c. 1978–1990

Neo-Expressionism

Around 1980 young artists in Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg picked up the brush again, after years in which Conceptual and Minimal Art had dominated the avant-garde. They painted big, fast and loud, often raw and provocative, and within a few years conquered museums and the art market. The Neue Wilde, Germany’s “new wild ones”, are seen as one of the last great art movements of the twentieth century.

A heap of earth and a lot of paint

Berlin, autumn 1982. In the atrium of the Martin-Gropius-Bau, an imperial-era museum building that had come out of the war as a ruin and stood right next to the Wall, lies a huge heap of earth. Beside it stand workbenches: an installation by Joseph Beuys. All around, in the arcades and on the galleries, hang paintings, big, colourful, wildly painted. The exhibition is called “Zeitgeist”. The curators Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal are showing 45 artists from Europe and the United States, among them Andy Warhol, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz, but also young painters whom hardly anyone had heard of three years earlier: Rainer Fetting, Salomé and Helmut Middendorf from Berlin, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil and Peter Bömmels from Cologne.

The exhibition was a sensation and a battleground. For some, painting had finally returned; for others, it was the art market that had. Either way, the Neue Wilde had now arrived on the international stage.

Hungry for pictures

In the 1970s the avant-garde had hardly painted at all. Conceptual Art, Minimal Art, photography, video and performance dominated the major exhibitions, and many considered painting old-fashioned. The young artists born around 1950, who left the academies in the late 1970s, had had enough. They wanted to make pictures, fast, direct and large, often on cheap unbleached cotton with quick-drying emulsion or distemper.

They got their name in 1980 from an exhibition in Aachen. Wolfgang Becker, director of the Neue Galerie – Sammlung Ludwig, called it “Les nouveaux Fauves – Die neuen Wilden”, after the Fauves around Matisse, who had shocked the public with their loud colours eighty years before. In 1982 the critic Wolfgang Max Faust and Gerd de Vries summed up the mood in the title of a book: Hunger nach Bildern, hunger for pictures.

Berlin: the Galerie am Moritzplatz

In Kreuzberg, in a building on Moritzplatz close to the Wall, Rainer Fetting, Salomé, Helmut Middendorf, Bernd Zimmer and others opened their own gallery in May 1977. It was a self-help gallery: the artists exhibited each other because no one else would. Their pictures showed the Berlin they lived in: punk gigs at the SO36 club, gay bars, nightlife, naked bodies, the Wall. In his 1978 series Van Gogh und Mauer (Van Gogh and Wall), Fetting sent the painter Vincent van Gogh walking along the Wall as a lonely figure.

The breakthrough came in 1980 with the exhibition “Heftige Malerei” (Vehement Painting) at the Haus am Waldsee. After that the artists went their separate ways, and soon some of them were exhibiting in New York as well.

Cologne: Mülheimer Freiheit

In the autumn of 1980 six young painters in Cologne moved into a shared studio on a street called Mülheimer Freiheit, at number 110, and named their group after the address: Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger. In December 1980 the dealer Paul Maenz showed them in his exhibition “Mülheimer Freiheit & Interessante Bilder aus Deutschland”. The Cologne painters were more playful and ironic than the Berliners, full of jokes, nonsense and allusions to art history and pop culture; Dahn and Dokoupil often worked together on the same canvas. In 1982 the group broke up.

Hamburg: irony as method

In Hamburg in 1977 Werner Büttner, Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger met, and Markus Oehlen and Georg Herold soon joined them. They had little time for the pathos of “vehement” painting and painted badly on purpose, with titles longer and cheekier than the pictures: Albert Oehlen called a 1984 painting Als Gott den Rock erschuf, muss er geil gewesen sein (When God Created Rock, He Must Have Been Horny). Kippenberger, who had run the SO36 club in Berlin for a while in the late 1970s and played in bands, turned his whole life into a work of art. The very title of his 1984 painting Ich kann beim besten Willen kein Hakenkreuz entdecken (With the Best Will in the World I Can’t See a Swastika) is a provocation that asks how Germans dealt with their past.

Boom and bust

In the early 1980s the Neue Wilde enjoyed a success that few generations of artists before them had known. Collectors, museums and galleries in Germany, New York and Italy competed for their pictures, and prices rose quickly. At the same time, the artists of the Transavanguardia in Italy, of Figuration Libre in France and, in the United States, Julian Schnabel and David Salle were painting in a similarly free, figurative way.

The movement burned out as quickly as it had risen. Many pictures repeated themselves, critics spoke of a fashion, and by the late 1980s interest had turned back to photography, installation and conceptual art. A few artists remained influential for decades, above all Kippenberger, who died in 1997 at the age of 44, and Albert Oehlen.

Why it still matters

The Neue Wilde gave painting back its self-confidence. Since then the painted picture has again counted as a contemporary medium rather than a relic. Their mix of grand gesture and irony, of seriousness and wit, still shapes many painters today. And they captured an image of the 1980s: West Berlin before the fall of the Wall, the clubs, punk music, a mood somewhere between new beginnings and the end of the world. In 2015 the Städel Museum in Frankfurt devoted a major exhibition to them, “Die 80er. Figurative Malerei in der BRD”.