File talk:SHIP OF FOOLS 1966 Detail of Victim at Bottom Right.jpg

That Jewess Accused from December 1965 is reproduced in the Portuguese Wikipedia article "Pintura nos Estados Unidos"1, as an example of the persistence of expressive figurative painting during its phase of ostracism and its recuperation in the mid-1970s only makes Ship of Fools that more startling in its refusal to be intimidated by being marked "retrograde" by the "progressive" critical theory of the day.

For a noteworthy example of the fanaticism operationg even against the mainstream avant-garde look no further than 'Artforum' and Michael Fried's prosecuting Minimalism in his brief against "Objecithood" (summer 1967)... Hyperbolie was doubtless in play here, as Hal Foster in "Critical Condition" continues about the extremes of the period: This writing was so incisive about the art of its moment; sometimes, though, it is fair to say, it overreached in its claims.2

That is all well and good for a critic looking back in retrospect fifty years later to say, but what about its overreaching condemnations.

For those of us painting figuratively, living through that period (which continues for some well past the 1970s) was like being sentenced to "excommunication", which now looking back makes Ship of Fools doubly an act of protest as the United States escalates the war in Vietnam by crossing the D.M.Z. to bomb the oil depots of Hanoi that very hot July weekend in New York City as I paint it.

- Richard Rappaport

1, http://pt.wikipedia.org/Pintura_nos_Estados_Unidos

2, Hal Foster, "Critical Condition", Artforum, September 2012, page 147.