The New Image: Painting in the 1980s

With the rebirth of expressionism in the late 1970s, artists in Europe and America spliced figures and scenes from everyday life with myth and dream. Their loose, fast style was dubbed neo-expressionism or New Painting, catch-phrases that encompass everything from Kenny Scharf's insidious cartoon fantasies to Enzo Cucchi's portrayals of ""presences'' to Anselm Kiefer's eerie mixed-media landscapes that evoke a Germany scarred by the Holocaust. With a marvelous eye for separating the real thing from trash, London-based art critic Godfrey has produced the best survey to date of figurative painting in the '80s. Proclaiming the death of the School of Paris, he examines French artists struggling to create a new pictorial language. Treading carefully through New York's SoHo and the East Village, he singles out such artists as Keith Haring, Susan Rothenberg, Julian Schnabel and Brad Davis. There is much that is significant in today's art scene, and this exhilarating, intelligent report captures the creative ferment. (October 17