Neo-expressionism is 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 of the 60s and 70s, Bay Area Figurative School of the 50s and 60s, the continuation of Abstract Expressionism, New Image Painting and precedents in Pop painting, it developed as a reaction against the conceptual art and minimal 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 andEdvard 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.
Representatives: Ida Applebroog, Leonard Baskin, Philip Guston, Michael Hafftka, Ouattara Watts, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joe Boudreau, A.R. Penck, Markus Lüpertz, Rainer Fetting.
Michael Hafftka (born 1953) is an American figurative expressionist painter living in New York City. Hafftka was born in Manhattan to Eva and Simon Hafftka, European refugees and Holocaust survivors. Raised in the Bronx, he attended public schools and experimented with several creative forms before he discovered painting when he was 20. In the wake of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Hafftka volunteered to work for a year on a Kibbutz in Israel. The "momentous change brought on a series of visionary experiences and mystical dreams", and when writing "proved an inadequate outlet of expression," Hafftka began to paint—an experience that proved "revelatory and self defining."
ReplyDeleteAnother representative of this style is Robert Delaunay (12 April 1885 – 25 October 1941).He was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key influence related to bold use of colour, and a clear love of experimentation of both depth and tone.
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