New figuration

New Figuration is a general term for the revival of figurative art in Europe and America in the 1960s, following a period dominated by Abstract Expressionism and geometric abstraction. Artists of this tendency reintroduced the human figure and the recognizable object world into the language of modern painting — not as a mere continuation of tradition, but in a new, often sharp, critical, and expressive key. New Figuration absorbed the lessons of abstraction — free brushwork, distortion, color expression — and combined them with social, psychological, and political content. In France and Spain the tendency took the form of Nouvelle Figuration and "narrative figuration" with artists such as Erró and Jacques Monory; in Britain it is associated with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. The movement paralleled the emergence of Pop art but retained greater drama and existential tension. New Figuration became an important link in the reassessment of the role of the human image in the art of the second half of the twentieth century.