Neo-Expressionism

In the 1970s, art went off toward the concept and the minimum. An idea became the work, and boxes stood in a row at even intervals. In reaction to that, around 1980, big paintings in thick paint came back all at once. In 1981 the Royal Academy of Arts in London held A New Spirit in Painting. In October 1982 came Zeitgeist in Berlin, where the Germans, Baselitz, Kiefer, Lupertz, and Polke, hung in the same rooms as the Americans Schnabel and Clemente, and Basquiat. The names differ from country to country. In Italy the critic Achille Bonito Oliva named it Transavanguardia; in the German-speaking countries it was Neue Wilden, the new wild ones; in the French-speaking countries, Figuration Libre. Who first used the word Neo-Expressionism itself is not actually known. On this map I have placed this band in the band of emotion and form, and joined it by a line of return to the Expressionism of 1905, seventy-five years away. At the beginning of the twentieth century, painting swung hard toward emotion once. This is the view that the same thing happened a second time seventy-five years later. Baselitz went on painting his motifs upside down from 1969. It was to make you look at the paint itself rather than at what was depicted. He died on 30 April 2026, at eighty-eight.