7.3: Neo-Expressionism (late 1970s–mid 1980s)
Introduction
Neo-Expressionism grew from the rejection of Minimalism and Conceptional art and the purity of sparseness followed by those movements. While rejecting those styles, artists were still influenced by earlier Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. The artists wanted to portray identifiable objects overlaid by violence or emotion using vibrant colors. The subject matter in the paintings was intense, often based on historical events, myths, or other folklore. The artwork was somewhat abstracted with distorted figures, even cartoon-like at times. Some artists integrated textual objects like straw, wood pieces, even sand into their artwork. Paintings were covered with thick, expressive brushwork to apply their paint's highly contrasted, brilliant colors.
Many art critics were highly critical of the paintings and declared the work unmarketable in the burgeoning art market. Women artists were generally omitted from participation and restricted from many exhibitions, including the 1981 New Spirit in Painting exhibit in London, showing 38 male painters and no females. [1] Artists performed the Neo-Expressionist movement in both Europe and America. In Germany, George Baselitz, one of the movement founders, used vigorous brushwork to form provocative images. Jean-Michel Basquiat in America used a graffiti style to illustrate his street art based on Afro-Caribbean imagery. Philip Guston worked in a new manner, with politics included in his roughly figurative work. He stated, "I got sick and tired of all that purity…I wanted to tell stories." [2]
Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz (1938-) was born in Germany; his original name was Hans-Georg Kern. His father was a teacher in the local elementary school Baselitz attended and where the family lived. The school had art reproductions hung in the rooms, the portrait styles a model Baselitz studied. By the time he was 15, he had painted multiple images, including portraits and landscapes. Baselitz applied to the Kunstakademie in Dresden to study art only to be rejected; however, he was accepted at a school in East Berlin simply to be expelled after a year because he was considered sociopolitically immature. At that time, East Berlin was under Communist rule, and Baselitz did not follow their socialist ideals. In 1957, he moved to West Berlin (under allied control), resumed his studies, and met his future wife. Baselitz studied the art of the German Expressionists and was also influenced by American Pop Art. In 1963 at a West Berlin gallery, his first solo exhibition became a public scandal; his work was deemed lewd and obscene. Baselitz turned to printmaking and then received a scholarship to study in Florence. In Florence, he encountered Italian artists, old masterpieces, and the techniques of chiaroscuro.
When he returned to West Berlin in 1965, Baselitz created a series called Heroes (Neue Typen) using a metaphorical man without a country to illustrate the empty promises and destruction of Nazi philosophy and East German communism. The series of paintings depicted soldiers who were large and muscular yet weak and desolate. The character in Ludwig Richter on His Way to Work (7.3.1) stands in the dark, foreboding landscape, his hands reaching for the destructive emptiness of the promises of the Nazis and communists. Baselitz used chiaroscuro concepts; the deep, dark background stopped any vision of past events, the small grey pile and running red offered a glimpse of what might have transpired. After the war during this period in Germany, many ex-soldiers struggled to understand their place in society.
By the 1970s, Baselitz began to invert his paintings. He believed color was essential, and the viewer could interface with the surface instead of the image's content. Inversion was also a method of moving between abstraction and figuration. Baselitz did not like the themed and descriptive work found in figures or the subjectivism from abstracted art. He thought inverting his paintings was a good compromise. Baselitz stated, "Turning the motif upside down gave me the freedom to tackle the problems of paintings…reducing the images to the base formal qualities of line, shape, and color." [3] Dinner in Dresden (7.3.2) is an example of the contrasting colors of pink, black, and blue. The image is reminiscent of the Last Supper, a central person flanked by others at the long table. Baselitz believed color and its application with the brush freed the viewer from the standard dimensional concepts.
His painting Adieu (7.3.3) brought the concept of separation, temporary or permanent. The half person appears to be staying in place while the complete person is walking away. Baselitz worked on the painting repeatedly, adjusting the distance between the two figures and moving them further apart. The focus on yellow as the primary color is jarring, only interrupted by heavy black lines and white squares. The background resembled a game board; Baselitz claimed he was inspired by the flags used in Grand Prix races.
Folkdance-Tired (7.3.4) was one of a series of his scatter paintings without any specific compositional focus. The tiles and heads are assembled in a pattern against the dark gray background. The tiles and heads are painted in highly contrasted red and black.
The heads seem to float; some of them appear upside down and others the right way. Where is the Yellow Milkjug, Mrs Bird? (7.3.5) is another of his scatter paintings; birds are distributed across the painting. In this image, most birds are inverted and painted in an almost primitive manner, the single yellow color against the dark background. Baselitz assisted a wildlife photographer early in his career who took ornithological photos, images Baselitz remembered when he painted this work.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was born in New York, his father from Haiti, and his mother, Puerto Rican. Basquiat was highly intelligent, learning to read by the time he was four. His mother recognized his abilities, took him to museums, and enrolled him in a private school focused on art. At seven, Basquiat was struck by a car, suffering from multiple internal injuries. In the hospital, he read an anatomy book. Unfortunately, Basquiat's parents separated, his mother in and out of psychiatric hospitals forcing his father to raise him and his sisters. By the time Basquiat was eleven, he fluently spoke English, French, and Spanish. Despite his incredible abilities, Basquiat did poorly in high school and had to attend an alternative school. He never went to formal art school and said he failed all the art courses; instead, he learned the art through museums and books.
In 1978, when he was only seventeen, he and a friend began to spray paint graffiti on buildings—using the pseudonym SAMO (short for same old shit) when they sprayed sayings. By 1980, graffiti art was beginning to be recognized, including Basquiat. During this period, New York City was not the glitzy place of today. Then, buildings were crumbling; people lived in abandoned places, and graffiti was everywhere. The SAMO tag was prominent, and everyone associated it with Basquiat, who was living with different friends and making and selling postcards. After three years of spray painting, Basquiat and his friend stopped and declared SAMO IS DEAD on the walls. Between 1981 and 1982, Basquiat's art began to sell, and he moved from being a homeless pauper to making millions by the time he was 21. He also bought expensive food and clothes, and piles of cocaine. As he became part of the New York gallery scene, he also met Andy Warhol. Some gallery owners rejected Basquiat's work because he was a graffiti artist, black, young, and untrained. However, he became very successful in holding joint shows with Warhol. As with many people in that time, heroin and cocaine were commonplace and used by Basquiat. He passed away from a drug overdose at the age of 27. Basquiat said of his art;
"I was trying to communicate an idea, I was trying to paint a very urban landscape, and I was trying… to make paintings for… I don't know. I was trying to make paintings different from the paintings that I saw a lot of at the time, which were mostly minimal and they were highbrow and alienating, and I wanted to make very direct paintings that most people would feel the emotion behind when they saw them." [4]
Basquiat produced paintings reflecting the Black experience and its historical roots in slavery and colonialism. He also observed Black life and its music, art, religions, and traditions. Basquiat used themes of symbols and diagrams, all made with deep gestural brushstrokes. He wanted to build multiple meanings into each painting. A crown was one of the motifs Basquiat frequently added to a painting, saluting black male figures. The crown had three peaks for those he celebrated, the poet, the musician, and the athlete. Boxers were one of Basquiat's favorite subject matters, a person he perceived who triumphs over adversity, knocked down but still fighting. Boxer (7.3.6) is monolithic, his hands raised and his face reflecting the pain inflicted. The halo on his head appears ready to change into a crown, the black body marked by previous encounters. Basquiat used the power of color in the painting, the dark lower half in high contrast to the lighter top half, the focused brown face in the middle.
Flash in Naples (7.3.7) was based on the comic the Flash, one of Basquiat's heroes. He has two views of the figure; one image blasts forward, running with a luminous pink arm seeming to generate energy, almost running into the words IL FLASH. The lightning bolt under his leg and the lines sparking from his foot continue the swift motion of the character across the canvas. The other figure stands facing forward; the lightning bolt emblazed on his chest. The intense look on his face directly confronts the viewers; he is fearless. Basquiat used a grid of multiple colors for the background, a common theme in his work.
Andy Warhol was one of Basquiat's idols and eventually a close friend and mentor. An art dealer brought Basquiat to meet Warhol, where they took pictures of each other with a polaroid camera. Basquiat took a few images and quickly went home and created the painting Dos Cabezas (7.3.8), which he gave to Warhol, the paint still wet on the canvas. The painting was the beginning of their unusual and close relationship and one of many portraits of the two men. The image of Warhol is that of an older, self-assured man, and Basquiat resembles an awe-struck young person in the presence of his idol.
In Slave Auction (7.3.9), Basquiat uses the blue of the ocean with different heads he drew on brown paper. The blue symbolized the slave's history and how they were taken from their homeland and transported across the ocean. Some of the heads were smaller, perhaps representing children who were also taken as slaves. The figure in the center wears black and white, demonstrating the imprisonment of slavery waiting for the people to sell.
Philip Guston
Philip Guston (named Phillip Goldstein, 1913-1980) was born in Montreal, Canada; his parents had escaped Jewish persecution in Russia. In 1919, the family moved to Los Angeles, where his father committed suicide a few years later. In high school, he started painting and attended an art school. At the school, he encountered Jackson Pollock. The two friends studied art, philosophy and wrote a paper together. Although Guston went to the Otis Art Institute for a year, he did not receive any other formal art education, remaining self-taught. In Los Angeles, Guston followed the supposedly radical socialist ideas, concepts used in his work on murals. In 1934, Guston went to Mexico to paint murals spending time with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. His mural work focused on political and social concepts, a style influenced by the prominent Mexican muralists. When Guston returned in 1935, he moved to New York at the height of the depression and worked on murals for the WPA, also marrying. In the 1940s, after painting murals, he worked as an artist-in-residence at universities in Iowa and Missouri, painted figurative works on easels, and taught at New York University and the Pratt Institute.
In the 1950s, Guston experimented with Abstract Expressionism becoming dissatisfied with abstraction. In his abstracted work, he generally used a palette of pinks and blues; colors continued throughout his career. By 1967, tired of the art scene in New York City, he moved to Woodstock, New York. The political climate was disruptive as the fight for civil rights led to riots, protests, and increased Ku Klux Klan activities. Guston stated, "The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything-and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue." [5] At this point, Guston stopped abstraction and began to paint the more caricature-like imagery he believed better portrayed the surrounding world.
Guston had painted Ku Klux Klan figures in the early 1930s when he worked on murals portraying the anti-African Americans' violence. During the civil strife and unrest in the late 1960s, Guston again returned to the theme. When he was painting in the late 1960s-1970s, the Ku Klux Klan had more than 4.5 million members across the United States. [6] City Limits (7.3.10) depicts men dressed in Klan clothing who appear to be leaving the city, traveling to the suburbs or countryside to apply their brutality to African Americans. Guston often talked about how it felt to be evil, what are the men like behind the hoods. The painting is made with geometric squares and rectangles, the oversized circular tires dominating the image as the propellant of evil. During the 1970s, Guston created his distinct visual imagery using specific identifiable forms; limbs, shoes, eyeballs, geometric shapes based on a palette of pinks, red or blue.
Guston painted Painting, Smoking, and Eating (7.3.11) as an autobiographical image of himself smoking in his bed. He illustrated his excesses in life because he smoked and overate, the plate of French fries on his chest, a favorite food. Guston's head is shaped like a bean seed with one oversized eye and missing his nose and mouth. The familiar objects in the room and the bean-shaped head are also found in many of his other paintings. Both paintings are based on his use of the pink, red, gray palette.
In the painting Evidence (7.3.12), Guston incorporated many of his objects, especially the multiple shoes stacked around the figure, bricks flying in the air. The almost comic-like person lying on the bed seems frightened as the oversized index finger dramatically points at something undefined. Guston used his traditional color palette with the addition of small areas of green and yellow. Art reviewers criticized him for leaving what they considered beautiful paintings to create these dreadful works. A better investigator would realize Guston based his current work on his history and its application to the environment found in the late 1960s.
Couple in Bed (7.3.13) is a painting of Guston and his wife in bed; their faces pushed together. In his right hand, Guston tightly clutches his brushes, a symbol of his artistry and occupation. Each person extends a foot, carefully touching each other. The soles of shoes are a familiar image in his work. Guston also tightly holds his wife; the black background forces them into emptiness. His wife died in 1977 from multiple strokes; in the painting, Guston can still hold her, while in real life, she slips away.
David Salle
David Salle (1952-) was born in Oklahoma and lived in Kansas when he was a child, always interested in art. He attended the California Institute of the Arts and earned both a BFA and an MFA. After Salle graduated, Salle moved to New York, where he found a supportive gallery that still supports him today. For a while, he sustained himself by working in the art department of a pornography magazine. When the magazine went out of business, Salle could save some of the stock images he used later. He worked in collage-like paintings with multiple images overlapping. Salle believed the different materials gave him more fluidity; his style was forthright and uncomplicated. He liked to juxtapose different and perhaps conflicting images found in cartoons, advertising, historical events, and even spray graffiti. The diverse images made the individual images float, different perspectives visible in each part of the painting. Salle used abrupt transitions from one image to another, creating simultaneous views and emotions. Pastel (7.3.14) is representative of the painted assemblage Salle produced. He used different parts of found images and added acrylic and oil paint. The man on the left appears to be repelling his thoughts or ideas, his hands pushing outward against the unseen. The other image is a black woman looking at the horizon, the burden she carries attached to her back. Salle used blocks of orange color to generate focal points and movement, the blue frame separating the images.
The focal person in Demonic Roland (7.3.15) stands in the middle of the painting, one fist clenched, the other holding a head. Each of the figures is overlaid with different patterns, the dark colors juxtaposed to the orange figure and the red horizontal stripe.
Bryon's Reference to Wellington (7.3.16) depicts the illusion of a woman holding an oversized crown of thorns, a concept generally found in old European paintings. On the top section of the work are the images of fish, like a still life. The writer Bryon resented and described Wellington as cut-throat in battle, perhaps the reason for the cut-throat trout images. The final section is a collage based on the background reminiscent of an old-fashioned card, the bucolic scene broken by the arrows of war.
Elizabeth Murray
Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007) was born in Chicago, Illinois; her mother wanted to be an artist; her father was a lawyer. Encouraged by her mother to paint, Murray attended the Art Institute of Chicago and received a BFA followed by an MFA from Mills College. She taught art locally for two years before moving to New York City in 1967. In 2006, after forty years as an artist, she was finally honored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York with a retrospective show at MoMA. At the time, only four other female artists had a retrospective show - an exhibition of their art covering their entire career. Murray was married twice and had a son with her first husband and two daughters with the second. Unfortunately, she died of lung cancer at 66. The New York Times wrote that Murray "reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of from whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself." [7]
Murray's paintings blur the line between a painting and a sculptural piece. She shaped canvases into distinct shapes, parts of the canvas jut out from the wall. Murray generally used parts of familiar objects, sometimes domestic objects like chairs or cups, and other times by eyeballs or fingers. The abstracted paintings are composed of bold colors she applied in multiple layers, frequently presenting a psychological view or dream-like images. Murray cut up the canvas and twisted, knotted, or stretched them into unusual shapes to support her expressionist works. Terrifying Terrain (7.3.17) is composed of pieces of haphazardly shaped canvas pieces. The painting resembles the rocky ridges in a mountain landscape Murray experienced, the center simulating the disorientation a climber experiences looking down a ravine. The browns and greens of the outer parts of the painting present the feeling of the trees, the red added to the vertigo depth of the center.
Heart and Mind (7.3.18) is one of Murray's less complex paintings. The three-color palette, black, and the contrasting colors of red and green, represent the coolness of the mind and the heat of the heart. The green of the mind is jagged as thoughts bounce around versus the rounded black of the heart's emotions. Murray reversed the shapes in each of half of the painting, bringing both sides together.
In My Manhattan (7.3.19), Murray used an irregularly shaped canvas as a base for the layers she cut from large canvas sheets with a simple razor blade. She fit the canvas on plywood to create the background for the different pieces. The vibrant, contrasting colors are almost cartoonish while presenting a somewhat troubling, unknown image.
Chain Gang (7.3.20) is quite different from most of Murray's work, the dark shades and hues without vibrant colors on four canvases. The work is exceptionally large, the canvas spread with bat-like wings or perhaps inflating lungs. The work references the issues of forced labor and harshness of imprisonment, the colors reflecting the bleak outlook of the chain gang.
Mary T. Smith
Born in rural Mississippi, Mary T. Smith (1905-1995) was the daughter of sharecroppers, and she only finished the fifth grade because of hearing problems. With a severe hearing impairment and one of thirteen children, Smith was isolated in her world. Her only salvation was drawing. Smith's sister said, "When the rest of us were doing hopscotch, Mary would get on the ground somewhere else and draw pictures in the dirt and write funny things by the pictures." [8] Smith had two short marriages; her second husband sent her away, so she moved to another small town in Mississippi. In 1941, she had a son; however, she did not marry the father and worked in domestic jobs to support herself and her son. The boy's father did build her a small house, giving Smith some independence. Smith did not start painting until her late seventies and converted her house and yard into a studio/gallery. For years, she thought about images and what to create, an artist in her mind still working menial jobs to support herself. As an older adult, Smith did not hear much; however, she could finally express herself through the paintbrush and define her spiritual autobiography through artwork.
Smith used materials she found in the community, pieces of wood, plywood, and the corrugated tin many people used for the roof of their houses. She lived near a dump, and Smith found piles of the discarded tin. Every day she took her ax, cut small pieces of tin, and brought them home to use as a canvas. As she became more successful, Smith only painted on plywood, easier to work with and cut than the tin. At the outset, Smith used only a few colors of paint, her imagery similar to African masks and often reminiscent of the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Smith constructed her studio with different small buildings, tables, and storage places. Her favorite subjects were her neighbors, various animals, and plants, especially her religious views of Jesus. Her religious paintings were expressive, similar to Byzantine icons with biblical sayings and words. Smith displayed her work around her yard and set her spiritual paintings along her fence for all to view.
In her early paintings, Smith used black to outline her figures and then filled in the rest of the figure. Two Red Figures (7.3.21) depicts the two figures heavily outlined with broad black lines with red used as the person, conflicting and aggressive colors. Smith used white and a few black accents for the faces. The figures appear to be standing behind a chair or gates; the tension in her image is based on the constraints of the figures behind a barrier.
Her painting, I See 2 (7.3.22), was recorded a visit to her house by two friends. Smith is standing outside to meet the people, her yard depicted with a broad swath of grass, trees, and fence. She used a limited palette of blue for the grass and lettering, black for the trees, and a fence around the yard portrayed in yellow. She continued to use geometric forms and generally included her vocabulary in the painting to represent her secular and religious world. As Smith grew old, she stopped painting in 1990 at age eighty-five, causing her income to shrink. Smith died at age ninety, penniless. An acquaintance paid for a casket and burial when the funeral home wanted to bury her in a pauper's grave. Unfortunately, the funeral home took the money and buried her in a cheap pine box without ceremony. [9] Today her work is found in museums and sold in galleries.
Neo-Expressionism was a dominant style until the mid-1980s when many political movements were gone, and the kinds of art supported different ideas. Conservative views criticized the harshness and dysfunctional views of Neo-Expressionist art and declared the style was the problem with the art world. Some of the artists overtly incorporated art into their work, and others were more subtle, all their work bold.
[1] Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-expressionism
[2] Retrieved from https://www.nationalgalleries.org/ar...-expressionism
[3] Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smith...itz-180969796/
[4] Retrieved from https://www.basquiat.com/press-feature/
[5] Retrieved from https://collections.mfa.org/objects/35406
[6] Retrieved from https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpress...&brand=ucpress
[7] Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/a.../13murray.html
[8] Retrieved from https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/mary-t-smith
[9] Retrieved from https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/mary-t-smith