The biggest topic of discussion is the origin of the movement, which has wavered between the 1960s and 1970s. Each interpretation of what Neo-Expressionism truly was and what it stood for differs in perspective and is often contradictory to the other ideas that have been suggested. This is because countless explanations have been speculated about this late 20th-century art movement, yet hardly any consensus exists. Studying the complicated art style that made up Neo-Expressionism can lead you down a rabbit hole of theories.
1 A History of the Neo-Expressionism Movement.
#NEO EXPRESSIONISM LICENSE#
This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). 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. The social and economic value of the movement was hotly debated.Ĭritics 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. 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. Neo-expressionism dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. It is also related to American Lyrical Abstraction painting of the 1960s and 1970s, The Hairy Who movement in Chicago, the Bay Area Figurative School of the 1950s and 1960s, the continuation of Abstract Expressionism, New Image Painting and precedents in Pop Painting. It was overtly inspired by German Expressionist painters, such as Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, James Ensor and Edvard Munch.
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, often using vivid colors. Neo-expressionism developed as a reaction against conceptual art and minimal art of the 1970s. It is characterized by intense subjectivity and rough handling of materials. Neo-expressionists were sometimes called Neue Wilden ('The new wild ones' 'New Fauves' would better meet the meaning of the term).
Neo-expressionism is a style of late- modernist or early-postmodern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s.