New York, Italy, and West Germany, late 1970s

Rejecting the restrictions against imagery and gestural treatment set by their Minimalist and Conceptual teachers and contemporaries, the Neo-Expressionists revived the formal elements of German Expressionism [more] and Abstract Expressionism [more], often on a heroic scale. As the “new” Expressionism this style reiterated the subjectivism associated with the earlier forms, marked by flamboyant textural brushwork and distorted figures. In their work the Neo-Expressionists took up a variety of cultural-mythological, nationalist-historical, erotic, and “primitivizing” themes. Some critics welcomed this art for its return to the personal and its lifting of what had become aesthetic taboos; others criticized its aura of nostalgia and its depoliticized, ahistorical tendencies. Georg Baselitz, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, A. R. Penck, and Julian Schnabel are among the primary figures of Neo-Expressionism.

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