Book Release! Painting in the 1980s
Painting in the 1980s: Reimagining the Medium by Rosemary Cohane Erpf has hit the shelves! You can pick up a copy at your local bookstore or buy it online from the University of Chicago Press.
Congratulations, Rosemary!
I started working on this project way back in the summer of 2020 when it was just a collection of notes and fragments of a draft. Rosemary and I have been on a wild ride to make her dream a reality, and in the process we’ve become close friends. Besides just editing, I helped her write, choose artists to feature, fact check, source images, and even get copyright permissions from all the museums, galleries, collectors, and studios.
Blood, sweat, and tears do not even begin to cover everything that went into bringing this book to life. We’ve been working on it so long that it feels like my book too.
Holding this book in my hands—it’s printed on fancy paper—is truly surreal. This was my first major project, and I’m so very grateful to have been a part of this adventure.
Back Cover
This book is the first to explore major painters of the 1980s in depth and to analyze the factors that shaped art from the period. Accessible to both novice and specialist, Painting in the 1980s details where and how painting embodied the zeitgeist in original fusions of style and content. Gallerists, curators, and art historians assigned labels such as New Image Painting, Neo-Expressionism, Italian Transavanguardia, Neo-Geo, and the blanket designation of Postmodernism to categorize painting in this era, yet these classifications denote a false sense of homogeneity. This book’s narrative aims to excavate and analyze the art and ideas that shaped each artist’s style and their diverse and often ambiguous content.
Early Reviews
During the tumultuous 1980s, nothing seemed more urgent inside the New York art world than the fate of painting, and many of the issues that burst into the open then are still important today. Unlike most overviews published at the time, Painting in the 1980s strikes a careful balance between the critical reception of the work and the artists’ own explanations for what they were doing. From Bad Painting to the Italian Transavangardia and beyond, Erpf pulls together over two dozen key painters of the period, introducing readers to a pre-global art milieu when ideas about image and surface were fervently debated, and painters were leading the way to a stylistic revolution.
Dan Cameron is a New York-based curator, author, and educator.
As ‘indispensable’ as Gerhard Richter described painting to life, this book brilliantly weaves together accounts of painting in its decade of resurgence. Featuring close analysis alongside interviews with key participants, the book makes for a crucial companion to understanding this vital period of art history.
Eleanor Nairne is a curator at The Barbican Art Gallery in London.
Rosemary Erpf energetically and cogently takes on the chaotic, polymorphous art scene of the 1980s where localism collided with the first inklings of globalism. Focusing on the three arenas familiar to denizens of the decade—the United States, Germany and Italy—she examines how abstraction and figuration jostled one another for primacy. What we see in hindsight is the active interconnection between these stylistic approaches, the role of the legacies of the immediate pasts in those areas in shaping the work, and how the work of artists she considers propelled art to new horizons, albeit not according to usual art historical orthodoxies and definitions.
A distinctive aspect of this narrative, however, is Erpf’s focus on several women artists in these discourses—notably Mary Heilmann, Jennifer Bartlett, Susan Rothenberg and Marlene Dumas—whose presences in chronicles such as this, tend to be downplayed or marginalized despite the protean nature of the painterly enterprises.
Lowery Stokes Sims is a curator and writer on Contemporary Art who is currently Kress Beinecke Professor, 2021-22 at The Center, National Gallery of Art. She is curator emerita at the Museum of Arts and Design, NY and previously curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and Director of The Studio Museum of Art, NY.
The re-emergence of painting in the 1980s in Europe and the United States is as exciting as it is confusing. In her in-depth analysis, Rosemary Erpf counters the false sense of homogeneity and problematic art historical labels attached to painterly practices of that era. Bypassing academic theories, hers is a human and empathic approach towards individual artists at work in the studio. Combining knowledge and passion, her book shines a clarifying light on the last great reset in the history of painting.
Dominic van den Boogerd is an art critic and Head of Research and Education at De Ateliers, Amsterdam, where he was director from 1995 to 2018.