In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a group of American painters made work that the art world had been insisting was dead: large, gestural, figurative paintings that asserted the continued relevance of painting as a medium at the precise moment when the most sophisticated critical voices were declaring it obsolete. The movement was called Neo-Expressionism in Germany and Bad Painting or Neo-Geo in the United States, but its American wing had a distinct character that differentiated it from its European counterparts. The American painters were not interested in expressiveness for its own sake. They were interested in painting as a vehicle for examining the condition of contemporary image culture.
David Salle, born in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1952, was the most intellectually consistent and formally inventive of the American Neo-Expressionist generation. His paintings from the early 1980s onward layer multiple images on the same canvas in ways that deny the viewer any conventional path through the composition. A figure from pornography sits alongside a fragment of art history. A piece of furniture is painted in one style while a figure in the same painting is painted in another. Text appears and disappears. The images belong to different registers of visual culture and different moments of cultural history, and their co-presence on the same canvas refuses to resolve into a unified statement about any of them.
Training and Context
Salle studied at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia under John Baldessari, one of the central figures of the conceptual art movement of the 1970s and one of the most important teachers in recent American art history. Baldessari's influence is visible throughout Salle's work: the use of found imagery, the interrogation of art's visual language, the willingness to treat painting as a medium for examining image culture rather than simply producing more images. But where Baldessari's practice tended toward photographic and text-based work, Salle redirected these conceptual investigations back into the medium of oil paint.
He moved to New York in 1975 and became embedded in the downtown art scene of the late 1970s, a scene that also included Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Cindy Sherman. The conversations and competitive energies of this community, combined with the explosive growth of the art market in the early 1980s, provided both the intellectual context and the economic fuel for the generation's rapid rise to prominence.
The Paintings: Structure and Method
A characteristic Salle painting from the early 1980s consists of two or more panels, or a single large canvas divided into distinct zones, each containing images in different styles and from different sources. The images are typically drawn from a combination of high and low visual culture: art history (Manet, Poussin, genre painting), pornography, advertising, comic books, pattern and ornament, and direct observation. They are painted in a range of styles that correspond to the source: a figure borrowed from a pornographic photograph might be rendered in a thin, washed-out gray that mimics the photographic source, while a fragment of painted pattern in the same work is rendered in dense, rich color.
The juxtaposition of these elements is the work's central activity. Salle is not interested in creating unified visual compositions in which all the elements contribute to a single effect. He is interested in the confrontation between incompatible visual languages and cultural registers. The viewer cannot settle on a stable interpretation because the painting refuses to organize itself into one. This refusal is not a failure of organization but the work's primary aesthetic principle.
The critical framework most often applied to Salle's work is postmodern, with its emphasis on pastiche, quotation, and the loss of a unified subject position from which meaning can be generated. Salle's paintings are read as symptoms of a culture so saturated with images from so many different sources and registers that the attempt to create a unified visual statement is either impossible or naive. The paintings embody this condition rather than proposing a solution to it.
The Controversy: The Female Body
A significant portion of the criticism directed at Salle's work concerns his use of images of women drawn from pornographic and erotic sources. The female figures in his paintings are often nude, often in sexually available poses, rendered in the flat, impersonal style that mimics photographic sources. These images coexist with the other visual materials in the paintings without any evident comment on or critique of the sources from which they come.
Feminist critics including Rosalind Krauss and others argued that the paintings' apparent neutrality toward their pornographic sources was not the sophisticated postmodern stance its defenders claimed but simply a recycling of the objectifying gaze that the postmodern framework was supposed to be analyzing and disrupting. Salle's defenders responded that the paintings' refusal to endorse or condemn their sources was itself a statement about the condition of an image culture in which critique and complicity are inseparable. The debate has not been resolved and continues to inform how the work is discussed.
The 1990s and After
The art market collapse of the late 1980s substantially reduced the commercial and critical visibility of the Neo-Expressionist generation, and Salle's reputation contracted along with the market. He continued to paint throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and his work in this period shows a gradual evolution toward more complex compositional structures and a greater range of source materials. The "Tapestry" series from the 2000s uses large-scale printed photographic images as grounds on which painted figures and objects are overlaid, extending the layering logic of the early works into new formal territory.
His critical rehabilitation has been ongoing since the mid-2000s, as scholars and curators have begun to reassess the 1980s generation with the distance that time provides. The retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in 2019 offered the most comprehensive survey of his career to that point and demonstrated that the most searching of his early paintings remain compelling objects that cannot be reduced to their moment of origin.
Final Thoughts
David Salle made paintings in the 1980s that were simultaneously celebrated and attacked as the most acute symptom of their cultural moment. They remain some of the most formally interesting and conceptually searching objects produced by the American art world in the second half of the 20th century. Their refusal to resolve, their insistence on holding incompatible visual materials in unresolved tension, looks more prescient now, in an era of algorithmic image overload, than it did when they were made. For the broader Neo-Expressionist context, the guide to Neo-Expressionism provides essential background. For the conceptual tradition he emerged from, the guide to conceptual art covers the Baldessari lineage that shaped his thinking.
