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 Neo-Expressionism
comprised a varied assemblage of young artists who had returned to
portraying the human body and other recognizable objects, in reaction to
the remote, introverted, highly intellectualized abstract art production
of the 1970s. The movement was linked to and in part generated by new
and aggressive methods of salesmanship, media promotion, and marketing
on the part of dealers and galleries. It was a diverse art movement that
dominated the art market in Europe and the United States during the
early and mid-1980s. Neo-Expressionist paintings are typically large and
rapidly executed, sometimes with found objects embedded in their
surfaces. They are usually figurative, often with violent or doom-laden
subjects, occasionally, the image is nearly lost in the welter of
surface activity. It developed in the late 1970s as a reaction against
conceptual art and
minimalism, and became a
dominant force in avant-garde art during the 1980s, especially in the
USA, Germany, and Italy. The German artist
Georg Baselitz (his painting
"Lenin on the Tribune " is show above) is regarded as a leading
pioneer of the neo-expressionism style of art. Other artists associated
with this movement include
Jean-Michel
Basquiat (painting shown below), Arnold Mesches, Susan Rothenberg,
and Julian Schnabel. Schnabel is famous for encrusting his paint surface
with broken crockery. The titles of his works are often as deliberately
crude as their handling, for example Circum-Navigating the Sea of
Shit
Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as
the human body (although sometimes in a virtually abstract manner), in a
rough and violently emotional way using vivid colors and banal color
harmonies. Other tenets of the movement included slashing brushstrokes,
strong color contrasts, and distorted subject matter. Neo-Expressionist
paintings themselves, though diverse in appearance, presented certain
common traits. Among these were: a rejection of traditional standards of
composition and design; an ambivalent and often brittle emotional tone
that reflected contemporary urban life and values; a general lack of
concern for pictorial idealization; the use of vivid but jarringly banal
color harmonies; and a simultaneously tense and playful presentation of
objects in a primitivism manner that communicates a sense of inner
disturbance, tension, alienation, and ambiguity (hence the term
Neo-Expressionist to describe this approach).
 Neo-Expressionist
paintings were more concerned with displaying spontaneous emotion rather
than traditional conventions. Overtly inspired by the so-called
German Expressionist painters Emil
Nolde, Max Beckmann and other emotive artist such as James Ensor and
Edvard Munch. Pablo
Picasso's late paintings, which are often aggressively sexual in
subject and almost frenzied in brushwork, were a major influence,
although neo-expressionists also borrowed heavily from a wide range of
sources and styles, from newspapers and novel covers to classical
mythology. In Italy neo-expressionism is sometimes known as the
Transavantgarde (‘beyond the avant-garde’), and German
neo-expressionists are sometimes called Neue Wilden (‘new wild
ones’). Various alternative names have been used in the USA, including
new fauvism, punk art, and bad painting (the latter because, in spite of
the commercial success enjoyed by several exponents, many critics find
the work crude and ugly, flaunting a lack of conventional skills).
Neo-Expressionism was controversial both in the quality of its art
products and in the highly commercialized aspects of its presentation to
the art-buying public. |
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