The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (339 page)

 
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New Image Painting
(or New Image Art)
.

A vague term applied since the late 1970s to the work of certain painters 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. The accompanying catalogue unhelpfully informs us 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’. Philip
Guston
, who in the 1970s abandoned
Abstract Expressionism
for a comic-strip style of figuration, is regarded as the progenitor of New Image Painting. Other American artists who have been labelled New Image painters include Jennifer Bartlett (1941– ), Jonathan Borofsky (1942– ), and Susan Rothenberg (1945– ). In Britain the term ‘New Image’ has been applied particularly to painters of the 1980s
Glasgow School
.

 
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Newlyn School
.

A name applied to the painters who worked in the Cornish fishing village of Newlyn from the 1880s, particularly those directly linked with Stanhope Forbes (1857–1947), who was the founder and leader of the school. One of the attractions of Newlyn was the mild climate, which made it particularly suitable for outdoor work, and Forbes and his associates were among the pioneers of
plein-air
painting in Britain. Apart from Forbes and his wife Elizabeth Armstrong (1859–1912), the artists most closely associated with Newlyn in its heyday include: Frank Bramley (1857–1915); Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854–1931), better known for his later work, particularly his allegorical pictures of children; and Henry Scott
Tuke
. Many of the Newlyn artists were associated with the
New English Art Club
, but they also showed their work at the
Royal Academy
. The golden period of Newlyn was over by the turn of the century; thereafter it was vulgarized by an influx of inferior talent, and
St Ives
came to have a greater attraction for 20th-cent. artists. However, distinguished painters continued to be associated with Newlyn: Harold and Laura
Knight
lived there, 1908–18, for example, and Dod Procter (1892–1972) and her husband Ernest Procter (1886–1935) spent much of their lives in the village.

 
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(1905–70).
American painter, one of the leading figures of
Abstract Expressionism
and one of the initiators of
Colour Field painting
. During the 1930s he had a hard time financially; the Depression almost ruined his father's clothing business, and unlike most American painters of the time Newman did not work for the
Federal Art Project
, being unwilling to accept State hand-outs. Part of his living came from teaching art in high schools. He destroyed most of his early work and stopped painting in the early 1940s, but he began again in 1944, and in the second half of the 1940s evolved a distinctive style of mystical abstraction—he considered ‘the sublime’ to be his ultimate subject matter. The work with which he announced this style was
Onement I
(private collection, 1948), a monochromatic canvas of dark red with a single stripe of lighter red running down the middle. Such stripes (or ‘zips’ as Newman preferred to call them) became a characteristic feature of his work. By the time he painted
Onement I
Newman already had a reputation as a controversialist and a spokesman for avant-garde art (in catalogue essays and in articles in journals). In 1949 he painted his first wall-size pictures (he was one of the pioneers of the very large format) and in 1950 he had his first one-man exhibition, at the Betty
Parsons
gallery. This was coolly received by critics and fellow artists, and by the mid-1950s his very spare style had separated him from the predominantly
Gestural
idiom of his colleagues. For a time he became a somewhat marginalized figure and he stopped painting in 1956. He had a heart attack in 1957, but the following year a resurgence began with a series of paintings in black and white, and in the last decade of his life his reputation soared and his output was prolific. From 1965 he made steel sculptures (vertical strips recalling his paintings) and in his late years he also experimented with
shaped canvases
, painting several triangular pictures.

 
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New Realism
.

A vague term, of dubious value, that has been used in at least three distinct senses in connection with art of the 1960s and later. First, it has been used in a way similar to the term
New Figuration
to describe a revival of figurative art after a dominant period of abstraction; whereas ‘New Figuration’ has been used very broadly, however, ‘New Realism’ has often been applied more specifically to works that are objective in spirit, particularly
Superrealist
pictures or those of Philip
Pearlstein
. In a second sense, ‘New Realism’ has been used as a straight translation of the French term ‘Nouveau Réalisme’ and applied to works incorporating three-dimensional objects, usually mass-produced consumer goods, in
assemblages
or attached to the surface of a painting. Thirdly—and perplexingly—it has been used as a synonym for
Pop art
.

 
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