| A
diverse art movement that dominated the art market in Europe and the
United States during the early and mid-1980s. Neo-Expressionism
comprised a varied assemblage of young artists who had returned to
portraying the human body and other recognizable objects, in reaction to
the remote, introverted, highly intellectualized abstract art production
of the 1970s. The movement was linked to and in part generated by new
and aggressive methods of salesmanship, media promotion, and marketing
on the part of dealers and galleries.
Neo-Expressionist paintings
themselves, though diverse in appearance, presented certain common
traits. Among these were: a rejection of traditional standards of
composition and design; an ambivalent and often brittle emotional tone
that reflected contemporary urban life and values; a general lack of
concern for pictorial idealization; the use of vivid but jarringly banal
colour harmonies; and a simultaneously tense and playful presentation of
objects in a primitivist manner that communicates a sense of inner
disturbance, tension, alienation, and ambiguity (hence the term
Neo-Expressionist to describe this approach). Among the principal
artists of the movement were the Americans Julian Schnabel and David
Salle, the Italians Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente, and the Germans
Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. Neo-Expressionism was controversial
both in the quality of its art products and in the highly commercialized
aspects of its presentation to the art-buying public. |
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