New spirit painting

New Spirit Painting is a term associated with the revival of expressionist, figurative painting around the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. The name derives from the influential exhibition "A New Spirit in Painting," held in 1981 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London under the curatorship of Christos Joachimides, Nicholas Serota, and Norman Rosenthal. This show proclaimed the return of painting as a leading art form after a decade dominated by Conceptual, Minimalist, and performance art that had questioned the very relevance of painting. The exhibition combined established masters — Picasso, Matisse, Bacon — with a younger generation of expressive artists, including Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, and Francesco Clemente. New Spirit Painting affirmed emotionality, subjectivity, large scale, saturated color, and a return to historical, mythological, and personal subjects. The exhibition became one of the manifestos of international Neo-Expressionism and testified to the restored status of traditional painting in the art of the 1980s.