George J. McNeil

Mitchell C. Shaheen, Cleveland

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1990

“14th Street,” belongs to an important series of paintings McNeil completed during the late 1980s that celebrate the street life of New York. Often exuberant, sometimes with a dark or mordant humor, this painting displays several hallmarks of the series: a figure that also functions as an architectural marker, tiny denizens of the street swirling around the corners, and the artist's hand with a watch face turned inwards, marking the passage of time.

Particular to this series, is a central face or figure. “Insistently democratic,” as critic Michael Brenson described it when the series went on exhibition in 1989, “it is sometimes hard to tell age, race or gender.” The heroes of these paintings are “neighborhood people who dance and fret and can’t stop moving… the size of the heads and their placement near the center of the paintings identifies street people with the medieval tremens of saints.”

— Jason Andrew, Manager/Curator, Estate of George McNeil