The New New Painters were a self-labeled art group whose core members are twelve abstract artists (Lucy Baker, Steve Brent,

Joseph Drapell Joseph Drapell (born March 13, 1940) is a Czech-Canadian abstract painter. Early life Drapell was born in Humpolec, Czechoslovakia, and emigrated to Canada in 1966. From 1968-1970 he studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills ...

, John Gittins, Roy Lerner, Anne Low, Marjorie Minkin, Irene Neal, Gérard Paire, Graham Peacock, Bruce Piermarini and Gerald Webster) who first came together in 1978 contemporaneously with the further development of acrylic gel paint as developed by the paint chemist Sam Golden.Sam Golden, Paintmaking Pioneer
Sam Golden's eulogy at Golden Artist Colors. The NewNew Painters as they are called, arose from the roots of

Jackson Pollock Paul Jackson Pollock (; January 28, 1912August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his " drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a hor ...

and

Abstract Expressionism Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...

, The New York School, and Color Field ( Morris Louis and

Kenneth Noland Kenneth Noland (April 10, 1924 – January 5, 2010) was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was though ...

from the

Washington Color School The Washington Color School, also known as the Washington, D.C., Color School, was an art movement starting during the 1950s–1970s in Washington, D.C., in the United States, built of abstract expressionist artists. The movement emerged during ...

Helen Frankenthaler Helen Frankenthaler (December 12, 1928 – December 27, 2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades (early 1950s u ...

,'Color Field' Artists Found a Different Way
Frankenthaler influences the Color Field painters Jules Olitski and

Larry Poons Lawrence M. "Larry" Poons (born October 1, 1937) is an American abstract painter. Poons was born in Tokyo, Japan, and studied from 1955 to 1957 at the New England Conservatory of Music, with the intent of becoming a professional musician. After ...

, among others). The Color Field artists worked by staining on raw canvas, in close value, high key colors, often large scale. The artists of The New New Painters came together with a desire to move forward into a new kind of painting using acrylic gels. Unofficially the group members were exhibiting together in smaller groups up until 1992 when Gerald Piltzer asked Kenworth W. MoffettKenworth Moffett biography
Ken discusses the origins of New New Painting. to curate an exhibition in his new gallery
The 1996 show is referenced in the Archives. in Paris, France under the name "New New Painting". The term "New New Painting" was coined in a conversation between Graham Peacock and John Gittins and was used by Piltzer for the Paris Show and the hardcover catalog of the same name.

Kenworth Moffett Kenworth W. Moffett (born 1934 in East Orange, New Jersey – June 21, 2016) was an American art curator, museum director and author. Moffett took a degree in art history at Columbia University, where he studied with Meyer Schapiro and Philip P ...

brought this group together and championed them from its earliest inception, despite resistance from the Color Field painters, the art world at large, and the famed art critic Clement Greenberg. Moffett has staunchly submitted that The New New Painters had been overlooked by the New York City art world. Moffett wrote in 1992 in the Paris Exhibition catalogue "While not a formal organization, the artists featured in this book all know each other and feel themselves to be part of a group with a shared sensibility and common interests, just like the Impressionists, the Fauves, the Cubists, the Surrealists and the Abstract Expressionists before them. They all live in North America - in small towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts in the United States, and in the larger cities of Toronto and Edmonton in Canada. Many of them are still in their forties and in my view constitute the most exciting new movement or 'wave' of painters to appear in twenty-five years. For the first time since Color Field and

Minimalism In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...

, modernist art has a whole new look and feel. It stands out by its aggressive aggressiveness of relief, texture, color and drawing."Kenworth Moffett excerpt
Exhibition introduction, Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporaine: Nice France. In the same article, Moffett writes further: "Two strikingly novel features of the new work are very bright color - often fluorescent - and very thick, plastic paint" and from Belgian philosopher Marcel Paquet: "Thus, far from having been just a quick-fire, Abstract Expressionism has cleared the path to a new aesthetics, to a non-organic, multi-sensorial space in which the New Acrylic Painters are already ranking quite high. These young and resolute painters harbour the proof that art did not die at the end of Renaissance, but that it is just confronted at entirely new tasks-the first being to create a beauty of a new world."

Critical views

Donald Kuspit said about the New New Painters in 1996: "They have broken out of the sterile, depleted ''cul de sac'' of post-painterly abstraction, bringing new life and intensity—depth and energy—to alloverness, in effect resurrecting it as a viable medium of creativity."Kuspit, Donald (1996) "Excess and Intimacy: Painting Besides and Inside Itself", ''New New Painting''. In his essay ''New New Painting and the History of American-Style Abstraction'', the critic

David Carrier David Carrier (; born 1944) is an American philosopher of art and cultural critic. Education Carrier received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University, where he was a student of Arthur Danto, in 1972. He was a Getty Scholar (1999–2000), ...

said in 1999: "the New New Painters are providing some exciting fundamentally original ideas about how to understand abstraction ... I greatly admire the New New Painters for their determined persistence and their indifference to mere fashion."Carrier, David (1999) "New New Painting and History of American-Style Abstraction", ''The New New Painters''. Flint Institute of Art,

References

{{Authority control American artist groups and collectives