New Image Painting

New Image Painting (or New Image Art). A vague term applied since the late 1970s to the work of certain avant-garde artists who work in a strident figurative style, often with cartoon-like imagery and abrasive handling owing something to Neo-Expressionism. It was given currency by an exhibition entitled ‘New Image Painting’ at the Whitney Museum, New York, in 1978. Subsequently the term ‘New Image’ has been used in the title of other exhibitions and in a book by Tony Godfrey, The New Image: Painting in the 1980s (1986). In the catalogue of the Whitney exhibition we are told that the New Image painters ‘felt free to manipulate the image on canvas so that it can be experienced as a physical object, an abstract configuration, a psychological associative, a receptacle for applied paint, an analytically systemized exercise, an ambiguous quasi-narrative, a specifically non-specific experience, a vehicle for formalist explorations or combinations of any'. Slightly more helpfully, Daniel Wheeler in his revision (1986) of H. H. Arnason's A History of Moderrn Art writes that the work of the artists in the Whitney Show ‘had little in common other than their recognizable but distinctly idiosyncratic imagery presented, for the most part, in untraditional, nonillusionistic contexts … The great progenitor of the New Imagists was Philip Guston, who in 1970 let it be known that he had abandoned his famous Abstract Expressionist style … for a rather raucous form of figuration that seemed to ape not only the primitive, heavy-handed manner of 1930s strip cartoons but also their narrative order and broad, goofy, humor.’

The American artists who have been labelled New Image painters include Jennifer Bartlett (1941– ), Jonathan Borofsky (1942– ), Neil Jenney (1945– ), Robert Moskowitz (1935– ), Susan Rothenberg (1945– ), Pat Steir (1940– ), Donald Sultan (1951– ), and Joe Zucker (1941– ). Some of these have also been claimed as representatives of Neo-Expressionism. In Britain the term ‘New Image’ has been applied particularly to painters of the 1980s Glasgow School.