Both these artists have been called "New Realists", but they are best seen in connection with the Conceptual group. Like the Conceptualists, they have Minimalist roots and later turned to figuration. And as with the Conceptualists, increasing figuration is accompanied by increasing emotional discomfort.
After travelling in Mexico and picking up the muralist influence, he worked that way for a while before turning to a form of abstraction sometimes called "Abstract Impressionism" (see Zone, below). Then in the later 1960s he returned to figurative art, exploiting a comic strip style well known from British children's comic books, which he might have discovered during his travels in Europe. These comics featured ordinary back street kids getting into mischief, in permanent rebellion against the adults (which was absolutely mutual). Sometimes the kids won and sometimes the adults did, but the kids never lost their high spirits - even in the midst of a well-deserved spanking. Here are a few classics - note the style: Desperate Dan and Corky the Cat (from The Dandy); and Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids (from The Beano, Britain's most popular and long-running comic, 1936 to present); Dennis the Menace and Gnasher (from The Beano). As comics mix text and image, so Guston in the 1970s produced his prose-poems, a mix of poetic text and image. Although his work parallels the children's comic theme of rebellion against social oppression, the spirit is very different.
Emerging apparently out of Minimalism or Abstract Expressionism, Rothenberg reintroduced the figure into her work. Her early horse silhouettes give no warning of the horror of her later work (after she married Bruce Nauman), which contain fragments of human and animal bodies whose macabre quality is increased by the apparent lack of narrative explanation.
