Ancestors
| Period | Node | Transfer |
|---|---|---|
| c. 1520–1600 | Mannerist religious painting (Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, El Greco) | Distortion of anatomy, elongated limbs, emotionally heightened off-balance compositions. Baselitz acknowledged this during his 1965 Florentine scholarship; the Helden series absorbs its melancholia. |
| 1905–1913 | Die Brücke (Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff) | Raw color, anti-academic figuration, the nude as exposed nerve. Critics invoke this as the named genealogy; Baselitz cited it less often than Mannerism. |
| 1911–1914 | Der Blaue Reiter (Kandinsky, Marc, Macke) | Spiritual intensity through color and animal motif; the German landscape as loaded symbol. More critic-imposed than painter-claimed. |
| 1910s–1940s | Max Beckmann | Monolithic figures in compressed space, the triptych as moral tribunal, the body as political symbol. Beckmann is the most frequently cited pre-war ancestor by the painters themselves. |
| 1930s–1950s | Soviet socialist realism | Monumental figuration and theatrical scale. Baselitz grew up under it; his early works invert the heroic subject into obscenity and defeat. The scale remains; the sign is reversed. |
| 1940s–1960s | Art Brut / Eastern European outsider art | Deliberately crude, anti-proportional, aggressively ugly. Baselitz and Schönebeck praised schizophrenia and outsider status in the Pandämonium manifestos. |
| 1960s–1970s | Joseph Beuys at Düsseldorf Academy | The erweiterter Kunstbegriff, shamanic performance, pedagogical authority. Kiefer was Beuys’s student; the broader Düsseldorf milieu shaped Capitalist Realism and the Neo-Expressionists alike. |
| 1963 | Capitalist Realism (Richter, Polke, Lueg, Kuttner) | Parallel German return-to-the-image; satirical distance, photo-mechanical mediation, commodity critique. Same generation, same academies, opposite temperaments. The Neo-Expressionists chose vehemence where Capitalist Realism chose irony. |
The core scene
| Year | Node | Transfer |
|---|---|---|
| 1961–1962 | Baselitz + Schönebeck, Pandämonium manifestos | The founding declaration: outsider art, schizophrenia, and the irrational as necessary responses to conformist West German culture. Schönebeck dropped out around 1964; Baselitz carried the project forward alone. |
| 1963 | Die große Nacht im Eimer and the Galerie Werner & Katz seizure | The scandal made Baselitz briefly famous; it established the pattern of raw figuration as deliberate provocation against polite post-war society. |
| 1965–1966 | Baselitz, Helden series (Florence) | Solitary tragic wanderers in rubble landscapes. The anti-hero as formal device: monumental scale, defeated body, ironic national myth. |
| 1969 | Baselitz, Der Wald auf dem Kopf | The first inverted painting. Formalist strategy to strip narrative from figuration while preserving it as structure. Becomes his signature device for decades. |
| Late 1960s | Lüpertz, dithyrambic paintings | Vehement paint as manifesto; Bacchic scale and aggressive gesture. |
| Late 1960s | Penck, Standart theory and paintings | Signs, figures, and a universal pictorial language conceived under East German surveillance. |
| 1968–1970 | Immendorff, LIDL Akademie | Anti-academy protests, happening-oriented political action. |
| 1969 | Kiefer, Heroische Sinnbilder photographs | Nazi-salute reenactments at European historic sites. The identification-with-perpetrator strategy that defines his entire career. |
| 1977–1984 | Immendorff, Café Deutschland series | The divided Germany as nightclub: crowded tables, national symbols, political allegory in saturated color. |
| Late 1970s | Kiefer, Wege der Weltweisheit woodcuts | German cultural figures arranged in forest compositions; the woodcut medium as deliberate engagement with Expressionist and propaganda histories. |
| 1980 | Kiefer at Venice Biennale German Pavilion | The Hochsommer and Märkischer Sand cycle provokes scandal. Baselitz curates/organizes the pavilion; the controversy marks Neo-Expressionism’s international breakthrough. |
| 1981 | ”A New Spirit in Painting,” Royal Academy, London | Christos Joachimides, Norman Rosenthal, Nicholas Serota curate. International canonization. |
| 1982 | Documenta 7, Kassel (Rudi Fuchs) | Institutional ratification. |
| 1982 | ”Zeitgeist,” Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin | The German-side companion exhibition; Joachimides and Rosenthal curate against the backdrop of the Wall. |
| Early 1980s | Junge Wilden Berlin (Salomé, Fetting, Castelli, Middendorf) | Next-generation extension: punk energy, club nightlife, queer subject matter, neon-inflected color. Galerie am Moritzplatz, Kreuzberg. |
Descendants and adjacent branches
| Period | Node | Transfer |
|---|---|---|
| 1980 | Italian Transavanguardia (Cucchi, Chia, Clemente, Paladino, De Maria; theorized by Bonito Oliva) | Parallel European return to figuration, myth, and traditional media. Mediterranean classicism where Germans chose Teutonic heaviness. Both rejected 1970s conceptual orthodoxy. |
| 1979–1985 | American Neo-Expressionism (Schnabel, Salle, Fischl, Basquiat) | Large scale, aggressive brushwork, interdisciplinary appropriation. The Mary Boone Gallery and Tony Shafrazi as New York commercial infrastructure. American painters lacked the direct fascist/Holocaust trauma; they engaged suburban ennui, media saturation, racial violence, sexual voyeurism. |
| 1987–1988 | Junge Wilden market collapse | Rapid rise and fall damages the older painters’ reception. Some critics treat the next generation as market-driven imitation that poisoned the well. |
| 1990s | Contemporary figurative painting (Tuymans, Dumas, Doig) | Cooler, more mediated returns to the figure. Neo-Expressionism’s heat is dialed down; the photographic source and the archive replace mythic immediate presence. |
| 2013 | Baselitz, Der Spiegel interview | The 2013 statement that women cannot paint as well as men reopens the movement’s machismo question in public. Not a descendant, but a late echo that reactivates the dispute. |
See also
- Georg Baselitz — the central figure
- Anselm Kiefer — the Beuys student who carried the historical burden furthest
- Capitalist Realism — the parallel German return-to-image, colder in temperament
- Italian Transavanguardia — the Mediterranean parallel
- American Neo-Expressionism — the New York branch