If neo-Expressionism is the term most often used to characterize the re-emergence of figuration in postwar German and Italian painting, in the American context, the term refers more broadly to a generation of artists who returned to the easel in the 1970s and 1980s. Unburdened by the legacy of fascism which haunted the canvases of their European counterparts, the American neoExpressionists plumbed their artistic pasts and image-driven presents for the subjects and styles of their pictures.

Quite varied in their pictorial strategies and thematic preoccupations, the American neoExpressionists’ work ranges from Julian Schnabel’s self-aggrandizing velvet and tarpaulin-based homages to art historical traditions, to David Salle’s coolly ironic painterly pastiches of a mediasaturated world, to Eric Fischl’s psychoanalytic representations of the dark side of suburban life.

In their refusal to acknowledge the presumptive death of modernist painting, signaled not only by the demise of Greenbergian high modernist criticism but by the strategies and assumptions of pop art, performance, minimalism, conceptual-ism and video, the neo-Expressionists assumed the position of cultural melancholics, repeating and resurrecting the figurative impulse of historical expressionism when its power was long since extinguished. For all the anachronisms of their painterly predilections, American neo-Expressionism was ultimately far closer to the appropriative strategies and nostalgic impulses evinced in the photographically based practices of its deconstructive compatriots than to the European traditions invoked in its naming and stylistic affinities.