he preferred to work alone. After thirty years, he realized that painting on canvas with oils would be much lighter and he could move even bigger paintings by himself. He started working on new paintings in 2016, based on old drawings for paintings he had never done before. These new works have a different process and are referred to by Neil Jenney as the "New Good Paintings."