No less so is Paula Rego, a painter I'd hardly heard of until a few years ago because she was scarcely known in the US - but how strongly put together, how viscerally and deeply felt, are her renderings of bad parental authority and of the psychic nightmares that lie just be low the supposedly sweet surface of childhood! Rego is a great subversive without a trace of the dull, academic conceptualism that renders the more approved American radical-feminists of the 80s-90s so tedious - and she draws superbly, which her sisters across the Atlantic have either forgotten or never learned to do. On the other hand, there are a few - a very few - artists of the "neo-expressionist" generation whose work continues its efforts to take on the burden of history, to struggle to explain our bizarre and terrible times to us in memorable visual terms, and one of the most complex and rewarding of these talents, uneven though he can be, is surely Anselm Kiefer. The period has been full of conceptual art, but conceptual art makes for utterly droning TV. Is there anyone who really cares much what Julian Schnabel or David Salle, for instance, are now doing? Do the recent paintings of Sandro Chia or Georg Baselitz excite interest? Maybe in your breast, but not in mine. Most of the "1980s artists" over whom such a fuss was made have turned out to be merely rhetorical, or inept, or otherwise fallen by the wayside. So we decided to sample rather than summarise. Not all of that "too much", admittedly, is compelling or even interesting, but the ground is choked with events that defy brief, coherent summary. T wenty-five years is a mere eyeblink in the story of Egyptian, Mayan or even medieval English art, but it is a long time in the modern or (weasel word) post-modern context, and if one is given a single programme - a mere 55 minutes - to bring the story up to date from where The Shock of the New left off when we finished making the series, one is bound to fail.
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