Neo-Expressionism

After a decade and a half of Minimalism's cool intelligence and Conceptual Art's dematerialised propositions, the late 1970s saw painting return with a vengeance. Neo-Expressionism erupted simultaneously in several countries: the Neue Wilde in Germany (Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, A.R. Penck), the Transavanguardia in Italy (Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Sandro Chia), and the East Village scene in New York (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, David Salle). What united these otherwise very different artists was a return to large-format figurative painting executed with raw, aggressive, emotionally charged gesture — visceral surfaces, mythological and personal symbolism, a deliberate disregard for finish and taste. Kiefer loaded his enormous canvases with lead, straw, ash and book pages; Baselitz painted his figures upside down; Basquiat scrawled crown symbols and crossed-out words across tachiste grounds. After the silence of Minimalism, Neo-Expressionism was very loud.

How to recognise it

Large scale and physical urgency are the immediate signals: these are paintings made aggressively, with thick impasto, raw canvas, scratched or scraped surfaces, paint apparently applied in fury. Figuration returns but is distorted, fragmented, masklike or deliberately crude — not classical beauty but scarred, anxious, expressive deformation. Symbolic and mythological content is common, particularly in German work: Kiefer references Norse myth, Nazi history, Kabbalah; Baselitz inverts the figure to make it a pure painting problem. In Basquiat, look for graffiti-derived marks, text fragments, anatomical diagrams, crossings-out, and an all-over surface energy. Colour is intense and often dissonant. If a figurative painting feels violently physical in its making and emotionally unresolved in its imagery, it is probably Neo-Expressionist.