The Neo-Expressionist Revolt: Painting is Dead - Long Live Painting!

“In the late seventies the wonderful conceptual artist Robert Barry came to see me in the museum in Eindhoven – in connection with his exhibition. There were one or two paintings by Penck on view. He disliked them intensely. He even found it difficult to see them as serious art. I remember he compared them to clumsy student painting in provincial American art schools. What he meant, I think, was that he could not accept that art in its formal and physical formulation should ever look back… Art should forever aim for the uncompromising new. It should be relentlessly new: that was a very strong sentiment with many artists in America. Penck was delving into the bygone muck of history.”

Rudi Fuchs, ‘Julian Schnabel Versions of Chuck and Other Paintings’, 2007, P156.

“… for years I’ve seen that content lying in wait, heavy-handed, student-level painting, rich in reds and blacks, a great seething, gravelly substratum of vaguely ominous, cartoon-derived, funky critters. In fifteen years of jurying from Worcester to Washington, from Durham to Dallas, I have never, for example, juried a show which did not have at least one image of a menacing dog with sharp teeth. Now they are here in packs in the downtown galleries. Sometime late in the 1970s, all this ‘content’, all this universally shared ‘personal imagery’, gathered itself up, like Visigoths and came to Rome.”

Walter Darby Bannard, Quoted in ‘The New Image: Painting in the 1980s’ by Tony Godfrey, 1986.      

           

For much of my early career - I was criticized by those in the Irish art establishment - for painting in an adolescent manner. This was true in the sense that I was an adolescent when I started painting seriously and my style and subject matter was not what a mature painter would ever have considered significant or acceptable. However, that is not to say that my ‘adolescent’ approach to art making was unique. Although since the 1960s it had been uncool to make emotional art - and to consider one’s subjective feelings important - was attacked as arrogant and arbitrary. Briefly from 1978-1985 it had been cool again to be raw and emotional. Modern art by the late 1970s was not only at a dead end theoretically it was also at a commercial impasse. Turned off by a succession of short-lived, increasingly ascetic and anti-commercial styles the avid collectors of Pop art stopped buying and though Photorealism had been popular with the public - critics dismissed it. Neo-Expressionism provided an unexpected shot in the arm to the art world - attracting new collectors and inspiring older ones to get back in the game. As Wolfgang observed: “After an art from and for the head – conceptual art, esthetic reductions on Minimal art, and Italian Arte Povera – after the schoolroom-for-society of Joseph Beuys, after artistic experimentation with technological media, after body art, after performance art, we are now witnessing a rediscovery of simple, spontaneous drawing and painting.” (Wolfgang Max Faust, “Du hast keine Chance. Nutze sie!” With It and Against It: Tendencies in Recent German Art, Artforum, September 1981.)                                                                                                                 

The term Neo-Expressionism, was a highly misleading one and certainly did not apply to many of the painters said to be under its banner and most of them had a far more sardonic notion of expressivity than their early German masters. Yet I have found it the easiest shorthand. While, many of the early commenters on Neo-Expressionism created the straw-man of the Expressive man naïvely trying to express his feelings in paint, much of Neo-Expressionism was a deconstruction of painting and an ironic comment on the very Expressive values they were supposed to have fallen for. In fact, Neo-Expressionism, was the last gasp for personal expression and authenticity in painting and its own process of quotation and deconstruction pointed up the failure of communication and the difficult if not impossible task of rebirthing the ancient idea of personal expressivity in a fragmented Post-Modern age of media blitz, TV channel-surfing, music sampling and the narcissistic cult of the media celebrity. As for the other painting movements of the 80s like Pattern and Decoration, New Image painters, The Pictures Generation and Neo-Geo painters, I found them all irrelevant and not even worth study.

The 1970s had seen a period of experimentation with photography, video, installation, text and performance - painting in particular was considered anachronistic. Victor Burgin the conceptual artist summed up the attitude of many artists in America in the late 60s when he later said: “I’d given up painting in `65 for the rather crude reason that it was an outmoded technology. There were enough paintings and sculptures silting up basements of museums all over the world – why produce more? It was ecologically unsound: a form of pollution.” (Victor Burgin cited by Tony Godfrey in The New Image: Painting in The 1980s, Abbeville Press, New York, 1986, P. 9.) Thus, the art world of the 1970s saw a period of open experimentation that tested the limits of art. However, as Hilton Kramer pointed out, even in this open period there was a prohibition against “the kind of expressive imagery likely to pose a threat to abstraction itself.” Or, “anything that suggested a reversion to or revival of artistic practices which had already been rejected in the name of innovation itself.” (Hilton Kramer, ‘Julian Schnabel’, Art of Our Time, The Saatchi Collection, London: Lund Humphries, 1984.)

 

                                                                                                                                   

With the dawn of the 1980s a tidal wave of roughly painted figurative paintings and sculptures landed on the shores of New York galleries – pushing out the minimalist blank canvases and diagrams of conceptual art. “Suddenly painting had become grave, mysterious, and messy again, and not in any of the familiar ways. It had also become boisterous, swaggering, and ‘tough’. Charm, elegance, and reductive understatement were all firmly rejected, and so was the tendency to anorexic aestheticism that had come to characterise the minimalist impulse at its outermost extremes, Excess and surfeit were embraced as a principal of vitality.” (Hilton Kramer, ‘Julian Schnabel’, Art of Our Time, The Saatchi Collection, London: Lund Humphries, 1984.) Sandro Chia seemed to speak for all Neo-Expressionists when he spoke of his rediscovery of the power of painting, “I’ve been through conceptualism, minimalism, everything. There is a new richness to our perception because we went through all that. Now it’s possible to look at paintings again, we see it not only as paint on canvas, but as something else... Painting is not just an object: it has an aura again. There is a light around the work.” (Sandro Chia quoted in Tony Godfrey’s, The New Image: Painting in The 1980s, New York: Abbeville Press, 1985, P.69.)

Yet, others derided Neo-Expressionism as stupid and inauthentic, its makers inarticulate and its works mainly retrospective pastiche, expressive kitsch, and cynical commercial products. They saw it as a form of decadent painting that cashed in on the boom of the eighties, which was desperate to find macho figures of heroic importance. Kim Levin an advocate for conceptualist artists and a critic for The Village Voice, was one of many critics of the new art of the 1980s: “Recent art can be seen in terms of neoconservatism, ultratraditionalism, antimodernism, as well as Neo-Expressionism. It can also be seen as a species of primitivism, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “a belief that the acquisitions of civilization are evil or that the earliest period of human history was best”... We are now being reminded that the twentieth century tradition of Formalist reduction has been paralleled all along by a tradition of reduction to the rawest content, the most elementary expression, in a quest for primal authenticity.” (Kim Levin, The Agony and the Anomie, Beyond Modernism: essays on art from the 70s and 80s, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988, P. 164.)

           

The key to understanding the controversial and contentious success of the Neo-Expressionists and their subsequent plunge from the art world pantheon lay not in aesthetics but in politics. As Thomas Lawson, who wrote some of the greatest polemics against Neo-Exprssionism wrote: “The quarrel with expressionist art is at its base a political one: art that places supreme value on individual enterprise is, ultimately, reactionary. While the expressionist stance is confrontational, it is as often based upon an effete snobbism as on real understanding of or sympathy with the oppressed classes. And, moreover, whether of the right or the left, it can too easily be characterised as merely rebellious – as safely contained, easily explained, and therefore in complicity with the standards that it seeks to overthrow, be they moral, political or esthetic.” (Thomas Lawson, Salome and Luciano Castelli, Artforum, September 1981.)

             

The seventies had seen a decade of left wing, anti-art market artists in their legion achieving academic control, curatorial promotion and political prominence. While such work was innovative, risk-taking and challenging it was still not as saleable or museum friendly as Greenberg inspired Post-Painterly-Abstraction in its last desperate fling. The 70s also saw the emergence of defiant feminist artists as well as politically antagonistic gay and lesbian artists who were attracted to new media like photography and video because it did not carry the baggage of painting and traditional sculpture. Their work deconstructed the myth of the western, white, male genius, the male-gaze and the politics of patronage as well as giving a voice to the previously voiceless. But collectors recoiled from such work as Robert Hughes observed: “As the decade wore on, their hopes of latching onto “heroic” art were crimped by legions of feminist art historians extolling Pennsylvanian quilt makers and unjustly neglected women Precisionists from the Bay Area; and their sense of self-worth as patrons found itself under attack from every sort of Marxist, structuralist, and deconstructor.” (Robert Hughes, There’s No Geist Like the Zeitgeist, The New York Review of Books, October 27^th 1983.)

Thus, when Neo-Expressionism emerged - through the aggressive support of the commercial gallery system - and rejected the pluralistic, anti-commercial, and innovative new media in favour of the retrograde, elitist and ultimate commercial product – oil on canvas – and collectors flocked back to the market, the seeds of antipathy were sown. As Donald Kuspit noted: “Neo-Expressionism exists largely to behead and relegate to the dustbin of history the art of the 1960s and 70s that has up to no seemed royal.” (Donald Kuspit, The New (?) Expressionism: Art As Damaged Goods, ArtForum, November 1981.) Moreover, of the thirty-eight artists chosen for the first large scale showcase of Neo-Expressionism; A New Spirit in Painting in the Royal Academy in London in 1981, none were women. Offended by the lack of female painters in A New Spirit in Painting, Roberta Smith wrote that: “… a message which also seemed to be reflected in many of the overblown canvases, is that painting is once again “man’s work.” A sub-message could have been extrapolated from the works at hand: that men have a greater right to be mediocre.” (Roberta Smith, Fresh Paint?, Art in America, P. 75, Summer 1981.) The following year when the Neo-Expressionist bandwagon moved to Berlin for the Zeitgeist exhibition, Susan Rothenberg was the only woman represented alongside forty-five male artists. However, Neo-Expressionism proved an instant hit with collectors and the old evaluation of an artist’s worth was reconnected with his skill, “An individual’s manual skill was reinstated as proof of an object’s artistic credentials, and this meant that, instead of being merely analysed as if it were a commodity, art could now properly function as one.” (Michael Archer, Art Since 1960: Expanded Edition, London: Thames & Hudson, 2002, P.153.) Moreover, Neo-Expressionist painting was shaped by some of the criticisms of painting and lessons learned from contemporary art of the last twenty years, “Like Orestes, the hero who peeped around corners in his return from exile, painting was wily and cautious. To salvage what it could of the wreckage of Modernism, it incorporated elements of Conceptualism as if a redeeming ichor. As if to demonstrate its awareness of its past sins, it returned from exile with a self-critical manner. As if to redress its former arrogance, it returned with self-mockery. As if to offset its former elitism and Puritanism, it returned in a costume of rags collected from everywhere.” (Thomas McEvilley, The Exile’s Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, P. 7-8.)

The political attitude of the Neo-Expressionist’s was cynical and nihilistic – a feeling that art could not effect social change and that it could only express the solopistic poltics of anguish and alienation and make money for the self-made artist entrepreneur. This change in taste came as politics itself was changing - with the election of the extreme Conservative Margret Thatcher and the hero of the Republican right Ronald Regan. Art in the 1980s stopped being about art and started to be about business in ways not seen since Paris in the 1950s. “Though the success of what came to be called “Reaganomics” has been debated, from the perspective of the arts it indisputably reduced the amount of funds available to non-profit arts organizations and increased the spending power of wealthier U.S. citizens. The result was to change the balance of how money entered the art world and where it was spent. With much less public funding to support experimental art, the gallery system, with its focus on sales, gained power as the ultimate arbiter of success or failure.” (Peter R. Kalb, Art Since 1980: Charting The Contemporary. London: Laurence King Publications Ltd, 2013, P. 68.) Money, celebrity and stylistic controversy replaced real innovation or artistic confrontation with society. Artists became businessmen and women. Anxious self-promotion replaced self-fulfilling talent and the bohemian pleasure of the artistic community was replaced by mercenary individualism. Moreover, old notions of artist maturity were challenged by young painters with meteoric careers who reflected a broader Zeitgeist, “... the type of person to whom the future is said to belong is no longer the “authoritarian” character with a strong ego, but rather an unstable, yet creative person. The former is incarcerated in the prison of his own rigid ego, which refuses to allow the revision of any judgement once it has been made, regardless of whether it originally came from others and has simply been taken over or whether it has always been his own. The unstable, creative person, on the other hand, is flexible, prepared to change his course and – if his flexibility goes hand in hand with creative imagination – is also able to make independent judgements and decisions. Modern sociologists have diagnosed that the age of the mature, inner-directed personality of the old school has passed and that it has become “non-functional””. (Klaus Honnef, Contemporary Art. Hamburg: Taschen, 1988, P. 96.) Thus, Neo-Expressionism immediately made bitter enemies amongst the left-wing radicals of the 70s - and simultaneously angered conservative art lovers who hated its raw, awkward and immature painting styles.

           

Hilton Kramer summed up the change it taste, that brought about the Neo-expressionist revival when he wrote: “Nothing is more incalculable in art - or more inevitable - than a genuine change in taste. Although taste seems to operate by a sort of law of compensation, so that the denial of certain qualities in one period almost automatically prepares the ground for their triumphal return later, its timetable can never be accurately predicted. It’s roots lie in something deeper and more mysterious than mere fashion. At the heart of every genuine change in taste there is, I suppose, a keen feeling of loss, an existential ache - a sense that something absolutely essential to the life of art has been allowed to fall into a state of unendurable atrophy. It is to the immediate repair of this perceived void that taste at its profoundest level addresses itself.”(Two Painters Explore New Wave, New York Times, April 17, 1981.)                                                                                                                    

However even as early as 1981, Neo-Expressionism had telling critics. In the spring of 1981, the historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, wrote an influential essay Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting, in the Neo-Marxist October magazine, comparing Neo-Expressionism, with the reactionary rappel à l’ordre (call to order) of the 1920s, which saw artists return to more classical styles of art after the bloodbath of the First World War. Buchloh believed that Neo-Expressionism was a reactionary repudiation of the political and artistic advances of avant-guard art of the 60s and 70s. Buchloh also attacked the expressivity of the Neo-Expressionists: “Such paintings, experienced by a certain audience as sensuous, expressive, and energetic, preform and glorify the ritual of instant excitation and perpetually postponed gratification that is the bourgeois mode of experience.” (Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting, Art in Modern Culture, Open University, London: Phaidon, 1992, P. 235.)

Hilton Kramer, was amused by this backlash from the left against the Neo-Expressionists: “One significant measure of the impact of the movement is that it is already under attack from the artistic radicals of yesteryear - especially the lonely champions of Conceptual art - as a “mock avantgarde.”” (Hilton Kramer, Expressionism Returns To Painting, The New York Times, 12^TH July 1981.)

In October 1981, in Artforum, Thomas Lawson in his essay ‘Last Exit Painting’, attacked the Neo-Expressionists’ theatrical insincerity, narcissism, self-importance, bad boy posturing within the safe confines of Soho galleries and debasement of art to kitsch. The following month, Peter Plagens in his essay ‘The Academy of the Bad’ in Art in America, humourlessly reported on the confusing new art world of good ‘bad painting’, bad ‘bad painting’ with its poor taste, rudimentary skills and anything goes pastiche of styles.                           

That same month, Donald Kuspit, in his essay ‘The New [?] Expressionism: Art As Damaged Goods’, in Artforum, regarded the Neo-Expressionists’ as symptomatic of a culture in crisis, beset by the threat of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe and the impotence of the individual within a corporate world that had turned personal expression into a tool of bourgeois conformity. Kuspit regarded the Neo-Expressionists socio-politically impotent, melodramatic and damaged creators whose grandiose work betrayed an apocalyptic fear. “There is an orgasmic overtone to the new Expressionism, the sense of arousal and release that evokes the apocalyptic, which at once becomes a metaphor for it. Reverberating on its source, the apocalyptic becomes a further erotic provocation. More pointedly, there is a sense of exaggerated – indeed, selfish – arousal, and incomplete release, further stimulating the sense of personal apocalypse. A kind of vicious autistic circle is created, in which a sense of the erotic becomes the subjective correlative for a sense of the apocalyptic, and, vice versa, a sense of imminent apocalypse becomes the objective correlative for a frustrated, even seemingly endangered eroticism. The erotic and the apocalyptic feed into one another until they seem interchangeable, and thereby finally robbed of their meaning and charge.” (Donald Kuspit, The New [?] Expressionism: Art As Damaged Goods, Artforum, 1981, P. 50).

At first, such work in Italy was called ‘Transavantguardia’ in Germany it was called Neue Wilden, in England it was called ‘New Painting’. While in the US, it was called ‘Neo-Expressionism’ and it is this last term which I use in my own writings. Artists like Baselitz, Polke, Chia, Clemente, Schnabel, Salle and Basquiat lead this dramatic - if brief change in taste. If cutting-edge’ art from the early 1960s to the late 1970s had been about impersonal techniques, styles and mediums - the art world from 1980-1987 was to be dominated by highly personal, intensely visual and emotional paintings. The work of the Neo-Expressionists, emerged outside of the mainstream of the art world dominated by Conceptual theory, and expressed psychic and emotional conditions that had been long ignored and made taboo by contempoary art. While Neo-Marxists condemned the Neo-Expressionists for giving vent to repressed, macho and right-wing aspirations for power. I would argue that therapeutically speaking, it is often good to express the repressed - in order to understand and transcend it. And the ability of painting to express spontanious emotion made it ideal for these Neo-Expressionist artists. The sensual handling of paint and its erotic charge were explored by painters who had long been condemed for their lust for paint. They uncovered the negelected power of iconography and symbolism.

           

In a narcissistic age, Neo-Expressionist paintings abounded with self-portraits both direct and indirect. In an age of masculine crisis, images of sexualised, tortured, upended and dismembered male figures were prominent. In fragmented and complex world, bodies in Neo-Expressionist art were equally fragmented, and homeless and penetrated either sexually or sadistically. The narcissism and obscurity of many of these paintings belied the fact that they were made in what is normally thought of as the most accessible of mediums – oil paint on canvas. The conceptualist Joseph Kosuth spoke for many of the radicals of the 1970s when he attacked the commercialism and counter-revolutionary nature of Neo-Expressionism: “The art market, which by nature is conservative - particularly in this century – loves paintings. Every illiterate, uncultured dingbat (rich or not) knows that paintings are art, are great investments, and look swell over the couch. Forget whatever historical necessity was thoughtfully felt by some artists for a return to painting; the market is delighted to have paintings up again; it can pretend that the last 20 years didn’t happen, celebrating old hacks and new opportunists indiscriminately.” (Joseph Kosuth, Portraits Mon Amour, Artforum, May 1982, P.62.)                                                                                                                                                   

After the dystopian 1970s the greed is good decade of the 1980s saw many artists abandon the dreamy experimentation of the 1970s to cash in. You either became a superstar or you might as well not exist. In the 1970s in America, artists could sponge off the government through grants, artist in residency programs and tenure in art colleges without ever making any art that real people admired never mind wanted to buy. But in the 1980s this funding was slashed, and artists only hope in America was to succeed in the art market. But since virtually none of these artists could make anything anyone would want to buy - they were cast aside. So, a vast lump of talentless artists who had gloried in their so-called avant-garde and anti-establishment credentials found themselves broke and unwanted. Naturally they focused their venom on successful commercial Neo-Expressionist artists - especially as they hoovered up ideas from conceptualism to add to their paintings. After the anti-heroic decade of the 1970s that had no real art stars apart from Warhol and Beuys, the 1980s was a decade of multiple artistic celebrities. Helped by the media’s renewed fascination with art, young artists like Schnabel, Clemente, Basquiat, Haring - and a host of others – became minor celebrities featured in glossy newspaper feature articles, the gossip columns and television interviews. As Roberta Smith pointed out in 2017, “The phrases “art star” “sellout show” and “waiting list”, gained wide usage, sometimes linked to artists you’d barely heard of.” (Roberta Smith, Painting From the 1980s, When Brash Met Flash, The New York Times, 9^th February, 2017.)        

But the price of commercial success for these Neo-Expressionists was alienation from their peers and critical assault from all sides. In 1979, Julian Schnabel made a plate painting called Circumnavigating the Sea of Shit and Francisco Clemente made a painting called Perseverance in 1982 in which he depicted himself being rained upon by shit. Both were commenting on the scatological abuse successful painters like them suffered from their envious peers and vicious critics in those days in the New York art world.

The Seventies and eighties saw major retrospectives of German Expressionists like Kirchner, Nolde and Beckmann and these shows influenced a younger generation of art students and the Neo-Expressionist painters. Neo-Expressionists also looked back to the late paintings of Picasso and Philip Guston as well as a host of ‘minor’ Modernist painters like Marc Chagall and De Chirico.                                                             

Unlike early Expressionists like van Gogh, Beckman and Grosz – who concerned themselves with social and political issues or a prolonged spiritual quest. Neo-Expressionism was notable for its lack of social commentary and self-centred concern with personal angst. They offered no new artistic solutions the way Joseph Beuys had, instead their art recorded their concern with previous art and themselves. It was this self-centredness which proved so damming in the eyes of writers like John Meany in the Irish academic art magazine Circa: “A crisis situation, which western capitalism is currently undergoing, tends to produce an art concerned with crisis. Many German expressionist images criticised the social decay of that society and questioned its values. But today’s expressionism is rarely concerned with our social and political decay but rather with a personalized mythical one. They do not appear as a social critique but as an expression of the crisis of the male personality. This self-centred outlook, coupled with the stylistic borrowings, suggest an inability to look beyond the self and other art, and to come to terms with contemporary problems.” (John Meany, Expressionism Revamped, Circa, Issue 10, May/June, 1983, P.6.)                                                                                           

Neo-Expressionist canvases were often large and theatrical, recognizably figurative but painted on the scale of murals with house painter’s brushes. They were often garishly coloured, crudely drawn, hastily painted and collaged with other totemic or personal elements. They included everything that had been stripped way by late modernism. In keeping with this, painters like Polke, Chia, Schnabel and Salle explored the ‘bad-paintings’ of René Magritte, De Chirico and Picabia. This frenetic eclecticism struck many commentators as reminiscent of sixteenth century Mannerism – with its desperate search for ever more extreme and fanciful visual orchestrations. Like Mannerism, and Expressionism - Neo-Expressionism flourished at a time of great social upheaval. The subject matter of some of this work was sexual – however (with the exception of artists like Salomé and Clemente) it was very rarely overtly pornographic – these were very commercially minded artists after all!

                                                                                                                                                            

Their paintings rough, violent, slap-dash figurative works – were the product of a liberal arts policy in the west which bad seen the abandonment of slow drilling in representational skills like; drawing from dirty and graffitied plaster casts in the college canteen, recording the fatigue and boredom of a life-model in the stuffy and smelly life-room, studying the anatomy of the figure in books and in models, analyzing the cast of shadows, the mixing and blending of half and quarter tones in a head study, or the painting of street scenes en plein air. So, few Neo-Expressionists were trained as figurative painters and their drawing style owed more to comic book illustrations and fashion drawings than to the-life-room. Their drawings were crude, sketchy, mannered and dumb.                                                                                                                                                      

The vast canvases of the likes of Chia, Clemente, Baselitz, Kiefer, Schnabel and Salle were not just a matter of making so-called big important art - it was also part of a clever marketing strategy. Countless young art students and artists could have painted nth generation Abstract Expressionist canvases and nth generation expressive figurative works that pastished art history - but none of them could have afforded to do it on the scale and in the quantity that the Neo-Expressionists could. And by painting figurative and abstract doodles and sketches on ten-foot canvases - the Neo-Expressionists made them instantly look more important than they were - and differentiated their paintings from amateur, student and failed artists work. 

They were also very successful artists - who benefited from a huge increase in the number of individual collectors of contemporary art as well as corporate and banking investment in new painting (especially in America and Germany.) Their emergence revitalized an art world recovering from the recessions of the 1970s and arts retreat into the anti-commercial dead ends of conceptualism and Minimalism. Unexpectedly Neo-Expressionist artists reaped the rewards of the brash optimism of the early 1980s, the Bull Market, and the return of collectors to galleries. Hyped and promoted by a handful of very ambitious and aggressive dealers like Leo Castelli and Mary Boone in New York, Michael Werner in Cologne, Bruno Bischofberger in Switzerland and Gian Enzo Sperone in Italy - young painters like Schnabel, Basquiat, and Clemente became millionaires overnight. They were critically lauded by Germany’s Joachimides, England’s Norman Rosenthal and America’s Donald Kuspit. Artists were constantly featured in fashion magazines, written about in the social and personal columns, and shown in retrospectives worldwide. Everywhere journalists and critics eagerly reported the smell of oil paint once again coming from artists’ studios - and talk at openings of painting and old painters who had been ignored for decades. “The artists’ studios are full of paint pots again and an abandoned easel in an art school has become a rare sight. Wherever you look in Europe or America you find artists who have rediscovered the sheer joy of painting. In the studios, in the cafes and bars, wherever artists or students gather, you hear passionate debates and arguments about painting.” (Christos M. Joachimides, A New Spirit in Painting, London: The Royal Academy, 1981, P. 14.) Although the Neo-Expressionist were out of favour with the radical old-guard and traditionalist critics, their work was given far more attention in museums than the Post-Structuralists and Neo-Geo artists -leading them to often have career retrospectives at startlingly young ages. With these exhibitions, came monographs that only further served to promote them. As Christos M. Joachimides pointed out, “This new concern with painting is related to a certain subjective vision, a vision that includes both an understanding of the artist himself as an individual engaged in a search for self-realization and as an actor on the wider historical stage... Artists, no longer satisfied with the deliberately objective view, are beginning to respond to their environment, allowing these reactions to be expressed in the form of images. We are confronted with an art that tells us about their personal relationships and personal worlds.” (Christos M. Joachimides, A New Spirit in Painting, London: The Royal Academy, 1981, P. 14.) However, what he failed to mention was that this deep psychological side to Neo-Expressionism –concerned male identity and most of these identities seemed fanciful, surreal or imaginatively – set in another world. Neo-Expressionist paintings subconsciously illustrated an age of masculine anxiety. These new wounded macho painters depicted themselves in historical, debauched or deranged ways. This cult of self-revelation reached its most extreme case with the solipsism of Clemente. Often painters like Fetting, Büttner, and Schnabel and in Ireland; Mulcahy, Maguire and Graham – painted phallic shapes or brutalised scrotums in their paintings.                                                                                              

While it proved to be immensely popular with the general public, collectors and dealers - Neo-Expressionism had many virulent critics, especially among conservative critics obsessed with craft like Robert Hughes and Brian Sewell. It was also attacked by conceptual artists concerned with theory like Donald Judd, formalist critics concerned with the Modernist tradition like Clemente Greenberg and Neo-Marxist members of the October group, who opposed Neo-Expressionist painting in favour of photo-based conceptual art like the work of the Pictures exhibition in 1977. They all attacked this new generation of painters who lusted after fame and monetary success and painted so fast and so badly. Critics quoted Post-Structuralist and Lacanian theory - which proved that there could never be an unmediated form of expression made outside of the structures of social and artistic tradition. They called the Neo-Expressionists cynical opportunists, acting out a form of diminished German Expressionism à la 1910. The conceptualist Lawrence Weiner reflected the critical and political contempt for this resurgence in expressive painting amongst the artists of the 1970s when he said: “The wild painting of Neo-Expressionism sweeps from the table all the enlightened values we artists have fought for. It bares fascistoid traits, because it glorifies the individual and [...] subscribes to a mysticism.” (Lawrence Weiner, cited in Antje von Graevenitz “Der Weg ist nicht zweigeteilt, sondern rund: Uberlegungen zum Bilderstreit in (West-) Deutschland nach 1945” in Bilderstriet: Widerspruch, Einheit und Fragment in der kunst seit 1960, ed. Siegfried Gohr and Johannes Gachnang, exh. Cat., Museum Ludwig, Cologne 1989, P. 221.)                                                                               

After a decade of attending endless student exhibitions, many critics were suspicious of the type of art student who in the 1980s jumped on the Neo-Expressionist bandwagon relying on ugliness and vehemence to hide a lack of formal intelligence or manifest craft. To these critics the childish spasms of paint that were summoned up in Neo-Expressionist painting was only an attempt to conceal a lack of genuine avant-garde progression.                                                                                                                                             

To older critics accustomed to dealing with the mature refined painterly grammar of a Cézanne, Matisse or Beckman the anarchism of the Neo-Expressionist was barbaric. They considered that slapping paint on (ironically) in incoherent spasms could never lead to a new painterly grammar that others could build on. Meanwhile social critics attacked the commercial avarice of the Neo-Expressionists and their shameless lust for fame.                                                                                                                                                                      

In the January 1983 edition of Art in America Craig Owens, Carter Radcliff and Hal Foster each in their own way sought to demolish the claims made for Neo-Expressionism. Craig Ownes attacked the lust for “honour, power and the love of women” of the Neo-Expressionists and began his essay with a quote from Sigmund Freud from whom he had borrowed this: “The artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the demand for the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction as it is first made, and who then in phantasy-life allows full play to his erotic and ambitious wishes. But he finds a way of return from this world of phantasy back to reality; with his special gifts he moulds his phantasies into a new kind of reality, and men concede them justification as valuable reflections of actual life. Thus by a certain path he actually becomes the hero, king, creator, favourite he desired to be, without pursuing the circuitous course of creating real alternations in the outer world.” (Sigmund Freud, Formulations Regarding the Two Principals in mental Functioning, General Psychological Theory, Ed. Philip Rieff, New York, 1963, P. 26-7).                                         

Looking back to early Expressionism, Owens observed that: “Prior to Expressionism, human passions might be represented by, but could have no immediate presence or reality within, works of art. The Expressionists, however, abandoned the simulation of emotion in favour of its seismographic registration. They were determined to register unconscious affects – trauma, shock – without disguise through the medium of art... whether we find its claims to spontaneity and immediacy hopelessly naive, or whether we believe that the Expressionists actually tapped a prelinguistic reserve of libidinal impulses – we should not overlook its radical ambition.” (Craig Owens, Honour, Power and the Love of Women, Artforum, January 1983, P. 9).                   

Owens, who dammed the Neo-Expressionists as “pseudo-Expressionists”, questioned their naïve faith in immediate, spontaneous and prelingual expression – the possibility of which he denied: “The pseudo-Expressionists, retreat to the pre-Expressionist simulation of passion; they create illusions of spontaneity and immediacy, or rather expose the spontaneity and immediacy sought by the Expressionists as illusions, as a construction of pre-existing forms.” (Craig Owens, Honour, Power and the Love of Women, Art in America, January 1983, P. 11). He critiqued their reactionary creation of “artificial masterpieces” that looked like they had already a place in museums alongside the art they pastiched and castigated the politically ambivalent attitude of the pseudo-Expressionists as schizophrenic in its declaration of the opposite of what it meant – pretending to be rebellious while really being complicit.

Carter Ratcliff, in his article ‘The Short Life of the Sincere Stroke’, pointed out how short lived the Expressive gesture was both in the individual oeuvres of the early Expressionists and in art history in general. “Raw spontaneity, uninhibited sincerity, violent immediacy – what use are these Expressionist ideals? How in fact could any artist pursue them for long without a strong suspicion that he was kidding himself? If these qualities of feeling depend on the manipulation of paint, Expressionism will surely develop routines and clichés.” (Carter Ratcliff, The Short Life of the Sincere Stroke, Art in America 1983, P. 74). He also poured scorn on the idea that only Expressionists had a special claim to sincere expression.                                                                                                                                        

Hal Foster attacked the “expressive fallacy” of the Neo-Expressionists beginning his essay with a telling quote from Paul de Man: “We know that our entire language is an intricate system of rhetorical devices designed to escape from the direct expression of desires that are, in the fullest sense of the term, unnameable- not because they are ethically shameful (for this would make the problem a simple one), but because unmediated expression is a philosophical impossibility. And we know that the individual who chose to ignore this fundamental convention would be slated either for crucifixion, if he were aware, or, if he were naive, destined to the total ridicule accorded such heroes as Candide and all other fools in fiction or in life.” (Paul de Man, Criticism and Crisis, 1967.)                                                                                                                           

Turning to Expressionism, Foster pointed out that: “... Expressionism denies its own status as a language – a denial that is necessary given the Expressionist claim to immediacy and stress on the self as originary. For with a denial of its rhetorical nature goes a denial of many social and historical mediations (dismissed as “mere conventions”). Such a “transendant attack on culture,” as Adorno wrote, regularly speaks the language of false escape that of ‘nature boy’”. (Hal Foster, The Expressive Fallacy, Art in America, January 1983, P. 80). Foster castigated the Neo-Expressionists as old fashioned charlatans, cynically playing at wild child Expressionism. However, more importantly Foster questioned the whole myth of self-expression, regarding it as an impossible wish and tragic monologue: “The adequation of self and expression is thus blocked – by the very sign of expression. (Such is the pathos of the Expressionist self; alienated, it would be made whole through expression, only to find there another sign of its alienation.)” (Hal Foster, The Expressive Fallacy, Art in America, January 1983, P. 81). And like Craig Owens, Foster regarded their work as mainly a pastiche of canonical Modernism.                                                                                                                             

Donald Kuspit a rather confusing critic who praised and critiqued Neo-Expressionism as he sought fit, wrote a muddled counter essay in response to this critical drubbing two months later. In ‘Rejoinder: Tired Criticism, Tired “Radicalism”’, in Art in America, in April, 1983, Kuspit dismissed these critics as puritanical and hackneyed in their view of art history as progressive and argued that Neo-Expressionism was about a battle against the oppressive dominance of photography, a struggle to deal with content and endure in an increasingly corporate world. Against Hal Foster’s critique of the “expressive fallacy”, Kuspit, retorted that: “The expressive fallacy may not be the full answer to the linguistic fallacy, but it reminds us that art is natural to us, part of our development and self-articulation.” (Donald Kuspit, Rejoinder Tired Critism, Tired “Radicalism”, Art in America, April, 1983, P. 15).

            

Personally, as an adolescent painter in love with the bad taste of expressive painting, I found all these authoritarian critiques of Neo-Expressionism by a relegated generation of older artist and critics - only made me love Neo-Expressionism even more. Yet, in many respects, the critics of Neo-Expressionism were right. Neo-Expressionism was predominately a movement of male painters, exalting macho, unfettered and immediate self-expression. Justifying the promotion of predominantly male painters in the early 1980s, Mary Boone infamously declared that “It’s the men now who are emotional and intuitive… Besides, museums just don’t buy paintings by women.” Yet, Neo-Expressionism was a fashionable, art-school parody of raw feeling - by artists whose feelings did not run as deep or true as those early Expressionist and Modernist artists they so wilfully pastished.“If a major drive in neo-expressionism was to reclaim the tragic vision in art, much that was produced under its supposed aegis was deliberately burlesque rather than high drama, openly embracing the pastiche of which Hal Foster accused neo-expressionism.” (Tony Godfrey, Painting Today, London: Phaidon, 2009, P. 69.)                                        

In the early 1980s it was common for major art stars like Clemente, Baselitz, Kiefer, Chia, Schnabel and Basquiat to have over three solo exhibitions in a single year. That meant that most of the big star Neo-Expressionist painters - had to have a team of assistants helping them in their studios. This was not an ethical problem for Pop artists like Warhol - whose whole ethos was industrial. However, for painters to claim that their work was important because it was a personal expression of their personal sensitivity or angst – to have assistants; stretch canvases, paint backgrounds and collage elements onto their paintings – was the height of artistic dishonesty. Robert Hughes writing shortly after the high tide of Neo-Expressionism, noted the odd connection between Neo-Expressionism and Pop art: “Much neo-Expressionism, oddly enough, now looks like a codicil to Pop art, in which a perpetual fortissimo of “expressiveness” – big size, thick paint, contorted figures, staring eyes, haste of facture, and fictive wildness of colour – is quoted cold like any other museum style.” (Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and The Century of Change, London: Thames & Hudson, Second Edition, 1991, P. 407.)

           

Speaking about the artists Markus Lüpertz, David Salle, Sandro Chia, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente and Georg Baselitz, Donald Kuspit noted that in the documentary A New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980’s: “These painters are not interested in developing a new style as painters have been since the beginning of the modern period. To do so no longer seems critically important. As one of these artists has said [Markus Lüpertz] it is time once again, to make great paintings. This means that experimental modern art is to be replaced by traditional looking works. This is a romantic idea, a regression from a pervasive belief in progress. After this regression, it is no longer clear what progress in art would mean. What the French poet Baudelaire called ‘the surprise of the new’ seems for these artists no longer an issue, rather the problem they face is to use the novel styles of the last hundred years to make a fresh point about human existence. It is interesting to realise that this century began with a controversial Expressionist type art and is ending with one. This shows that it is still unclear what it means to speak of subjective experience, but that it is still necessary to do so. For all their talk about abstraction, these artists paint the human figure after all. they use fantasy and mythological narrative to show that the figure can still be expressive. By doing this, they demonstrate that painting can, once again, participate in the complex relationship between art and life. The interaction between the painter and his painting directly symbolises this relationship.” (Donald Kuspit, A New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980’s, Michael Blackwood Productions, 1984.)                                                                            

Meanwhile, many jumped on the Neo-Expressionist bandwagon, thinking they were the kind of paintings anyone could make. By the early 1980s many art students were adopting the pseudo-psychotic looking mannerisms of expressionism, without actually understanding its roots. They thought it was easy, yet few actually managed to create expressive works that also displayed originality, vision and that peculiar Expressionist virtuosity that married mutilation with beauty evident in the best artists’ work. They strove for levels of experience, emotion and anxiety that few of them actually felt. Many artists felt compelled to manufacture angst in themselves in order to stay relevant which is why so many instantly forgotten Neo-Expressionist painters looked manufactured like late Punk bands. They were merely adopting the historical precedents that were currently in vogue. They were adopting anxiety as a fashion - just as it had been very fashionable to suffer from nerves in Vienna in the 1900s. The borrowed styles, faked emotions and production line quality too much of this highly commercial Neo-Expressionist art became its undoing aesthetically, spiritually and morally. Like with every other major artistic style, it was brought down not by the achievements of its most original and talented exponents at their best – it was destroyed by the overproduction of these great Neo-Expressionists at their most commercially craven and their countless imitators and debasers.                                                                     

The new revival of German painting was led by previously unfashionable or outcast figurative artists like Gerhard Richter, Eugen Schonebeck, Georg Baselitz, Karl Horst Hodicke, A.R. Penck (Ralf Winkler), Markus Lüpertz, Sigmar Polke, Jörg Immendorff and Anselm Kiefer – all of them born in the years between 1932-1945. Markus Lüpertz (pronounced Loop-er-tz) observed that: “My generation doesn’t worry about survival, although we are aware of the war, we are more aware of Germany’s reconstruction. We developed our thinking in an atmosphere of new hope and we have a positive outlook on life. This makes us different from the Expressionists. Expressionism was a planned form, a psychological form of painting. Expressionism anticipated the end. It held a vision of the end of the world. For my generation of painters, the theme was never sorrow or fear for the world. Our aggressive attitude comes from self-confidence not despair.” (Markus Lüpertz interviewed in A New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980’s, Michael Blackwood Productions, 1984.) Yet, these artists had quite different approaches to reviving painting and questioning it at the same time. A.R. Penck took to making stick figures in diagram like designs that harked back to Paul Klee but also early cave paintings and predated similar work by Basquiat by a decade; Gerhard Richter painted both blurry photo-realist paintings that highlighted the artifice of photography and various kinds of abstraction most notably his large squeegee abstracts that emptied Abstract-Expressionism of all its myths of authenticity and angst; Sigmar Polke mixed surfaces and mediums, for example using commercial patterned cloths as backdrops with Ben-Day dotted images that parodied popular culture and high art myths and abstract splashes that were arch and knowing; Karl Horst Hodicke created largescale gestural paintings that married early Expressionism with the scale and delivery of Abstract Expressionism and Jörg Immendorff created funky cartoony political art images. As Markus Lüpertz observed: “There is no longer a revolutionary attitude in painting, instead we are creating great art. After all the revolutions, real and fake in the art of this century, todays great artist has an immense reservoir of choices at his disposal. We are the first artists who must return to again classic art. We have to put the crumbling house back together again. We need to define things again. We need to make art against which one can rebel one day.” (Markus Lüpertz interviewed in A New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980’s, Michael Blackwood Productions, 1984.)

Yet, Anslem Kiefer was undoubtedly the most important artist to emerge from German Neo-Expressionism. Kiefer’s unearthing of Germany’s toxic history and attempt to give it an artistic ad moral shape that reunited it with the suffering of the Jewish people under Hitler was an almost impossible task - yet it was a measure of Kiefer’s genius that he accomplished this without aggrandizing Nazi culture. Formally, Kiefer’s paintings were a dense accumulation of oil and acrylic paint  mixed together to create a disastrous clay that mirrored the doomed nature of the history he evoked and it was collaged with elements like straw, lead, woodblock prints and black and white photographs. However, despite his genius, I personally did not find much to influence my own work in Kiefer, because his was a grand, impersonal historical style and I was more interested in personal expressions of anarchic individuality.

That is why, I found the example of Georg Baselitz more important to my own art. Baselitz started out as a self-made outsider, kicked out of Art College in East Germany for “socio-political immaturity” (because he had painted his own version of Picasso’s Guernica), in love with the examples of the art of the insane and the mental self-flagellation of Antonin Artaud in particular. In 1961, Baselitz and his friend and fellow painter Eugen Schönebeck wrote their first Pandemoniac Manifesto to accompany their first exhibition, this brilliant manifesto was influenced by both Comte de Lautréamont and Antonin Artaud and it was personally one of my favourites and very influential on my own early writing. Baselitz’s early canvases were a strange malcontent series of deformed bodies in murky browns, creams, olives, greys and black, the most notable being The Great Night in the Bucket from 1962-3, a bleak and dark painting of a young boy with his pants open - and holding forth - a huge erect penis. When exhibited in 1963 in Berlin, the painting and another Naked Man were confiscated by the police. The subsequent court case and infamy nearly destroyed Baselitz’s career. In the subsequent years, Baselitz painted images of lonely young men in rags in charred landscapes, then he began to deconstruct these images turning them into painted, torn collages. In the mid-1970s, Baseltiz made his infamous breakthrough by painting his images upside-down, some thought it a mere gimmick, or that he had merely turned his painting upside down after painting them, but in fact Baseltiz had painted his work upside down and for him these works were a logical continuation of his iconoclastic and malcontent vision of Germany after the apocalypse of World War Two. Baselitz’s early upside-down canvases were almost naturalistic in their treatment of form, but by the early 1980’s his canvases had become strange, barbaric extensions, and critiques of early German Expressionism. Though Baselitz was not without his critics, at the Venice Biennale in 1980, Baselitz exhibited one of his first chain-sawed and painted wooden sculpture Model for a Sculpture - a reclining male figure with his arm raised up and his hand open in what some claimed was a Nazi salute (in fact it was not, and was more like a gesture of offering), Joseph Beuys famously dismissed Baselitz’s work at the Venice Biennale as “worse than those of first-semester students”. Personally, I liked the wilful immaturity of Baselitz and loathed the boring maturity of so many of the so-called greats of late academic and theory bound Modernism. Personally, I was very influenced by Baseltiz’s anti-social iconoclasm, his political immaturity, his reinvention of motifs and solitary individualism. For some time, I even chose midway through my paintings, to turn them upside down so I could find errors and discover new shapes in the images I was painting, however not wanting to so obviously copy Baseltiz, I would then turn them back around and finish them the right way up.                                   

Added to this formidable group of German veteran artists - who had paid their dues - were two new groups of young upstarts. The first were the Berlin artists Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salomé and Bernard Zimmer - who had co-founded the ‘Galerie am Moritzplatz’. They were known as the Neue Wilden or heavy painters after their first exhibition called ‘Heftige Malerei’. Their work was a rock-and-roll version of the violently coloured canvases of Vincent van Gogh and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – but on the almost mural-scale of Jackson Pollock and with the slathered brushstrokes of Willem de Kooning. They frequently used ‘dispersion-paint’ a cheap, latex-based household paint.                                                                                            

A cliché Neue Wilden canvas heaved with slathered paint. It typically depicted dark and mock-heroic male figures often with wild, menacing wolves or dogs in the background. They were typically situated in the pitch dark of night – where the figures were caught in the lurid light of streetlamps, signs and nightclub entrances.                                                                                                                                     

The greatest difference between the original German Expressionists and the New Wild Ones – was that while the former greats like; Kirchner, Nolde, Dix and Beckman expressed genuinely visionary feelings of angst, passion, anger and hope – the latter expressed mostly; second-hand sentiments of cynicism, irony, sarcasm and narcissistic performance. So, I quickly realised that their paintings were just shallow, opportunistic wall-paper – not the deeply felt expressions of pain and passion I had hoped for.                                                           

Rainer Fetting (who was the most successful of this group) and his friends painted scenes from Berlin’s gay subculture. His canvases were full of dark fantasy and unkempt emotion. His paintings were clearly knocked up in one long night - fuelled by joints of marijuana and fat lines of amphetamines and cocaine. However, for a brief moment - art stars like Fetting had the world at their feet. In one interview at the time, he claimed he was not making art he was making art history! It was just one of many laughable egotistical things said by male painters about themselves in the 1980s. When the spotlight shifted, he never got over it and bitterly worked on in the hope of another change in received taste. Even in 2006 in an interview with Cornelius Tittel in the German newspaper Die Welt Am Sonntag (May 14^th 2006), Fetting was still grumbling about his loss of prestige. Claiming that his best 15 canvases could still stand up to the best 15 canvases of Richter or Baselitz. It was an utterly deluded statement.                                                                                                                      

The second major gang of young painters were the Cologne group Muhlheimer Freiheit who were; Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Brommels, Walter Dahn, Jiři Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Georg Naschberger. Other artists like Ina Barfus, Werner Büttner, Georg Herold and Albert Oehlen were also loosely associated with them. Their work was a sarcastic mix of crude cartoon derived images and parodies of Abstract-Expressionist painterly grammar. One common trick they used was to turn their canvases around while painting with sloppy liquid paint - which would thus drip up and down the canvas – or side to side. Dahn and Dokoupil mocked the clichés of Expressionism and the self-regard of the Expressionist artist. Their work was a kind of Art School skit on the myths and idealism of early modernist calls to personal expression and the fetishization of the primitive. They painted badly and on purpose. They drew their images from the television, newspapers, magazines, adverts, graffiti and fine art. Personally I was more attracted to the heroic wishful thinking of the likes of Baselitz to the comic capers of the likes of Kippenberger. Though I did like early works by Oehlen and Dokoupil that both mocked the seriousness of the older Neo-Expressionists, yet also had their own Punk heroics. Although Dokoupil and Dahn’s work was comic, sarcastic and essentially a piss-take on Expressionism, I was amused by their Oedipal efforts. Although I enjoyed the laddish mockery of Oehlen and Büttner early in their careers. Yet I found their deconstructive painterly sarcasim wear thin in their later work.

           

When this new German painting found its way to New York, it was heavily criticised. Donald Kuspit summarized the critical suspicions that this new German aroused: “The defenders of abstraction, both conceptual and perceptual, accused the new painting of reactionary authoritarianism. It regressed, they argued, not merely to expressionism (a decadent style) but to painting (an obsolete convention). Above all the new German painting was said to lack the critical character of Modern art – as if abstraction, with its timed strategies of negation, was still critical with respect to society and art. In sum, the German neo-expressionists, as they were called, were regarded as the creators of neo-bourgeois art.” (Donald Kuspit, Flack from the ‘Radicals’: The Case Against Current German Painting, in ed Brian Willis, After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New York, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984.) Kim Levin was even more dismissive: “Theirs is the romanticism of messy paint, not of changing the world. But as far as Expressionism goes, it’s a misnomer. There’s not enough powder in their angst to blow their noses. Should we call it instead the New Subjectivity? Their work is too blankly impersonal for that. The New Traditionalists is more like it, to borrow a label from Devo. Or think of Kraftwerk’s purely synthetic robotic sound. No feeling. No ideology. No Politics. No responsibility. And no spiritual tension. The new German art may be painterly, messy, and heavy handed, but it isn’t expressive. It’s evasive and blameless (after all, the first generation were just babies when Beuys was in the Luftwaffe). And it’s listless. Nothing matters, nothing counts. If art could have a nervous breakdown, this might be it. But speak of speak of the decorative – cold-blooded simulations of the surface of an expressionistic style – they’ve got that down pat. They’re crypto-academics. Their strength is to wrest from art history some ironic anti-expressionist twists, and a sloppy sentimentalism that denies itself.” (Kim Levin, Both Sides Now: German Painting Here and There, Beyond Modernism: essays on art from the 70s and 80s, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988, P. 211.                           

The Transavanguardia painters from Italy - made a direct appeal to the viewer’s senses with poetic and vivid images - which came from the artists’ imagination or memory. They were one of the first cohesive groups to react against the dead ends of Post-Painterly Abstraction, Pop Art Photo-Realism, Minimalism and Conceptualism. The five main Transavantguardia painters were Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino and Nicola De Maria. The term Transavanguardia - was the invention of the Italian historian Achille Bonito Oliva. His prose (or sales talk) was full of grandiose poetics and metaphysical speculation – claiming all kinds of socio-political, philosophical, aesthetic and poetic achievements for these young painters. Too bad their art could not meet these grand claims. They did mark a moment in art history – but their reign did not last long. By the late 1980s they along with their German and American counterparts were out of fashion and out of date. Intellectually their work was solipsistic, backward looking and mannered. However as aesthetic objects their oil paintings, watercolours, charcoal drawings, sculptures, pastels, frescos and artist-books, could be staggeringly beautiful.                                                                                                                        

Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and Enzo Cucchi became the most successful Transavantguardia painters and were dubbed the “three C’s” or “espresso Expressionists”.  However, they were light operatic artists in comparison to their German counterparts like Baselitz and Kiefer. Francesco Clemente turned out to be the greatest and most durable of the three – he was also the most stylistically diverse. His work quoted endlessly from the ancient and modern art history of the West and the East - in particular India where he had a home. He worked in all the traditional mediums but with different levels of success. He was a Symbolist at heart in the tradition of painters like Odilon Redon. Personally, I preferred his watercolours and pastels to his gaudy oil paintings, which lacked any real sensitivity to oil paint as a luscious medium. While nearly all the Neo-Expressionists exploited the immediacy and personal intimacy of drawing, none made it such a central part of the oeuvre as Clemente who could achieve works of staggering beauty and poetry at his best but could also be slick and superficial at his most over-productive and uncritical. Clemente possessed a poetic and imaginative mind - capable of conjuring improbable and dreamy pictures. However, the fundamental problem with Clemente was his solipsism, passivity and introverted narcissism. Virtually everything he painted was a self-portrait in some way or other. His face and body cropped up repeatedly. Even Egon Schiele - perhaps the most narcissistic, great artist in art history - painted landscapes, still-lives and female nudes from time to time! For me, Clemente was a sweet but insubstantial influence on my own later work.                                                           

Sandro Chia’s (pronounced Key-a) world in paint was more communal, varied and sociable. Chia’s oil paintings were theatrical works that placed - typically male figures - in fanciful, surreal and colourful landscapes. There was a morbid sweetness and artful naïve energy in Chia’s huge, intensely coloured paintings. His levitating people harked back to the religious figures of Tintoretto and Tiepolo. Yet their hovering also took a page out of Mark Chagall’s sketchbook. In Chia’s dream like works - people floated in the air, smoked cigarettes, farted and belched. Though his drawing was rudimentary it was strengthened by a daring taste in colour and lively paint handling.

            

Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino were more primitive and limited painters. Cucchi’s huge primal canvases of doom-laden seas, or fires tossed with skulls were plastered with oil paint aggressively brushed on to over an inch thick. His work bore traces of late ‘bad’ de Chirico and Art-Brut. Paladino’s oil paintings looked more hermetic than any of ‘the-three-C’s’ as they were touted, and his work lacked their visual salesmanship. Finally, there was Nicola De Maria – a delightful painter of poetic abstracts suggestive of music, landscapes and flora. His colourful paintings were inspired by the small abstracts of Paul Klee as well as the larger scale but equally suggestive abstracts of Twombly and the childlike and mystical imagery of Juan Miró. Personally, I did not think much of Nicola De Maria – his work was far too commercial looking and derivative for my tastes.                

The Swiss born Martin Disler was a late developer as a Neo-Expressionist, but it could be argued that the primal oil paintings he made in the mid-80s - came the closest, to a form of unmediated expression - of all the Neo-Expressionists. In Disler’s paintings - life, death and sex battled for supremacy. His vast canvases filled with writing figures that emerged from a maelstrom of oil paint applied with brushes, pallet-knives and even Disler’s hands were Neo-Expressionist updates to the all-over expressiveness of Jackson Pollock.                                  

Finally, we come to the American contribution to Neo-Expressionism and what is most notable is that for the first time in forty years, America took its lead from Europe. In fact, the brash promotion of artists like Julian Schnabel by America dealers - was an attempt to keep pace with the Germans and Italians. Of all the American Neo-Expressionists, Julian Schnabel was the most attuned to events in Europe - after taking a number of trips to Europe in the 1970s. Schnabel shamelessly sought to revive old myths of macho expressivity last embodied by Abstract-Expressionist like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning - but which had not been taken seriously by art world insiders since the 1950s. Yet, like most Expressionists and Neo-Expressionists, Schnabel hated being characterised as such: “I am called a Neo-Expressionist. I don’t think its Neo anything, because I don’t think that these kinds of paintings were made before. I just think it’s an inept term, its only use is that of shorthand, so people don’t have to call it anything else. It’s a packaging term. I don’t think about the Expressionist movement of painting, I’m not commenting on it in any way. My expression is an expression of the world not of the self, it’s an expression of what I think things seem like now. The job of the painting is not just to sit on the wall and decorate a room. I think that its job is to embody a certain meaning that can affect whoever’s looking at it and change their recognition of what life is. Maybe that’s the job of the artist.” (Julian Schnabel interviewed on his tennis court surrounded by his recent paintings on tarpaulin, A New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980’s, Michael Blackwood Productions, 1984.) Schnabel’s infamous plate paintings were only one series of works in his large oeuvre that included abstract and figurative paintings on velvet, wood, tarpaulin, sail-cloth and kabuki theatre backdrops. Though Schnabel’s conventional skills were limited - like other great Neo-Expressionists he made up for this with a formal invention that learned from the experimentalism of Conceptualism. The 1980s saw Schnabel launch an endless series of exhibitions around the world that 80% of the time were greeted by vitriolic reviews by art critics. Yet he proved to be immensely popular with collectors, fellow painters and a forgiving art public - and unlike most of the Neo-Expressionists he continued to reinvent his work with mixed results long after the 1980s was over.                                            

David Salle who was briefly friends with Julian Schnabel was the least Neo-Expressionist painter included amongst its ranks. Salle’s work which looked like a James Rosenquist painting made by an American psycho - was actually more influenced by the likes of Francis Picabia’s Transparency paintings in which Picabia overlapped images and Sigmar Polke’s mocking, mix-and-match of Modernist clichés that created a new form of Post-Modern painting. Salle was an intellectual painter, suspicious of claims to expressivity and in his paintings, he overlapped images, styles and expressive mannerisms - undermining them all - and placing his own subjective role as voyeur and editor at the heart of our media blitz. It was more Salle’s bad boy use of soft-core pornographic source material and his cynical and sarcastic collaging of images that linked him with the bad boy provocations of the other Neo-Expressionists. Like most of the Neo-Expressionists Salle could not maintain the drama of his early work into the 1990s - though he continued to make ever more complex but ultimately indifferent paintings.

                                                                                                                             

Eric Fischl was technically the most traditional even retrograde of the Neo-Expressionists. The look of his paintings was like a slap-dash Edward Hopper painted on a billboard sized canvas. However, what made Fischl’s early work so powerful, was his oedipal, incestuous, tragic suburban subject matter - and what made these subjects even more disturbing was Fischl’s preference for painting his protagonists naked, from scrawny adolescent youths to flabby middle-aged housewife’s with tan lines. Like so many writers of misery memoirs - who have instant success but are then unable to write anything as compelling as their childhood story – Fischl quickly ran out of anything meaningful to say, after he had used up the trauma of his childhood - in his first few years as a painter. Even though his later work grew in technical skill it became academic and pointless. Finally, he seemed to settle for being a society portrait painter - for rich art world figures.                                            

Susan Rothenberg’s elegant, minimal paintings of horses in the late 1970s presaged the Neo-Expressionist movement with their rebirth of imagery and she continued to mature her work slowly until the mid-80s when she created many memorably expressive paintings inspired by the deconstructed figures and animals in the desert - which throbbed with a blizzard of hatched brushstrokes. That said, her formal contribution to Neo-Expressionism was minor compared to Schnabel, Salle, Baselitz, Kiefer or Chia.             

Last but by no means least was Jean-Michel Basquiat the wunderkind of Neo-Expressionism and whose expressivity was less feigned than that of most of his peers, not because he was black but because unlike most of them, he had no formal training or bourgeois cringe. Basquiat’s hip recasting of Modernist primitivism, his genius for mixing high and low source material and his scathing critique of racism and the experience of being black in America - made his work far more significant than most of the short lived Neo-Expressionist work of his peers. Initially thought to be a fashionable flash in the pan, Basquiat’s work proved far more significant with each passing decade to generations of artists not even alive when he was painting. That said, Basquiat like his peers found it hard to maintain the intensity of his best work from 1980-1983 and his early death from a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven may have spared him the even more tragic fate of a middle-aged career that weakly pastiched his early achievements.

            

In many ways the International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture exhibition in MOMA in New York from mid-May to mid-August 1984, which was full of macho Neo-Expressionists – was the beginning of the end for the popular support for Neo-Expressionism. The exhibition led to protests by female artists in New York who were outraged that of one hundred and sixty-five exhibitors only thirteen were women and even fewer of colour. The vast majority of the male artists on display were Neo-Expressionist, New Image or Bad Painters which must have only increased the anger of female artists not included in the show. Because frankly most high school kids whatever their gender or race could have produced better works - but they would not have been able to afford the six-foot canvases and multiple cans of paints wasted on much of this art. There were many major male artists in this show that deserved their reputation - but many were represented by poor examples of their work. And the show was swamped by completely talentless male artists who had jumped on the Neo-Expressionist bandwagon to produced weak pastiches of the stars of Neo-Expressionism. Because so much of this work was crass, talentless, intellectually vacuous and merely a reflex of fashion, it only served to highlight how prejudiced, arbitrary and corrupt artistic success had become. This fleeting moment of masculine artistic identity posturing - led to a backlash and the emergence of female, gay, black and ethnic identity art. And the female protests against the International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture led to the creation of the Guerrilla Girls the following year.

The verve and grandiosity of vision of the Neo-Expressionists that began the 1980s - ended with increasingly facile, desperate and gloomy works. The overblown Neo-Expressionist artists, began to lose their creative energy and faith in painting’s power to reinvent itself in a world increasingly understood through photography, graphic design, television and video not the paintbrush and canvas no matter how large and complex it was.                                                                                                                                                         

Of all the artists of Neo-Expressionism, only Kiefer, Clemente and Schnabel continued to develop even they did not evolve that much. Others like Fetting, Chia, Cucchi, Paladino and Salle never produced work as good as that which they had made in the early 1980s. In 1990, the art market and the reputations of Neo-Expressionists collapsed - save for a few exceptions like Kiefer, Clemente and Basquiat. As the nineties progressed, the market for Neo-Geo artists and the Post-Structuralist’s rebounded but the fortunes of most of the Neo-Expressionists did not, since they in particular, were held responsible for the greed of the eighties art market. Yet its influence on the art of the following decades continued to be felt, if only in art schools and on the margins of the art world: “Neo-expressionism tends to get a bad press nowadays, often being referred to as ‘80s painting’ – vulgar, overblown, uncritical, inauthentic. Yet much painting currently in art schools and commercial galleries should still be categorized as neo-expressionist in its use of exaggeration, heightened colours, myth and personal imagery.” (Tony Godfrey, Painting Today, London: Phaidon, 2009, P.61.)                                                                                        

Four years later, Neo-Expressionism remained as unfashionable and forgotten, leading Raphael Rubinstein to write in Art in America in February 2013, his essay Neo-Expressionism (Not) Remembered, in which he tried to explore Neo-Expressionism’s disappearance from the collective artistic consciousness and why “major museums generally pretend Neo-Expressionism never existed”. “Even in a culture that thrives on revivals”, Rubinstein noted that the Neo-Expressionists remained “perennially uncool”. For Rubenstein, this collective amnesia signalled just how unpalatable Neo-Expressionism remained, “you don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to have your suspicions aroused when so much effort is expended to supress an episode and its memory. There was something about this movement and style that inspired incredibly strong reactions, many of them negative”. Rubenstein decided that the battle between the Neo-Expressionists and the October group and Pictures Generation had been won by the latter but that this victory had gone too far in its almost total dismissal of Neo-Expressionism.                                                                

Neo-Expressionism was a fundamentally conservative attempt to revive the ideals of early modernism in the face of increasingly impersonal and intellectual approaches to art. Neo-Expressionism was a failed attempt to revive the glory of early Expressionism and the authority of male painterly gestures. Post-Modernism sought to deconstruct all such mythologies of unmediated expression, the primacy of painting and the western, white, heterosexual male artist. Yet despite all the criticism heaped upon Neo-Expressionism, painting after it - never had the same optimism, ambition or desire to reach a wide audience. The greatest painter after Neo-Expressionism, was probably Luc Tuymans and his work - which was a sour mediation of socio-politically charged photography, and which questioned whether any real communication was possible - was the very antithesis of Neo-Expressionism.

Seen in retrospect, Neo-Expressionism was a cathartic moment in art history one that marked the end of Modernism and the birth of Post-Modernism - the end of art judged in terms of originality and the start of art judged in terms of spectacle. Betraying Modernism and the ideals of the zealots and laughing all the way to the bank – Neo-Expressionists were then doomed by history and unthanked by the following generation of artists who profited from the freedoms they gave them - to make substantial careers from unoriginal and ever larger spectacles. No one since 1975 has had an original idea worth anything – but only the Neo-Expressionists had their credibility punished for it. The Neo-Expressionists lost the intellectual and historical battle to Neo-Conceptualism however it cathartically marked the end of modernist progress and its radical revolt against the legacy of Modernism changed the art world forever. Neo-Expressionism also fundamentally broke the dominance of New York (though it remained the commercial capital of art) and signalled the internationalization of contemporary art where styles and concepts were pastiched worldwide within months of appearing in major galleries.

             

Looking back in retrospect at the critical treatment of the Neo-Expressionists versus the Neo-Conceptualists and female artists that dominated the art world from the 1990s onward one can see how outrageous it was. The Neo-Expressionists were constantly attacked by critics for their lack of originality and mannerist rehashing of early Modernist styles. But their lack of avant-garde originality was not unique to the Neo-Expressionists. The truth was that no artists in any style had produced anything original since at least 1975 but the Neo-Expressionist were made to take the blame for the death of Modernism. The Neo-Expressionists were vilified because of their commercial success, lack of traditional skills and machismo yet the Neo-Conceptualists became even richer and only received muted criticism and as for female painters that emerged from the 1990s, they were treated as critically untouchable, even though they painted far worse and with far less originality than the Neo-Expressionists, and their feminist chauvinism was far worse than the machismo of the Neo-Expressionists. So seen from the perspective of the gradual emasculation of Western, white, male heterosexuals that started from the late 1980s with the rise of socio-political art and resulted in the uncritical elevation of women, minorities and the alphabet soup of sexual identities one might suggest that the Neo-Expressionists were the victims of a deep animus against white, male, heterosexual artists in an art world in which they were increasingly becoming a minority.

The Neo-Expressionists were condemned because of the hype that surrounded their work - but it was nothing like the quantity of hype that later surrounded the politically correct art that came to dominate the art world after Neo-Expressionism. Moreover, unlike Neo-Expressionism whose small amount of dealer hype was savagely attacked from all quarters – the hype surrounding politically correct art from the late 1980s onward - was only criticised by a few conservative cynics like Robert Hughes and Hilton Kramer. Thus, the politically correct Neo-Conceptualists from the late 80s onward discovered a critic proof way to achieve success – namely by virtue signalling through anti-art – while hypocritically making themselves rich in the process. 

Conceptualism may have regained the upper hand, but it became in its own way an unoriginal remaking of the innovations of artist of the 1960s and 70s. Art became a free for all where style and content became a personal matter of no larger narrative significance. The early 1990s saw a return to installation, sculpture and photography - which now was presented in huge full colour formats that were laminated and mounted on aluminium, which brought them closer to the glamour and permanency of oil painting. Neo-Expressionism like original Expressionism had been a flash in the pan - in a century of art dominated more by ideas than feelings.

I knew all this as a teenager and only grew more desperately aware of it as my life progressed. Yet I simply could not bring myself to make anything other than an expressively based form of painting – anything else felt academic, false, mechanical and ultimately pointless to me. So, although I had initially laughed at the talentless Irish Neo-Expressionist student pastiches I had seen in NCAD in 1987 - when I became a late convert of Neo-Expressionism in 1990 - I was to become a fanatic unable to ever view any other movement in contemporary art with as much enthusiasm. It was a passion I could never repeat again (the closest I came was with yBa's like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.) Moreover, no matter how mature and cynical I became, I could still affectionately overlook the many flaws of my old love the Neo-Expressionists and continued to study and write about it in my forties. A melancholy case of arrested development - I never outgrew my initial passion for Neo-Expressionist painting and remained throughout my life a radical-regressive.

           

Neo-Expressionism was unfortunate that it came at a time when TV art documentaries on contemporary artists were rare. One of the few to feature Neo-Expressionists was A New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980’s from 1984, which was narrated by the art critic Donald Kuspit and featured the artists Markus Lüpertz, David Salle, Sandro Chia,  Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente and Georg Baselitz. Watching it in December 2019, I was struck by the complacent macho importance of the white male artists holding court with journalists and documentary makers as though they were the latest great painter Princes. Women hardly featured in the documentary unless as wives, models or interpreters and I could not see a single ethnic or black person anywhere apart from in the background when the documentary showed Clemente in Madras in India. It was striking to me that that they had all done very well for themselves through painting. But at the same time, they struck me as almost 80s caricatures of the famous male artist handed down from Picasso and debased in Judith Krantz’s romantic bohemian painter Mistral who coincidentally was the central character in the TV miniseries Mistral’s Daughter the same year that A New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980’s was made. And it was the accessibility of the image of the Neo-Expressionists and their frankly conservative ambition to create “great art” that everyone could understand and accepted that seduced so many in the 1980s. So, in their pomp in 1984, they had large studios and homes (Baselitz even had a German castle), stacks of expensive canvases and oil paints, Chia wore designer Italian clothes and had numerous assistants, the German’s smoked Cuban cigars and wore awful but expensive clothes, Baselitz had vicious guard dogs and they spoke of their desire not to invent a new style but to pick up the broken fragments of Modernism and create great figurative art that spoke to the existential issues of the 1980s. None of these painters possessed a critical or political attitude towards capitalism or western society, because they had done very well for themselves under it and profited from the art market and its fetishism of oil painting as the ultimate commodity. While most of these painters were selfish and tried to ignore the suffering of the lives of others outside their studio door, Clemente came across as the most narcissistic and solipsistic of all the Neo-Expressionists. Yet, more positively, I was also very struck by their instinctual approach to art making, their privileging of visual language over logic and reason and their desire to create works that spoke to the complex nature of their vision including its dualities. This shocked me as I watched the documentary in 2019, because I had frankly not heard language like this ever since. You see, one of the troubling things that had happened to late Modernism in the late 1960s and 1970s had been the weaponizing of aesthetic and socio-political ideology and the same thing happened after Neo-Expressionism in the late 1980’s. But briefly during the early 1980s, Neo-Expressionist’s refused to create ideological work and regressed into their solipsistic subjectivity staking everything on the quality of their art alone. Rather than simplify existence down to protest slogans – they complicated the nature of their paintings and drawings to illustrate the problematic nature of consciousness itself. 

                                                                            

Over thirty years from the height on Neo-Expressionism, Peter Schjeldahl who had been contemptuous of much of Neo-Expressionism, surprisingly had a change of heart, largely because of the agitprop art and the toxic social media polarization after Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016. Summing up what had happened to art after Neo-Expressionism he observed: “The next generation of leading artists took up themes of multiculturalism and identity politics, with audience-oriented sculptural and photographic installations. What was abandoned is the forte of painting as the medium of creative solitude: the individual artist engaging the individual viewer with stroke-by-stroke intimacy and nuanced eloquence. It’s harder now than it was then to stand out from the crowds that are marshalled by our politics and shepherded by much of our culture. But the will to do so always scans for chances to break out.” (Peter Schjeldahl, The Joy of Eighties Art, The New Yorker, 6^th February 2017). Frankly, when I read this it was a confirmation of all I had felt for over thirty years in the wilderness and I was glad I was at least not as insane as I had thought I was. Temperamentally a recluse and solitary artist, I had no interest in making socio-political art or indulging in mass spectacles. For me painting would always be a private art to be shared one-on-one with anonymous viewers. Besides as a severely damaged man – I was in no position to preach utopian socio-political visions.

            

My own conversion to Neo-Expressionism came in a suitably poetic way. On 19th October 1990, I had my wisdom teeth removed in St. Michael's private hospital in Dun Laoghaire - and I had to stay overnight after the operation. My mother brought me in magazines on Titian and Mantegna. She also brought me in an art book she had bought in Waterstones for me to read. I was sceptical at first of my mum's present - she rarely knew what art books I liked or needed - but this time she was spot on! The book was The New Image; Painting in the 1980s by Tony Godfrey and had been published in 1986. The New Image focused on Neo-Expressionists of the early 1980s like (in order of my preference at the time); Georg Baselitz, Julian Schnabel, Anslem Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, Martin Disler, Albert Oehlen, Arnulf Rainer, Werner Büttner, Rainer Fetting, Eric Fischl, Jiři Georg Dokoupil, Enzo Cucchi, Sigmar Polke, Walter Dahn, Markus Lüpertz, Sandro Chia, Mimmo Paladino, Therese Oulton, Gillian Ayres, Salomé, Helmut Middendorf, Christopher Le Brun, Susan Rothenberg, and A. R. Penck. The New Image also highlighted older artists of influence like (in order again of my preference at the time); Robert Rauschenberg, Brice Marden, Joseph Beuys, Cy Twombly, and late Philip Guston. A few weeks later I bought a second-hand copy of Art Expo 1988 – which had an article on Julian Schnabel illustrated by five of his paintings. Other artists included in the book were Francesco Clemente, Martin Disler and Mimmo Paladino. Even at nineteen I did not see this as a traditional form of angst-ridden Expression - rather as a highly mannered form of Expressionist playacting. However, seeing contemporary artists try to make afresh the Expressionist spirit fascinated me.                                                                                

At nineteen, I had found myself artistically at an impasse at the time, in love with the Old and Modern Masters though realising I could never redo their achievements - and I was alienated from contemporary art. The truth is from 1980-1989 I thought contemporary art from the 1960s on was a con. In art college, I dabbled with modern and contemporary styles - but I felt like a fraud. They meant nothing to me. I felt totally alienated by impersonal Pop art, Conceptualism, Photorealism and Minimalism art and I loathed Feminist and Multicultural art. In a Marxist dominated art world full of completely talentless people trying to destroy art, I was thankful there were some painters that counter-attacked the horrific aesthetic puritan crap of the Marxists. While I recognised Warhol was a genius, I loathed the effect he had had on art and as for all the other Pop, Conceptual, Minimalist, Feminist and Gay ‘artists’ of the 1960s and 1970s - I thought they were talentless frauds who by entryism had taken over the academic and art world - to reduce all art to their incompetent and dead level. While the artists of the 1960s and 1970s claimed that they were on the right side of history - I thought their work was a historical aberration and that at any other time in art history they would have not even have been allowed to sweep the floors in an artist workshop! And I simply could not tolerate or excuse the Marxist hatred of individual talent, subjectivity, independence and success. Their aesthetics were an affront to humanity! I frankly grieved for the time before Dada when Western oil painting was so credible and astonishing in its technical brilliance, populism and humanity. So, when I discovered Neo-Expressionism it was an incredible relief - because I had finally found a contemporary art style that I admired and identified with. So, for me, what was most important about Neo-Expressionism was its ideological counterattack against the dominant abstract, conceptual and Marxists conspiracy against figurative painting and real artistic talent. I supported the Neo-Expressionists because they fought for the rights of marginalised painters everywhere.

As a nineteen-year-old, Neo-Expressionism fitted with all my own interests at the time in German and Austrian Expressionism and early Modernism - but without its Utopian view of itself as an end to history. I responded immediately to the irony, sarcasm and fecklessness of Neo-Expressionists like Georg Baselitz, Walter Dahn, Jiři Georg Dokoupil, Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger. I too shared their cynicism, lack of faith in historical progress and wilful inclusion of all the elements of artistic creativity that had become taboo since 1955 (after the conceptual asceticism of Duchamp, Johns, Warhol, Kosuth, and Judd.) For me Neo-expressionism brought back both materiality (in the philosophical sense of embodiment and being) and material (in the form of broken plates, antlers, straw, lead, or just simply thick unruly oil paint) to painting. It also brought poetry (especially in the works of Cy Twombly, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi) and narrative (for the first time since Beckman) into paintings by artists like Paula Rego and Eric Fischl. Raw aggressive emotion was also returned to art for the first time since the last gasps of French L’art informel, American Abstract Expressionism and European COBRA painting in late 1950s. Most importantly of all it brought about a return to paint, especially oil paint, (that most conservative and ancient of mediums.)                                    

However, my attraction to the Neo-Expressionist movement was not unique to me. Art in Ireland had always strongly favoured an expressive form of figurative art. Like many other isolated and Northern countries, it had tended to produce gifted expressive painters. A whole series of Irish (mostly male) painters like Michael Kane, Patrick Graham, Brian Maguire, Michael Mulcahy, Michael Cullen and a host of minor Neo-Expressionists like Ben Hennessy, Ethine Jordan and Richard Gorman plumbed the same depths nearly ten years before me. However, the differences between Irish Neo-Expressionism and European and American Neo-Expressionism were pointed. Irish Neo-Expressionism was far more obsessed with masculine sexuality - thwarted and deformed by Catholicism - domestic and nationalist violence and social justice issues and it lacked the commercial panache and desire to seduce the viewer of the more operatic European and American brands of Neo-Expressionism. Still they received as much critical hostility in Ireland as their more original German, Italian and Americans peers had in New York: “The pointed informality and artlessness of much contemporary Irish painting suggests that the artists are trying to make a break, not establish a continuity. In many cases, the message built into the violent brusqueness of their method is a gloomy one: things fall apart. Relevance is denied. The violence of form reads like the rage of impotence, a form in which descriptive effort and gesture are reduced to a minimum, to crude caricature, the line of least resistance, where colour is often arbitrary and dissonant. There is in all this a denial of received associations, a refusal to play the game.” (Aidan Dunne, NCAD Decade Show 1975-1985, 1986, P. 23.)                                                                        

The 1983 seminal Irish Neo-Expressionist group exhibition Making Sense, followed the example of A New Spirit in Painting by having no women in the exhibition. Writing later of the of the exhibition Aidan Dunne commented “To put it at its bleakest: here, you felt, were a lot of rather glum paintings by men obsessed with their own cultural and sexual identities, self-absorbed creatures who took a rather dim view of the world around them”. (Aiden Dunne, Back to The Future: A Context for Irish Art of the late 1980s, Dublin: Gandon Editions, 1990, P. 25). Other commentators on Irish Neo-Expressionism, were equally sceptical of the myth making around the Irish Neo-Expressionists: “… the net result I that we now have quite a few neo-or-neo-neo-expressionist with large reputations and even semi-mythical status if they happened to drink a lot in their younger days. The catalogue here predictably (though only occasionally) lapses into soap opera, casting the artist in the role of heroic victim who having been forged in the white-heat of personal traumas, emerges tough and triumphant and totally committed to their authentic art.” (Micky Donnely, Review of Patrick Graham and Brian Maguire, Circa, No. 18, 1984, P.35-36).

            

Conforming to the rule that all Expressionists disavow their movement – both Brian Maguire and Patrick Graham – vocally and in writing later disassociated themselves from Neo-Expressionism – despite the fact that their work had been promoted under this briefly successful banner. Brian Maguire descried Neo-Expressionism as a “language of voyeurism and not of experience.” (John Hutchinson, Sense, Direction & Selected Images: Irish Art in the 1980s, Circa, No. 50, March-April, 1990.)