Neo-expressionism was a style of
modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the
late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s.
Related to American
Lyrical
Abstraction,
New Image
Painting and precedents in
Pop painting,
it developed as a reaction against the conceptual and
minimalistic art of the 1970s.
Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects,
such as the
human body (although sometimes in
an
abstract manner), in a rough and
violently emotional way using vivid colours and banal colour
harmonies.
Overtly inspired by the so-called
German Expressionist painters--
Emil Nolde,
Max
Beckmann,
George Grosz,
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner--and other
expressionist artists such as
James
Ensor and
Edvard Munch.
Neo-expressionists were sometimes called
Neue Wilden ('The new wild ones'; 'New
Fauves' would better meet the meaning of the term). The style
emerged internationally and was viewed by many critics such as
Achille Bonito Oliva and Donald Kuspit as a revival of traditional
themes of self-expression in European art after decades of American
dominance. The social and economic value of the movement was hotly
debated.
Critics such as Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Craig Owens, and Mira
Schor were highly critical of its relation to the marketability of
painting on the rapidly expanding art market, celebrity, the
backlash against feminism, anti-intellectualism, and a return to
mythic subjects and individualist methods they deemed outmoded.
Women were notoriously marginalized in the movement, and painters
such as Elizabeth Murray and Maria Lassnig were omitted from many
of its key exhibitions, most notoriously the 1981 "New Spirit in
Painting" exhibition in London which included 38 male painters but
no female painters.
References
Buchloh, Benjamin. “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression:
Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting.”
October 16 (Spring 1981): 39–68.
Foster, Hal, “The Expressive Fallacy,” Art in America 71 (January
1983): 80-83, 137.
Kuspit, Donald. “Flak from the ‘Radicals’: The American Case
Against Current German Painting,” in Jack Cowart, ed., Expressions:
New Art from Germany. St. Louis: St. Louis Art Museum, 1983.
Kuspit, Donald, A Critical History of 20th Century Art, chapters 8
and 9. Artnet.com, 2006,
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/authors/kuspit1.asp
Lawson, Thomas. “Last Exit: Painting.” Artforum 20, no. 2 (October
1981): 40–47.
A New Spirit in Painting. London: Royal Academy of Arts,
1981.
Oliva, Achille Bonito, The International Trans-avantgarde. Milan:
Giancarlo Politi, 1982.
Owens, Craig, “Honor, Power, and the Love of Women,” Art in America
71 (January 1983): 7-13.
Schor, Mira, “Appropriating Sexuality,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G 1 (December
1986).
Neo-expressionism around the world
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