Neo Expressionism

Neo Expressionism is an art movement of the 1970–1990 period. The gallery holds 64 works in this movement, including works by Max Beckmann, Peter Howson and Rob Scholte. Browse Neo Expressionism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Neo-Expressionism was the dominant painting movement of the late 1970s and 1980s, a deliberately raw, figurative reaction against the cool intellectualism of Minimalism and Conceptual art that had governed the previous decade. Where those tendencies had stripped art to ideas and industrial surfaces, Neo-Expressionists returned emphatically to the human figure, to myth and history, and to the loaded, hand-worked canvas. The revival drew openly on early-twentieth-century German Expressionism—artists such as Max Beckmann, several of whose portraits including the Rathbone pictures the collection holds—as well as on Abstract Expressionism, fusing painterly heat with a knowing, Postmodern appetite for appropriation and quotation.

The movement is best understood as a cluster of national variants that emerged almost simultaneously: the Neue Wilden ("New Wild Ones") in West Germany, the Transavanguardia named by critic Achille Bonito Oliva in Italy, Figuration Libre in France, and an American wing centred on New York's booming gallery scene. Despite regional differences, the work shared a visual signature: large scale, fast and gestural brushwork, thickly built and often coarse surfaces, jarring colour, and charged, frequently violent or mythological imagery.

Its canonical figures span these geographies. In Germany, Georg Baselitz—whose deliberately upended figures, such as those following his 1962–63 Die große Nacht im Eimer, became a trademark—and Anselm Kiefer, who confronted Germany's Nazi past in tar-black, straw-encrusted landscapes, anchored the European side. Italy contributed Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and Enzo Cucchi. In New York, the brief, incandescent career of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) brought graffiti-rooted, African-diasporic urgency, while Julian Schnabel—whose shattered-crockery "plate paintings" debuted at the Mary Boone Gallery in 1979—and David Salle epitomised the American market frenzy.

By the mid-1980s Neo-Expressionism commanded the art market and is often called the last great international movement of modern art, before the cooler, critique-driven Neo-Geo and the broader figurative revival—echoed in painters like Scotland's Peter Howson, represented here by Samson (Bairds Carryout)—reshaped the decade's close. Its legacy endures in the continued licence painters take for emotion, narrative and unruly surface.