New Image Painting never quite got the recognition it deserved, honestly.
I used to think abstraction and representation were these fundamentally opposed forces in art—like oil and water, you know? But then I spent an afternoon at a retrospective of New Image Painting works from the late 1970s, and something clicked. Here’s the thing: these artists—people like Susan Rothenberg, Neil Jenney, Nicholas Africano—they weren’t trying to choose sides in some grand aesthetic war. They were exhausted by that binary, I think. Abstract Expressionism had dominated for decades, then Minimalism stripped everything down to geometric purity, and by the mid-70s there was this weird hunger for imagery again, but nobody wanted to just go backwards to traditional realism. So they did something else entirely, something that felt almost contradictory on purpose.
The movement emerged around 1978, give or take, mostly in New York galleries. Critics struggled to name it—some called it “Bad Painting,” which was sort of a disaster of a label, honestly. The work wasn’t bad; it was deliberately rough, intentionally unpolished in ways that made you uncomfortable if you’d been trained to appreciate technical mastery.
Susan Rothenberg’s horse paintings are probably the most famous examples, and I guess they’re a good place to start.
She’d paint these horses—just the outline, really, almost like a child’s drawing—on massive canvases with this thick, gestural paint application that screamed Abstract Expressionism. The horse was recognizable, sure, but it was also clearly about the paint itself, the physicality of brushstrokes, the way form could emerge from and dissolve back into abstraction. In her 1974 piece “Tattoo,” the horse is bisected by a vertical line, as if Rothenberg couldn’t quite commit to letting the image fully exist without reminding you of the painting’s essential flatness. Wait—maybe that’s too intellectual a reading. Maybe she just thought it looked interesting. But the effect was the same: you couldn’t look at it as purely abstract, and you couldn’t recieve it as purely representational either.
The Deliberate Awkwardness That Made Critics Uncomfortable With This Movement
Neil Jenney took a different approach, one that felt almost sarcastic at times. His paintings had these thick, dark frames—sometimes painted right onto the canvas—with blunt, declarative titles like “Meltdown Morning” or “Them and Us.” The imagery inside was recognizable: trees, animals, landscapes. But it was rendered in this oddly flat, almost amateurish style that refused conventional beauty. The frames made the paintings feel like specimens, like Jenney was presenting these images for clinical examination rather than aesthetic pleasure. I’ve seen people stand in front of his work looking genuinely annoyed, like they’d been tricked somehow. Which, I guess, was sort of the point? He wanted you to think about what images do, how they carry meaning, not just passively consume them.
Nicholas Africano worked even smaller, more intimately. His figures were tiny, theatrical, isolated in vast monochrome fields. You’d see a miniature person gesturing dramatically, rendered with enough detail to read as human but surrounded by all this abstract space that swallowed them up. The contrast was almost painful—all that emptiness pressing in on these fragile little narratives.
The movement didn’t last long, maybe five or six years before it got absorbed into broader postmodern trends. But its influence was huge, even if people don’t always recognize it. You can see echoes in everything from Neo-Expressionism to the figuration revival of the 2000s. What New Image Painting did was prove you could have it both ways—that imagery and abstraction weren’t opposing teams but different frequencies of the same conversation. The paintings were messy, contradictory, sometimes ugly. They rejected the purity that had defined so much of 20th-century art.
Why This Hybrid Approach Mattered More Than Anyone Realized At The Time
Turns out, refusing to choose was its own kind of radical statement.
I think what made the movement so unsettling for critics was that it didn’t offer easy answers about what painting should be or do. It was comfortable with ambiguity, even when that ambiguity looked clumsy or unfinished. Rothenberg’s horses weren’t symbolic of anything in particular—they were just horses, and also just paint. Jenney’s landscapes were both sincere observations and ironic commentaries. Africano’s figures were simultaneously dramatic and absurd, important and insignificant. The work operated in this uncomfortable middle zone where meaning refused to stabilize, where you had to hold multiple contradictory readings in your head at once. That’s exhausting, honestly, and maybe that’s why New Image Painting never became a household name like Pop Art or Abstract Expressionism. It demanded too much ambiguity, too much tolerance for contradiction. But for those of us who respond to that kind of productive confusion, who find beauty in things that don’t quite resolve—well, it feels like coming home, I guess. Even if home is a little awkward and definately not what you expected.
