Neo-expressionism is a style oflate modernist or early-postmodern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s. Neo-expressionists were sometimes calledTransavantgarde,Junge Wilde orNeue Wilden ('The new wild ones'; 'New Fauves' would better meet the meaning of the term). It is characterized by intense subjectivity and rough handling of materials.[1]
Neo-expressionism developed as a reaction againstconceptual art andminimal art of the 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in anabstract manner), in a rough and violently emotional way, often using vivid colors.[2] It was overtly inspired byGerman Expressionist painters, such asEmil Nolde,Max Beckmann,George Grosz,Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,James Ensor andEdvard Munch. It is also related to Americanlyrical abstraction painting of the 1960s and 1970s,the Hairy Who movement in Chicago, theBay Area Figurative School of the 1950s and 1960s, the continuation ofabstract expressionism, precedents inPop Painting,[3] and New Image Painting: a vague late 1970s term applied to painters who employed a strident figurative style with cartoon-like imagery and abrasive handling owing something to neo-expressionism. The New Image Painting term was given currency by a 1978 exhibition entitledNew Image Painting held at theWhitney Museum.[4]
Neo-expressionism dominated the art market until the mid-1980s.[5] The style emerged internationally and was viewed by many critics, such asAchille Bonito Oliva andDonald 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.[6] From the point of view of the history ofModern Art, art criticRobert Hughes dismissed neo-expressionist painting as retrograde, as a failure of radical imagination, and as a lamentable capitulation to theart market.[7]
Critics such asBenjamin Buchloh,Hal Foster,Craig Owens, andMira Schor were highly critical of its relation to the marketability of painting on the rapidly expanding art market, celebrity, thebacklash against feminism,anti-intellectualism, and a return to mythic subjects and individualist methods they deemed outmoded.[8][6] Women were notoriously marginalized in the movement,[9] and painters such asElizabeth Murray[10] andMaria Lassnig were omitted from many of its key exhibitions, most notoriously the 1981New Spirit in Painting exhibition in London which included 38 male painters but no female painters.[11]
The movement became known asTransavanguardia in Italy andNeue Wilden in Germany, and the groupFiguration Libre was formed in France in 1981.[12] In Toronto, the group known asChromaZone/Chromatique Collective was formed in 1981 and existed till 1986.[13]
