Marlene Dumas's triptych (below, right) showing the blindfolded heads of arrested Palestinians delivers an old-fashioned oil paint whammy: the energetic brushwork, rich tones and urgent subject matter make for a painting as beautiful as it is horrifying. The masterful South Africa-born painter deploys a lurid palette to evoke harsh lighting, and her crude brushwork—swabs of paint conjure up the blindfolds—becomes a metaphor for the violence she depicts. Standing in front of these iconic images, derived from the rolling news channels of our day, it is difficult to imagine figurative painting ever "went away."
But it did. Remember the exhilarating feeling produced by paintings that capture the events of their age, like David's Death of Marat and Manet's Execution of Maximilian? You may almost have forgotten, because we haven't seen their like since the German expressionist Max Beckmann was active in the middle decades of the last century. For most of the last 100 years, painters have been under attack, as modernist art theorists and critics increasingly prescribed what they should and shouldn't paint. Photography and television had, they said, made obsolete "representational" painting, and many went further and pronounced the "death" of all painting. All that was left for the dauber was to pursue the elemental formal qualities of the picture through abstraction—which led to an arcane debate in the 1960s about a painting's status as surface or object. That was a cul-de-sac: after Ad Reinhardt painted his monochrome black paintings and Robert Ryman his monochrome white ones, there really seemed nowhere else for painting to go. These widely accepted theories about the development of art didn't eradicate figurative painters—there was Kiefer, Baselitz, Guston, Bacon—but they decimated them, coralling them into expressionist-surrealist investigation of interior angst. For a time, one specific genre of painting became all but extinct: if you wanted to make a work of art about the world we lived in, you used photography, readymades and installation.
But what a variety of bold and tenacious approaches! It's never simply about copying a photo. Dumas can hardly be said to paint photographically. Instead, she has claimed the right for herself to paint as others photograph—that is, to produce works in series, to cover news stories, and make images of the dead, oppressed and destitute, as photographers do.
This is a panoramic show, which traces the history of modern life painting back to a handful of 1960s pioneers, many of whom were well known at the time—there's Andy Warhol's screenprinted electric chair, Malcolm Morley's witty paintings of postcards of cruiseships and Vija Celmins's luscious black-and-white paintings of photos of bombers and explosions. In the 1970s, Franz Gertsch—a photorealist Géricault—turned small snapshots of friends into towering canvases with epic figure compositions that recalled 19th-century history painting. In the 1990s, Luc Tuymans pioneered the return of topical pictures, copying cropped photos in a deliberately weak style with limp brushwork and an insipid palette, while Elizabeth Peyton, whose small painting of punk rocker John Lydon went for a ridiculous half a million dollars at auction in May, turns photos of celebs and snapshots of friends into cute oil paintings.
The most forceful attack these painters mount is one in which they obsessively imitate the visual effects of photography, among them the mistakes and accidents, to create mesmerisingly beautiful pictures. In other words, they use painting to out-photograph photography. In his black and white images of nurses and holiday snaps, Gerhard Richter creates a style of wet horizontal brushstrokes that is inspired by, and evokes, the blur of an indistinct photograph, without literally rendering it. Robert Bechtle, whose work has increased ten times in value since his retirement in 1999, turns the faded pastel colours and limited detail of 1970s family snapshots into rich aesthetic experiences, while Johannes Kahrs extrapolates large oils from video freeze frames of a Rolling Stones documentary.
These kind of works tell us something about both photography and painting. In the case of the former, they tell us about the sense of authenticity that the flaws in photograph communicate—the exhilaration of the distorted and obscure image. In the case of painting, they reveal the vast spectrum of aesthetic effects that photographs cannot provide. Looking back on 50 years of figuration-phobia, one wonders how the art critics of modernism could have got it so wrong. The exhibition reveals how reactionary modernism eventually became—imposing rules on painting which, in their own way, were as restrictive as those of the previous centuries compelling ambitious painters to tackle religious and mythical themes. Now, thank God, those days are over.
