New Figuration

New Figuration names a spread of post-war tendencies that turned away from impersonal abstraction and back to the human figure. No manifesto founded it and no single group defined it; what unites its artists is reaction - to geometric abstraction, to the post-war crisis of human values, to the sense of alienation modern life produced. The figure returns damaged: distorted, truncated, grotesque, or reduced to a trace or sign, and techniques range from Dubuffet's raw Art brut matter to body casts, imprints and photorealistic paint on mirrored steel. Its forerunners are solitaires such as Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti and the late Picasso; in France it took the narrative turn Gérald Gassiot-Talabot called narrative figuration, in Prague it became the Czech grotesque, and exhibitions from the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles to Nová figurace (Prague, 1969) chart its reach.

Defining characteristics

• The human figure returned to, but damaged: distorted, truncated, or grotesque
• Presence by proxy: a body implied by trace, cast, imprint, or photographic sign
• Raw, anti-aesthetic surfaces drawn from Art brut and informel
• Anthropometry - body casts, prints, and imprints - replacing modeled anatomy
• Photorealistic imagery set against polished steel or mirror, implicating the viewer
• Narrative and quotidian subjects: comic-strip plots, advertising, media imagery

Key figures

• Francis Bacon (1909-1992) — Whose screaming, distorted popes and figures made him the tendency's emblematic forerunner
• Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) — Art brut founder whose raw matter fed the new figuration's anti-aesthetic side
• Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) — Sculptor whose attenuated figures embodied the post-war existential crisis
• Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) — Whose Women series of the late 1940s-50s swung between abstraction and figure
• Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) — Late works of the 1950s-60s named among the tendency's founding statements

Example works

• Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X — Francis Bacon (1953)
• Woman I — Willem de Kooning (1950-1952)
• Walking Man I (L'Homme qui marche I) — Alberto Giacometti (1960)

Sources

• New Figuration - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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