There’s a plausible story about the last half-century of art-making that would go something like this: By around 1950, almost all serious art was abstract. Soon enough, Pop art, Nouveau Réalisme, photorealism, and other tendencies might seem to have heralded a return of the image, but they did not: What they heralded was the return of the Duchampian readymade, sometimes in image form, though this too is a form of abstraction—an art of meta-images, if you will.And then, the story continues, art began to grope its way back from this extremity: first with the New Image Painting of the 1970s and its pictographic signs in abstract fields; then with Neo-Expressionism, a painterly frenzy that scooped up the broken forms of the old pictorial modes, put them together haphazardly, then spewed them out again even more messily than it found them (think David Salle and Julian Schnabel). After that, for better or for worse—probably for worse—it was anything goes.That kind of history offers the pleasure and utility of being utterly clear. The problem is that things were much messier. In 1952, when Jackson Pollock was painting Blue Poles, Edward Hopper was painting Morning Sun, and the following year, Francis Bacon painted the first of his screaming popes. In 1966 Mel Bochner mounted his pioneering Conceptual art exhibition, but was also writing in praise of Alice Neel’s portraits. I could go on. But you get the point. Anyone who thinks that figurative painting died and made a comeback should remember that great old song by Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks: “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?”Louis Fratino: Man, book, mirror, 2020.Courtesy Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York/©Louis FratinoFigurative painting, of course, never went away, but sometimes it makes more noise, attracts more attention—in the market, and sometimes in the world of critics and curators. It will be remembered that about 15 years ago, collectors (and speculators) were hot on the trail of young artists making elegantly distressed quasi-minimalist paintings with a conceptual edge—as critic Walter Robinson admitted before almost single-handedly demolishing their market by coining for them the irresistibly derisive label of “zombie formalism.”With the 2014 defenestration of the zombies, a vacuum was created; needed to fill it was a new cohort of hot young artists whose works could be bought cheaply and resold quickly at a premium. Well, you can always depend on the pendulum effect. If abstraction has suddenly started to look dodgy, what about figuration? Lo and behold, a year and a half after Robinson’s takedown, the same publication, Artspace, featured a story (by another writer) headlined, “The Figure Is Back, Baby! At MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, Artists Vanquish Zombie Formalism with People Art,” drawing attention to emerging painters such as Gina Beavers, Mira Dancy, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and Greg Parma Smith. That year’s iteration of the quinquennial “Greater New York” exhibition featured, per the museum, “a heterogeneous range of aesthetic strategies, often emphatically representing the city’s inhabitants through forms of bold figuration.”Bridget Mullen: Blood’s Bluff, 2022.Courtesy Nazarian/Curcio, Los AngelesIf a figurative wave began circa 2015, it’s held sway by now for a lot longer than the brief apotheosis of zombie formalism—presumably, at least in part, because recognizable images hold more appeal for viewers who are new to art. And coming during a period of market boom, it created some auction stars whose work also shows real substance, but also others whose success belies a fairly ordinary level of achievement, and did not last long. Yet another headline, this time from the August 2024 New York Times, spells it out: “Young Artists Rode a $712 Million Boom. Then Came the Bust.” The headline didn’t name what the illustrations make clear: All those whose auction prices shot up and then just as quickly plummeted were figurative painters. And what was striking to me when I read the article was that—although my work as both an art critic and an editor at an art magazine keeps me well informed about new artists on the scene—I had never seen or even read about the work of any of the artists featured. These were artists whose paintings had sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars without benefit of anything like a critical profile or a museum show. Their work had provoked no discussion, only speculation.That fact shows something about the reception of figurative painting over the past decade: its indiscriminate nature. Collectors, dealers, and even curators (who ought to know better) seemed so eager to latch on to new figurative painters that they hardly seemed to notice whether the ones they chose were genuinely exploring what painting can be or just churning out B-student variations on figurative forebears such as Alice Neel or Kerry James Marshall. The figurative painting boom coincided with a market bubble, and not just for art: It was a period that finance commentator Mihir A. Desai described as when “magical thinking pervaded the wider investor class,” a time of “declining and zero interest rates” when “mistakes and mediocrities were obscured or forgiven, while speculative assets with low probabilities of far-off success inflated in value.” Yes, we know that market success does not equal aesthetic quality, but still, when weak and derivative work gets catapulted to dizzying price points, how surprised can one be when the fall is just as swift. One can be sympathetic to an artist whose work goes from selling at $100,000 to just $10,000 while still thinking they’re lucky to sell it at all.Jennifer Packer: Jess, 2018.Courtesy Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York, and Corvi-Mora, London/©Jennifer PackerNOW LOOK AGAIN at that Times article on the collapse of the market for young artists. Just as the photographs rather than the text spelled out that its beneficiaries-turned-victims were figurative painters, the same images made it clear that three of the four artists featured were Black. The boom in figurative painting coincided with a more general surge of interest in the work of Black artists that took off in tandem with the Black Lives Matter movement. But the effects were different in other areas of artistic activity: Black conceptual artists and abstract painters also suddenly became more visible than they had been for a long time. But in those fields, a similar speculative market in untried talent never seems to have taken off. Instead, elder or midcareer artists with oeuvres of proven substance, like Charles Gaines and Stanley Whitney, drew long-overdue attention.And of course there was good reason for the success of some of these new figurative painters too. The painterly intelligence of Jennifer Packer, for instance, is undeniable and poignant. The earthy brazenness of Somaya Critchlow’s nudes can be haunting. But they are exceptions. Many of the younger painters who’ve been taken up by the market have opted for obviousness over nuance in meaning. And as critic Nkgopoleng Moloi recently pointed out, reviewing a survey of Black figurative painting at Zeitz MoCAA for this magazine, a widespread tendency to imitate Kerry James Marshall in exaggerating and de-naturalizing Black figures’ skin color “risk[s] positioning the Black body as a gimmick.” And the market, of course, loves a gimmick. So many younger artists seem indifferent to Marshall’s declared goal: “to undermine that tendency to project a certain kind of image of who we are into the world.” On the contrary, Blackness feels commodified in much of their work.Somaya Critchlow: Bedstead (Asymmetry), 2022.Courtesy Maximillian William, London/©Somaya CritchlowWhere zombie formalism was derided as soulless, this new wave of figuration leaned sincere, propelled by earnest efforts to right historical exclusions. That means that not only paintings of Black figures but also other images reflecting marginalized identities have been given unprecedented market support. Queer artists in particular have come to the fore—Louis Fratino and Salman Toor, for instance—with work whose popular success is matched by artistic promise.But after the January 20 inauguration of the second Trump administration, and the onslaught against DEI initiatives and what the federal Office of Management and Budget seriously calls “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies” in government, academia, and businesses—what’s been called, and not hyperbolically, “the great resegregation”—one has to wonder what support the collector class, let alone publicly funded museums, will be able to muster for Black and other marginalized artists. Collectors’ desire to show their goodwill by displaying recognizable scenes of Black life on their walls could become a thing of the past, even among those who might want to send their Teslas to the used car lot.Bridget Mullen: Androgynous Friendly Village, 2023.Courtesy Nazarian/Curcio, Los AngelesSo while market trends are always transitory in any case, it seems likely that the end of the figurative painting boom will be for exogenous reasons, to do with the unfavorable economic and political climate of the times.But where does that leave the artists? In art, unlike politics, the burning question “what is to be done?” can sometimes entail ignoring the immediate context and forging ahead according to an inner directive rather than an executive one. I should probably add here that I dismiss out of hand Dean Kissick’s view that art wokeism—not the term he uses but clearly what he means—“destroyed contemporary art.” No artistic technique is in itself conservative or progressive; in art, the how always outweighs the what. Just as abstract and conceptual artists proceeded with their work notwithstanding the market drive toward figuration, in the coming decade we can expect that as some other craze takes hold, figurative painters may well cultivate their work in the shadows. They might even find that there are better rewards than getting rich off their work; I hope it doesn’t sound corny and sentimental to say so. What Marcel Duchamp said so long ago could still be true: that the great artists of tomorrow could go underground. And an underground might be just what the coming years call for.Eunnam Hong: Myth, 2023.Courtesy Lubov, New York/©Eunnam HongAS FOR ME, I’ve seen more than a few emerging painters making exploratory work using the figure and doing so with integrity—and more than that, making a mark on my memory that doesn’t seem to fade. Here, I can just point to a few examples: One is Eunnam Hong, Korean-born and based in Brooklyn, whose enigmatic autofictional canvases, painted with incredible refinement, seem to go against the tide of much recent figuration by highlighting the plausible artifice, rather than the supposed authenticity, of identity. “I wanted to counterfeit an Asian-American woman character,” she’s said. Walter Price, by contrast, embeds his representational fragments in a context of lyrical abstract mark-making. But what the Georgia native, now living in New York, has in common with Hong, for all their stylistic differences, is a will to complicate things, to show seemingly self-evident stories as questionable, and to “make people more comfortable with being uncomfortable,” using “visual contradictions to symbolize ideas for myself but also [to allow] viewers to have their own story with these objects.” I could go on: Bridget Mullen’s psychedelic grotesque, the eerie oil pastels of Michelle Uckotter with their “impossible quantification of solitary time”; Issy Wood’s “medieval millennial” realism with its fragmented images like close-ups from an imaginary film noir .…Walter Price: Don’t have hope, be hope!, 2024.Photo Elisabeth Bernstein/Courtesy Greene Naftali, New YorkThese five artists hardly constitute a trend. Their works don’t look like each other’s or anyone else’s. And while they represent different ethnicities and gender expressions, their life experience informstheir subject matter without coming off as packaged and sold. In the end, we may all be typical of our times, but some artists are typical in ways that no one else is: Those are the ones who stand a chance ofbeing remembered.