In 1979, the Royal Academy exhibition, A New Spirit in Painting, marked official recognition of a surprising phenomenon: the rebirth of painting, which had been largely written off by the art world. Neo-Expressionism, as it became known, was a rather chauvinistically male movement that swept through Europe and the US in the following years, generating a huge amount of inflated, egotistical painting.

Many of the reputations established during the decade hardly deserved to outlive it. Indeed, the youthful, charismatic Jean-Michel Basquiat literally didn't outlive it, dying of a drug overdose in 1988. The inevitable backlash led to a new breed of ultra-ironic conceptual artist, such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. But some painters emerged from the 1980s with enhanced reputations, including the German Anselm Kiefer, whose vast canvases and sculptures have rare mythical and historical breadth, and a convincing moral gravitas rare in art of the decade - not to mention their superb tactile values, fully evident in works such as To the Unknown Painter of 1983.