Lóránd Hegyi, “After the Expansion III—‘New Decorativism’ and ‘New Subjectivism’,” translated from Hungarian by Jozefina Komporaly, originally published as “Az expanzió után III—‘Új dekorativizmus’ és ‘új szubjektivizmus’,” in Mozgó Világ (1983): 23–30

Lóránd Hegyi was the most ambitious young Hungarian art historian of the 1980s. His essay on the new, decorative, and Painterly tendencies of American art served as an international contextualization and encouragement for a similar tendency in Hungary. The Chapter examines American art of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which he identifies as New Decorativeness and New Subjectivity. A number of artists belonging to the trend of New Painterliness and New Decorativism emerging in the second half of the seventies and early eighties, advocate a surprising similarity between image and theme, spectacle and object, and a kind of “naive” and “natural” simplicity. Decorative art is one of the oldest new Arts. In John Perreault’s evaluation “Decorative art” is optimistic: It acknowledges its feminist, ethnic and non-Western roots, as well as its roots in public consumer taste and non-art, such as wallpapers, printed textiles, ceramic tiles.