Touching Taboos,Revealing Truth

In The History of Modern Western Art,1980s,H.Harvard Arnason listed Julian Schnabel,David Sally,Robert Longo,Cindy Sherman and Eric Fischl as the representatives of American neo-expressionism.Among them,Fischl is the only painter with the main purpose of figurative realism.But at that time,it was difficult for artists to succeed only by means of figurative language,and Fischl’s early painting skills were green.His success is mainly attributed to a series of works on suburban life that began to be created in the early 1980s.What makes these paintings special is that they tell the stories of suburban life in a unique narrative way.These stories reveal the real spiritual world of the American middle class at that time by touching the taboos of life that people are ashamed to speak out.This paper takes Eric Fischl’s suburban life paintings as the main research object.First,through the review of his childhood traumatic experience,early fisherman family life series and cellophane series works,it analyzes the formation process of suburban life painting.Second,it analyzes the connection between the taboo and psychological themes of the works and the artist’s childhood experience,suburban racial segregation and the inner world of the middle class,further studies the update and adjustment of the expression of taboo and psychological themes in works under the context of artistic pluralism and post-feminism.Third,combining his later works,this paper illustrates the relationship between narrative elements and realistic techniques in Fischl’s paintings.Through the analysis,it finally points out the psychological realism connotation of Eric Fischl’s suburban life paintings,and attempts to give a more accurate judgment of the significance in post-modern painting.