One very clear tendency of the early to mid-1980s, which was trumpeted by a number of critics at the time, was a “return to painting,” mainly of a figurative or semifigurative nature. Some argued that this represented a regressive trend. The experimentalism of the 1960s and ’70s had undermined the status of the saleable art object, but a widespread return to the time-honoured technique of oil painting seemed to chime in with the return to a conservative political ethos. At the same time, the fact that national characteristics were being promoted by dealers and curators (such as the specifically “Germanic” character of the so-called Neo-Expressionist painting that came to the fore in Berlin) seemed to suggest that the internationalist ethos of the 1960s was being overturned in accordance with the needs of the art market.

On the other hand, the curators who organized the big painting exhibitions of the early 1980s (such as the “Zeitgeist” exhibition in Berlin in 1982) argued that the trend marked a welcome return to expressive humanist content in art and a move away from the intellectualism and austerity of Conceptualism and Minimalism. An end to the previous cultural dominance of the United States could also be perceived in the resurgence of work from Europe.

Whatever the case, the return to painting can be seen as a distinctly postmodern phenomenon. Many of the artists who came to prominence tended to quote previous styles rather than attempt to produce innovations in artistic language on the model of Greenberg’s Modernism or modernism in general. Hence, the aforementioned Neo-Expressionists in Germany—such as Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, and Markus Lüpertz—reverted to the Expressionist idioms of early 20th-century German art, employing emotionally charged figural distortions and frenetic brushwork in order to make ironic or poignant comments about Germany’s historical fate over the course of the 20th century. A similar tendency appeared in Italy in the form of the so-called “Trans-avant-garde,” dominated by artists such as Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia.

It would be wrong to assume that, because of its revivalist and nationally identifiable aspects, the painting of the1980s lacked critical urgency. The German painters Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, both of whom had originally lived in East Germany under the Soviet bloc but had subsequently moved to the West, utilized the quotational idioms of postmodernism to make incisive comments on the collisions of political ideologies they had experienced. Polke overlaid radically disparate motifs in his canvases, blithely merging abstract and figurative idioms as though unable to assess their relative claims. By contrast, Richter produced important sequences of work in distinctly photo-realist and abstract modes as though compulsively restating the stylistic (and ideological) divergence between officially sanctioned Socialist Realism and experimental abstraction that he had been presented with in moving from eastern to western Europe during the Cold War.

Politics, commerce, and abjection in 1980s art

If painting experienced something of a comeback, art in the1980s was nevertheless extremely heterogeneous in terms of the various approaches and media employed by artists. Many artists continued to adopt a neo-conceptualist idiom, attempting to produce a form of “oppositional” postmodernism, which would undermine the painting revival. Such artists tended to make use of photography (favoured on account of its nonautographic nature as well as its informational content) and text. Frequently they had strong political motivations. The work of the British artist Victor Burgin was a key precedent for this tendency. As a conceptualist he had produced a clever piece of pseudo-advertising—a poster (Possession, 1976) that appeared on billboards throughout Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, showing a couple embracing (as in ads for deodorant or jewelry), with the words “What does possession mean to you?” placed above them and the deadpan rejoinder “7% of our population own 84% of our wealth” placed below. Burgin continued to make elaborate photo-text works in the 1980s, but younger artists following in his wake made more directly political gestures. The American artist Jenny Holzer, for instance, paid to have messages flashed across electronic billboards in prime public locations such as New York City’s Times Square. Her slogans were often highly ambiguous but hinted obliquely at the cult of materialism of the1980s. One read, “Protect me from what I want” (from the Survival series, 1983–85).

If neo-conceptualists in the 1980s were often profoundly critical of the times, other artists openly embraced commerce. Most notorious of these was the American sculptor Jeff Koons, who, having worked for a while as a broker on Wall Street, inaugurated his artistic career with a display of off-the-shelf vacuum cleaners, in Plexiglas vitrines, in the window of New York City’s New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980. In a sense, Koons was updating the Duchampian tradition of the ready-made and Pop art for the 1980s, but his penchant for kitsch outraged the critical establishment, a notable example being Michael Jackson with Bubbles, a porcelain figurine of the 1980s pop star with his pet chimpanzee.

By the end of the 1980s this capitulation to commerce had provoked a marked reaction. As part of a trend toward “abject art,” artists produced morbidly tinged images of body parts and physical residues as though registering the human cost of the 1980s emphasis on materialism. Cindy Sherman, for instance, began to produce photo-works depicting disturbing “landscapes” made up of human viscera or vomit. Given that the worldwide AIDS crisis was then well under way, this “fin de siècle” turn toward death and morbidity is not surprising. Some of the most poignant works of the period were produced by gay men. The American sculptor Robert Gober, for instance, produced uncanny wax sculptures of male body parts with phallic votive candles sprouting out of them.