[3] These factors speak to the movement's strong association with the emotional expression of the artist's interior vision, with the kinds of emphatic brushstrokes and bold color found in paintings like Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night and Edvard Munch's The Scream that have influenced generations of practitioners.
They also speak to the rejection of the outward-facing "realism" of Impressionism, and tacitly suggest the influence of Symbolism on the movement, which sees meaning in line, form, shape and color.
The Boston origins of the American movement date to a "wave of German and European-Jewish immigrants" in the 1930s and their "affinities to the contemporary German strain of figurative painting ... in artists like Otto Dix (1891–1969), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), and Emil Nolde (1867–1956), both in style and in subject matter," art historian Adam Zucker writes.
[9] Their ongoing work and modernist dialogues envisioned art "as a narrative that unfolded through the incorporation of figures and landscapes into allegories drawn ... from traditional or imagined subject matter, fueled by the artists’ experiences and spirituality.
Spiritual and fantastical scenes were thus common, and depictions of sublime religious displays, political satire, and treatments of the theme of human mortality ... all contributed to the progression of figurative painting and to the evolving definition of modern humanist art.
The French group, concentrating on the painterly aspects of their work, particularly color, was classified as Fauvist ("wild beasts"), and Henri Matisse is considered a key practitioner.
[11] The self-taught Die Brücke had a strong interest in primitivism, like the Fauvists, but their color choices were in a less natural, higher key than those of the French, and their streetscapes were edgy.
The final group, Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), based in Munich, was largely of Russian nationality, and included, most famously, Wassily Kandinsky.
"[14] Praised by Time magazine while having scarcely sold a picture[15] he was called "the first abstract expressionist"[16] by New Yorkers Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
Hyman Bloom's stature in the New York movement waned,[16] as the difference in point of view hardened, and critics like Clement Greenberg argued for art that referenced itself, not literary relics like figuration.
Backing this mission statement was an editorial committee that included Isabel Bishop (1902–1988), Edward Hopper (1882–1967), Jack Levine (1915–2010), Raphael Soyer (1899–1987) and Henry Varnum Poor (1888–1970).
"[24] The literary historian Marjorie Perloff has made a convincing argument that Frank O'Hara's poems on the works of Garace Hartigan and Larry Rivers proved "that he was really more at home with painting that retains at least some figuration than with pure abstraction.
New York Figurative Expressionists belong within abstract expressionism, he argued, pointing out they had always taken a strong position against an implied protocol, "whether at the Metropolitan Museum or the Artists Club."
This exhibition, which was called "Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting," brought widespread attention to the tendency[31] that featured representational imagery within a painterly mode conditioned by the rich and vigorous brushwork of abstract expressionism.
[32] There are critics who also noted a sense of collaboration between the Bay Area artists as they translated the abstract expressionism into a viable figurative style.
[34] Particularly, Park provided the spark for the artistic movement after his painting of a jazz band caused a stir in the San Francisco's art community after it was included in a group exhibition.