Key decade: 1980s

Terms: Postmodernism, Transavantgardia, Neo-Expressionism

1. Rejecting austerity (return to painting
   1. Graffiti and the '80s boom - middle-class kids and street culture
      1. Keith Haring (1958-1990)
      2. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), a.k.a "Samo"
   2. "New Image" painting (1979 Whitney exhibition), "Bad" Painting
      1. Robert Moskowitz "almost abstract"
      2. Richard Bosman
      3. Eric Fischl: suburban libido
2. Neo-Expressionism in the US
   1. US Metro Pictures Group (strongly filtered by photography)
      1. Robert Longo (Buffalo to NYC)
      2. David Salle (from CalArts under Baldessari)
      3. Julian Schnabel (from Brooklyn and Texas)
   2. Loner: Mark Tansey (from California to NYC, also a photo sensibility)
3. European Neo-Expressionism: a complicated past
   1. Germans Occupy New York! – a new Romanticism?
      1. Georg Baselitz (b. 1935 as Georg Kern in "Deutschbaselitz," Saxony)
      2. Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945 in the Black Forest)
      3. Richter and Polke subsumed in Neo-Expressionist market frame
   2. Italian transavantgardia
      1. Arte Povera '60s background (Penone, Kounellis, Merz, Anselmo)
      2. "The three C's," or, "Italian Bad Boys"
         1. Enzo Cucchi (neo-primitivism)
         2. Sandro Chia (muscled Michelangelos)
         3. Francesco Clemente (global visions)

Slide List

Haring Untitled 1983
Basquiat Charles the First 1982
Basquiat Untitled (with Andy Warhol) 1984
Moskowitz Swimmer 1977
Longo The American Soldier and the Quiet Schoolboy 1977, sculpture from "Men in the City" series
Salle His Brain 1984
Schnabel Death of Fashion 1978 (oil on ceramic fragments on canvas)
Schnabel The Unexpected Death of Blinky 1981 (oil on velvet)
Tansey Modern/Postmodern 1980
Tansey Triumph of the New York School 1984
Tansey Constructing the Grand Canyon 1990
Baselitz The Shepherd 1965-66
Baselitz Eagle and Fingerpainting 1 1971
Baselitz Elke V. 1976
Baselitz Late Dinner in Dresden 1983
Kiefer Parsifal II 1973 (Oil, blood, paper on canvas)
Kiefer Markish Sand 1982 and Icarus: Sand in Mark 1981
Kiefer Constellation 2000
Richter Structure (oil, abstract) 1989
Polke Menschenschlange (Crowds) 1974-5
Kounellis Untitled 1982-895 (wood)
Penone Tree of 12 meters 1980-2
Merz 853 (igloo) 1988 (metal, glass, twigs, neon)
Anselmo Direction 1967-9
Cucchi Le Anime Viaggione con I Cavalli 1981
Chia Water bearer 1981
Clemente Self-Portrait with Gold 1979

Haring, graffiti in Soho, (1980s)
Haring, Installation at Shafrazi Gallery, 1984
Basquiat, Self-Portrait, 1982
Basquiat, Untitled collaboration with Andy Warhol, 1984

The artist working on the street had to take street rules: graffiti lasts only as long as the graffitists respect the work; then overwriting and "tagging" begins. Both Haring and Basquiat were happy to move to the gallery scene, yet in some ways that passage remained troubled. Basquiat was forced to perform himself as a "primitive," and Haring sought to form his own popular business to escape from a fixed identity within the cloistered gallery scene.

Longo, Mr. Jazz, 1982
Salle, Brother Animal 1983
Schnabel, Vita, 1984
Tansey, Short History of Modern Painting, 1982

The new painters were not all expressionists, but seemed that way by virtue of their commitment to "pictures" in an artworld still dominated by conceptual and minimal modes. Unlike earlier Expressionisms, these "NEO" Expressionist artists appropriated their imagery from mass culture (film stills, 50s advertisements, photographs) and began to produce arguments against Modernism as a "high art" produced from a supposedly isolated critical position. Tansey, in particular, developed a sophisticated body of work that was deeply engaged with critical postmodernist philosophy (most notably Jacques Derrida).

Baselitz, Partisan, 1965
Baselitz, Man of Faith, & detail, 1983
Kiefer, Man in the Forest, 1971
Kiefer, Nuremberg, 1982

Kiefer and Baselitz both return to the "forbidden" past of a traumatized German modernism. Baselitz found a way to reanimate the snuffed-out path to expressionism (closed off by the Nazi's "Entartete Kunst" exhibition in 1937) after seeing American Abstract Expressionism in 1958 (as part of MoMA's "New American Painting" travelling exhibition). He makes this expressionism strange, nonetheless, by painting his figures upside-down, creating a curious hybrid of figuration and "pure" painting. Kiefer studied under Beuys, where he was well-exposed to the mythic role of the artist as shaman and healer of a traumatized past. He quickly outdid Beuys by staging what he called his "occupations" in 1969, photographing himself in various charged sites of WWII in stormtrooper boots, giving the Nazi salute. Man in the Forest stages a similar co-optation, staging a central legend of the Jewish bible (Moses and the Burning bush) in a German forest, himself as the mythic prophet. Nuremberg reflects his mature style: earth colors, straw, a compelling use of perspective, a scorched but now agricultural terrain. Bombastic? Fascistic? or Postmodern? You decide.

Richter, 2 Candles, 1982
Richter, Wald 1990
Polke, Reagan I-III, 1980

Richter and Polke, in the context of the revival of Expressionism, continued to pursue the more critical objectives of their "Capitalist Realism" project of the 60s. "Expressionism" is staged as a performance and a replication - Richter explicitly produces both fuzzy, photo-realist paintings and their mechanically cancelled "Abstract Expressionist" cousins. Polke pursues the degrading of an image through successive photocopies, meticulously transferred to "canvases" of printed fabric, themselves reiterated patterns of a mass-produced modernism. Polke in particular seems to resonate with French theorists, who viewed mass culture as a "society of the spectacle," come to fruition in the spectacle-based leadership of the avuncular celebrity President, Ronald Reagan.

Pistoletto, Venus of Rags, 1967
Merz, Objet cache toi, 1968

The Italian Arte Povera (poor art, impoverished art) movement of the late 60s set up a relationship to the great classical past of Italian art that was ambivalent at best, and fed directly into a postmodern culture of appropriation, irony, eclecticism and pastiche. Pistoletto takes his plaster garden sculpture "Venus" ( a cousin to Arman's mannikin venus embedded with dollar bills) and buries her in rags; Merz builds a "primitive" hut of mud and emblazons it with cheap urban neon, advertising his "object to hide yourself."

Cucchi, Under the Wind, 1981
Chia, Water Bearer, 1981
Clemente, Untitled, 1983

Linked a thousand ways to the Arte Povera artists, the younger generation dubbed the "Transavantgardia" produced expressionist images that flirted directly with "repressed" aspects of earlier modernist practices. Unabashedly figurative, these painters also directly addressed the burden of Italy's past -- both its great tradition and its recent fascist history. Michelangelesque musculature and mythic themes (Chia), blood-soaked soldiers (Cucchi), and psychological palimpsests of modern masculinity (Clemente), these three "expressionists" have more on their mind than pretty pictures.