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.
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".
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.
Tucker identifies a shared theme of iconoclasm, and a preference for parody and antagonism for her selection,[6] but again, these are qualities common to Expressionism and Surrealism, and even some Photo-realism.
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).
While art historical allusion, humour and fantasy are undoubtedly features of her selection, more precisely, they arise in deliberately citing popular print or publication sources, albeit with increasing distance or restraint.
P&D sources often carry an additional vulgar or kitsch quality with their earnest, sentimental motifs, once these are removed from a print context and scrutinised as painting.
Albertson's mock symbolic or allegorical scenes, such as Memento Mori (1975) Sex, Violence, Religion + The Good Life (1976) and The Triumph of Chastity (1976) all supply humorous content in contrast with earnest titles, in a broad-brushed style, akin to movie posters or magazine illustration of an earlier era.
Carrillo's large-scale Los Tropicanas (1974) presents a futuristic scene peopled with glowing skeletons, female nudes and a strangely mechanical bird.
Also of note, the drawing to figures in both Albertson and Carrillo does largely maintain classical proportions and foreshortening, contrary to Tucker's sweeping claims.
The work is "bad" in comparison with Pop Art, for pursuing techniques and imagery to trivial or nugatory ends for painting, for blurring or obscuring reference in prints.
The second group brackets the work by Cply and Siler, whom retain the strong outlines of comic-strip or animated cartoon figures, stylised drawing and mostly flat colours.
Although, Cply's figures are notably looser in drawing than most comic- strips, while the attention to pattern and a decorative flattening in projection also aligns the work with P&D.
Here, more decorative, frontal motifs often emphasise fabric supports, in works such as Urquhart's Interior with Sugar Talk (1977) and Hendon's tapestry-like Mallard with Friend (1977).
Brown's work from this time often features patterned borders along the bottom of the picture; however, examples selected for "Bad" Painting concentrate instead on the centralised motif, flat colours and an oblique projection to the surrounding space.
In Woman Wearing a Mask (1972) – one of the standouts to the show – it is presumably the attention given to modish black lace lingerie and high heels, content that recalls advertising, included within a more relaxed composition, that appealed to Tucker.
The fourth group brackets the work of Jenney[9] and Chatelain, where vigorously brushed grounds to central, simple motifs are prominent.
However, Tucker's selection concentrates on examples where the object or drawing style loses some of its familiarity and gives the rugged treatment a more mannered, arbitrary quality.
Any rationale for the stooping figure on the left of the picture, for example, is now lost and the surrounding ground, granted even greater latitude to impasto brushstroke and colour.
The stylistic lineage offered here demonstrates a greater coherence and articulation than Tucker's catalogue essay, and indicates several inaccuracies to her description but essentially confirms her choices.
"The freedom with which these artists mix classical and popular art-historical sources, kitsch and traditional images, archetypal and personal fantasies, constitutes a rejection of the concept of progress per se...
Bad Painting is sometimes seen a precursor to the wider movement of Neo-Expressionism that follows in the early 80s, a style with branches in Germany, Italy and France, amongst other nations.
Tucker's selection does not concentrate upon large-scale works, featuring broad, urgent facture, applied to allegorical or metaphorical themes, frequently political or historical.
Because of the priority given to place of purchase in Thrift Store Painting, works are mainly easel-scale and devoted to traditional themes, factual and fictional.
There is no place for "bad" Minimalism on a site-specific scale or geometric abstraction, for instance, no works abandoned by recent ambitious art students or failed post modernists.
1957), for example, where the focus is upon portraiture and stereotypes, much like Thrift Store Paintings, but provides a more directed mix of technical virtuosity with vulgarity, caricature with idealism, stylisation with realism.
Such work is sometimes associated[15] with "bad" painting, for degrading or conflating traditional iconography, but the difference lies in a narrowed scope for these later artists.
Good and bad here fall between a purity of means – formal or intrinsic properties to painting – and impurity of ends – extrinsic content to a picture.