ABSTRACT
Around 1980, within a year of the New Image Painting show at the Whitney Museum, a new group of painters, the most celebrated of whom were Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Eric Fischl, suddenly became the center of art-world attention. The advocates of neoexpressionism considered it to be significantly different from new image painting. In actuality the two tendencies were related, the one building on the other, and Rothenberg and Murray were generally counted in both groups. The neoexpressionists wanted to paint directly, even instinctively, thereby continuing the tradition of historic expressionism. Artists embraced all of Western painting, but they tended to pay particular attention to their own heritage. The adversaries of neoexpressionism pointed out that they were not the first to reject the specious rhetoric of expressionism. Major contemporary artists had already done so in their art.
