In “Downtown 81,” Edo Bertoglio and Glenn O’Brien’s no-budget New York film made in the early 1980s, a teenage Jean-Michel Basquiat roams a desolate Lower Manhattan, hauling a painting he’s trying to sell to make rent. “There was a diamond-brick road there and I could see it,” Basquiat’s only-lightly fictionalized character says with uncanny prescience. “I was off to be the wizard.”
This is the moment of creative florescence that the uptown gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan revisits with its exhibition, “Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties,” a blockbuster opening Thursday that surveys the decade’s art stars: Basquiat and Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel and David Salle, Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons, among others. In a canny bit of double-billing, the show is co-curated by the former gallerist Mary Boone, herself a protagonist of the decade, as responsible as anyone for shaping its direction and tastes.
“Downtown/Uptown” represents Boone’s formal return to the art world since she closed her namesake gallery in 2019, when she was preparing to go to prison for tax fraud, specifically, for using the gallery’s money to pay her personal expenses. (She served nine months.) Much of the exhibition turns on the careers she nurtured. Boone mounted early, crucial shows of Schnabel, Salle, Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, and Eric Fischl, a cohort that, along with Basquiat, whom she also showed, formed an American core of Neo-Expressionism, an art historical-ism that still chafes the artists lumped into it.
“The word ‘Neo-Expressionist’ doesn’t exist,” Schnabel declared earlier this summer at a round table convened in Montauk, N.Y., for The New York Times that brought together several of the show’s artists and organizers. “It’s dull and doesn’t mean anything.”
What Neo-Expressionism did mean, and what this show centers on, was a return to a style of figurative painting — and painting generally — that had long been declared dead. Its lusty, emotive mark-making announced something new. That it was as much a return to the New York School painters of the 1950s mattered little as it congealed into one of the decade’s dominant moods. It’s easy to see the saturation of young figurative painters of the last several years as a direct echo, if not a willful attempt to reproduce that mood’s success.
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