By 1980, Alloway happily accepted that “Now we find that there are broad tendencies, rather than identifiable movements.” Pluralism did not need movements because progressive, interesting work “functions mainly in relation to individual genius” or creativity. Descriptive attempts to label a tendency, such as Systemic painting, were acceptable, but labels could be misused and become mere branding. A so-called new movement may amount to no more than a marketing ploy: pattern painting, championed by John Perreault in 1977, might be a significant development in non-figuration, or it may be just “another precedentconscious phase of abstract art… [a] synthetic movement.” At the Whitney in 1979, New Image Painting included ten artists—among them Nicholas Africano, Michael Hurson, Neil Jenney, Robert Moskowitz, and Jennifer Bartlett—whose common factor was “oblique or schematic imagery” for which, in Alloway's opinion, too much was claimed by curator Richard Marshall who wrote in his catalogue introduction that “these image makers exhibit a closer affinity to Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal, and conceptual concerns than to traditional figurative and realist work.” Alloway resented the attempt to locate the work as part of the “official” avant-garde by downplaying realism “as insufficiently modern.” He thought that Marshall's comparisons “seem inflated, given the modest nature of the work he is pushing.” The combination of Modernist flattening and representation was “a compromise rather than a synthesis… The accommodations of imagery of the world and the status of the picture as painting are simplistic, blocking a dialectic of reference and technique. The art is authentically shallow.” It was a “conservative movement.”

The impetus of an Expressionist-derived art witnessed in “Bad” Painting and New Image Painting, was furthered at the 1980 Venice Biennale which announced the arrival of the Italian Transavantgarde. Its five members—Nicola de Maria, Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, and Mimmo Paladino—were linked with Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, and Georg Baselitz in Germany, Gérard Garouste in France, and Julian Schnabel in New York to represent a re-engagement with myth, narrative and painterly gesture. Achille Bonito Oliva, the Transavantgarde's theoretician, wrote about a rejection of Conceptualism and a return to “the humility of creative, accessible, and real work… The artist become again maniacal and Mannerist in his own mania.”