Thaddeus Radell reviews the exhibition See It Loud: Seven Post-War American Painters at the National Academy Museum, New York, on view through January 26, 2014. The show features work by Leland Bell, Paul Georges, Peter Heinemann, Albert Kresch, Stanley Lewis, Paul Resika and Neil Welliver.

Radell writes that "after slogging through the demoralizing, conceptually sodden eclectic streets of Chelsea, with only an occasional ‘find’ or rare glimmer of pictorial dignity, a resounding visual feast lies in wait at the Academy. This exhibition is a decisive, erudite celebration of the act of figurative painting. The conceivable and valid argument made for the inclusion of several other painters amongst the Center’s considerable stable of artists (Kaldis, Blaine, Freilcher) is quickly muted by the breadth and depth of what is now on view. Fueled by Abstract Expressionism but with a temperament and passion more keenly addressed to representing the world around them, these seven artists, all of whom knew, respected and interacted each other to varying degrees, together deliver an irrefutable vitality to their page in the history of art. And if individually they do not, at times, significantly or broadly enhance that sacred text in the true Elliot-driven sense, together theirs is a story in bold text."