ABSTRACT
The figurative painting of Julian Schnabel, in particular, but also the work of Susan Rothenberg, David Salle, and other Americans began to attract international art-world attention around 1981, paralleling the recognition of two groups of European painters, the Italians, and the Germans. Their painting was welcomed as a reaction against American minimalism and postminimalism, Italian arte povera, and fluxus art in Germany, which had dominated avant-garde art of the 1970s. Attempts to distinguish European from American art had begun before the international recognition of the new painting. In the 1980s European art professionals would continue to embellish their image of a peculiarly American art, adding that it was preoccupied with the mass media and consumer society and employed mechanical or nonpainting techniques associated with the mass media. Until the middle of 1979, arte povera and transavantguardia artists were friendly.
