In the West, the 1980s are remembered as an era marked by a renewed interest in painting.
In general terms, artists focused on reconsidering issues such as expression, interpretation, and production. With paintings of the '80s as a starting point, this edition of the collection exhibition approaches these topics from an even wider perspective.
In the 1980s painting, which had practically been pronounced dead, underwent a revival. Eagerness for energetic lines and vivid colors, the deeply meaningful (and often personal) stories that they wove, and art that urged people to “read” it like a story, emerged due to a sort of exhaustion with the status quo. It was a backlash against the somewhat dry and logical postwar art up through the 1970s, which urged people to “think about” it like a philosophical problem.
Paintings have always told us “lies.” They have long been defined by the trick or illusion of taking art materials that have no inherent meaning, and transforming them into images with meaning. One could say that Modernism was a quest to escape from those lies, and this movement gained particular strength in the postwar era. Abstract Expressionism carried on the legacy of various experiments by the European avant-garde and sought to transform paintings from stories we “read” to things that “are.” Minimalism adopted a critical stance to this approach, while refining it further and eventually departing from painting altogether. Then Conceptualism aimed to present ideas in their pure form, unbound from materials altogether, as works of art. This stoic stance of seeking ever-greater purity eventually led to a period of groping blindly, toward a dead end, in the 1970s. This paved the way for the reaction against logical, coherent and transparent art, and the reemergence of opaque, intricate and personal painting.
Painting of the 1980s that reasserted the subjectivity of individual artists was collectively referred to as “New Painting.” While professing its newness, this painting drew on the accumulated traditions of the past, and there was little evident will to move art forward, although there was a tendency to emphasize differences from the art that preceded it. Indeed, the New Painting phenomenon had many avid supporters when it emerged, but once its time in the limelight had passed, its significance was rarely discussed in depth. However, the various issues it raised were not necessarily transient, but universal, continuing to resonate with later generations. For specific examples, we can look at the 1982 exhibition Zeitgeist, held at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin in the former West Germany. The German word Zeitgeist is roughly translated as “spirit of the times.”
One of the exhibition’s organizers, Christos M. Joachimides, spoke about the artistic trends of that period, that is the Zeitgeist that the young artists themselves played a part in creating. “Looking at these works, we see an obvious head-on confrontation with Minimalism, which has rigidified to the point of being academic”. 1 Anti-Minimalist elements cited at this time included “the Visionary [das Visionäre],” “Myth [der Mythos],” “Suffering [das Leiden]” and "Grace [die Anmut]", as well as those seen in the practice of members of the preceding generation like Cy Twombly and Joseph Beuys: “Wishes [die Wünsche],” “Intuitions [die Ahnungen],” and “Aspirations [die Sehnsüchte].” All these elements reject objectivity and transcend the grip of logic, and this is one reason New Painting was also called “Neo-Expressionism,” especially in Germany. We use the term Expressionism generally to refer to art that manifests the artist’s inner vision, seeking a dimension apart from realistic depiction of subject matter. 2 It is valid to say that “the act of expression” was the first thing to be reexamined in the 1980s. Of course new light was also shed on the viewer’s stance or “the act of interpretation.” What is most important in this art is not things exactly as they appear, not form in and of itself, but the meaning behind form.
Be that as it may, why revive painting in particular? Joachimides emphasized “direct, sensory involvement with the work of art” as a reason for the return to a traditional medium.3 The issues were no longer Modernist ones like searching for modes of pure painting without “lies” – the goal was to transcend the conclusions that Modernist thinking had reached. The art of the 1970s, while focusing on clear communication of ideas, was not always concerned with the means of doing so. “Cool” art that adopted new media one after another, such as the body and video art, and no longer even required the artist to lift his or her own hands, was impersonal and distant, leading to art’s divergence from life. Under these circumstances, the painting of the 1980s sought to root art in raw emotion through “the act of making.”
The acts of expressing, interpreting, and making: at the time of the “revival of painting,” these were no longer self-evident. The painters working at this time were fully aware of the Minimal and Conceptual modes of not expressing, not asking for interpretation, not making art by hand, and deliberately chose to reexamine the possibilities of expression, interpretation, and hands-on production. Today, while New Painting is a part of history, this phenomenon continues. This exhibition of works from the museum’s collection takes the 1980s Zeitgeist as a point of departure.
Takashi Fukumoto (Curator, The National Museum of Art, Osaka)
Artists: Futo Akiyoshi, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Varda Caivano, Alexander Calder, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Enzo Cucchi, Jean Dubuffet, Toshikatsu Endo, Koji Enokura, Michio Fukuoka, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Masakazu Horiuchi, Leiko Ikemura, Hajime Imamura, Jörg Immendorff, Motonori Inagaki, Donald Judd, Wassily Kandinsky, On Kawara, Anselm Kiefer, Imi Knoebel, U-Fan Lee, Jac Leirner, Roy Liechtenstein, Brice Marden, Chie Matsui, Bruce McLean, Joan Miró, Kimiyo Mishima, Henry Moore, Tomoharu Murakami, Saburo Muraoka, Tam Ochiai, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Susan Rothenberg, Chiyuki Sakagami, Natsuko Sakamoto, George Segal, Ushio Shinohara, Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi, Frank Stella, Yoshihiro Suda, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jiro Takamatsu, Eri Takayanagi, Shigeo Toya, Cy Twombly, Erwin Wurm, Tadanori Yokoo.
Sources: The National Museum of Art, Osaka, exhibition brochure
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