It is a terrible time for painting, but a marvellous time for painters. Compare today with (say) the 1950s. Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Henri Matisse were names that wielded Hollywood glamour with the public. Abstract expressionism was simultaneously a leading-edge movement and a major influence on wallpaper design: high culture and home decorating intersected. Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and others made pictures that ranked with some of the most beautiful in the history of art. Although abstract art was in, there was plenty of room for such heterodox artists as Joseph Cornell and Edward Hopper in America or Alberto Giacometti and Matisse in Europe; not to mention a younger generation of rising Americans (especially Jasper Johns) who seemed to be inventing a new kind of figurative painting. In those days, the public cared enough about painting to make fun of it.
Since then, contemporary painting has disappeared from the public mind throughout the western world and the contemporary art scene strikes many basically sympathetic observers as not quite right in the head. Granted, there are first-rate artists, dealers, and critics mixed up in the mess like fine china in a mudslide. But the educated public steers clear of the art scene as it does of madmen in the streets.
Yet still it is a marvellous time to be a painter. I will explain why below, after making four claims about painting today: one about its public standing, one about the painting as object, one about painters themselves and last about painting's meaning and consequences. Each claim is paradoxical in a way.
Claim one: nearly everyone has been moved by music or a story at some time, but relatively few people have ever been moved by a painting. We believe ours to be a "visual age," but painting is now the least popular of the arts. Only part of the explanation lies in the art world's odd condition.
We are often told that booming museum and gallery attendance means that the public is famished for art. If you believe that, you will believe anything. Crowds at the big shows barely look at the paintings; there are more people gathered around the signs and labels than the pictures. For many people, words are easier to read than painted images.
Perhaps the human visual sense tends to be poorly developed because we do not bother developing it. But that cannot be the whole story. Giacometti once said: "I recognise faces but I don't know how I recognise them; even if I've looked at them carefully for countless hours, I still can't draw them from memory." He was one of the century's great portraitists.
Most people can hum a tune or tell a story from memory, but very few have ever been able to draw a particular face from memory. The visual arts have a lot to contend with: looking comes naturally to us but seeing does not. Our uncertainty about painting and sculpture is reflected in the language; we lack a decent word for painting and sculpture together with drawing, collage-making and so forth, a word corresponding to "music" or "literature." All we have is "visual art," which is a cheesy phrase suggesting desperation. "Sculpture" itself is an unsatisfactory word. It suggests carving, not modelling or assemblage.
The big event in the modern history of visual art was the invention of photography. A paradox: photography (which competes with painting) was the loveliest gift painting ever got. The invention of photography meant that painting hit the jackpot-won a billion dollars in the lottery, quit its job and was free to do whatever it felt like for the rest of history.
Before photography, it was taken for granted that an artist must be a first-rate draftsman. But C?zanne, a "post-photography" artist, was not a natural draftsman and neither were van Gogh and Matisse; yet they produced some of history's greatest masterpieces. All three saw their technical limitations as challenges or obstacles and transcended them by monumental labour and powerful artistic intelligence. Their limitations brought out the best in them. Since the invention of photography, the best non-virtuosi have seen the need to transcend their technical limitations; the virtuoso (Degas, Picasso, de Kooning, Johns) has had to transcend his virtuosity. After photography, virtuosity alone no longer made you an artist.
So painting owes much to photography. And yet, because of photography-not so much the bare process as the rise (still underway) of high-quality colour printing, which makes photography ubiquitous-painting might never again be a popular art. Wherever they compete, photography will always drive out painting, not because it is truer but because it is cheaper. The camera babies us, spoon-feeds us predigested images. In the long run, we must work diligently if we mean to maintain our ability to come to grips with a painting-to look long and hard.
Claim two: one of the most important qualities of a painting has nothing to do with line or colour or any aspect of imagery. A painting or sculpture is an energy source, like a charged battery or compressed spring. It absorbs energy from the artist and radiates it back to the looker.
Photographers have produced brilliant and memorable pictures. But no great photograph has ever had anything like the power of a great painting. Why? Because you cannot knock a man down with a potato chip no matter how hard you throw it, or power an aircraft carrier with a rubber band no matter how tight you wind it-or load up a photograph with enough energy to make it great art.
How does the artist get energy into a painting? No one knows. A picture's energy content has nothing to do with how elaborate or highly worked it is. A smudged chalk line by Michelangelo can be more highly charged than a half-acre of Correggio. But the energy of an artwork reflects in some way the intensity of the artist's effort. Sheer intensity of effort can, if it is focused properly, raise a picture's energy level, even if it produces no direct visual effect.
Consider the two most celebrated portraits of modern history, C?zanne's of the art dealer Ambroise Vollard and Picasso's of Gertrude Stein.
Vollard sat for C?zanne 115 times, then C?zanne abandoned the not-quite-finished painting and said to Vollard what has become the most celebrated pronouncement in modern art: "I am not discontent with the front of the shirt."
The painting is famous not merely among art historians who know this story. It has a radiant intensity-along with so much of C?zanne's work-that some people clearly feel even if they know nothing about the painting's history.
Gertrude Stein sat for Picasso 90-odd times. Picasso was unsatisfied, left the painting for a while, then painted out the face and installed another: the famous mask-like face. If he had known from the start how to paint that face and had sat down and done it in 15 minutes, I suspect the picture would never have developed such enormous power. Picasso painted all sorts of mask-faces in and around 1906. The Stein portrait became famous in part because Gertrude Stein did, but another aspect of its reputation clearly rests on a sense of its huge energy.
Giacometti would rebuild a sculpture or painting from scratch again and again. In most cases no trace remained of the rebuildings and reworkings but, as James Soby wrote in 1955, Giacometti's pieces "magnetise the surrounding air and light."
No paintings are less laboured than Matisse's. But toward the end of his career, Matisse started exhibiting photographs of paintings-in-progress along with the finished pieces, as if he wanted to make clear that his pictures were far from tossed-off improvisations. True, the appeal of his pictures lies partly in their seeming effortlessness; yet if you look at them in the belief that they were effortless, you miss something important. Matisse seemed to think so at least.
The purest expression of this theme might be a cryptic comment attributed to Jasper Johns: that he would like to exhibit an artwork consisting of a rubber mask deformed into a concave shape, then reflected in a convex mirror that made it look exactly as it had looked to begin with. The image in the mirror would be the artwork.
The obvious question is, where is the art? Where is it hiding? If the image in the mirror is identical to the mask we started with, what has the artist done? The answer is: he has added energy. He hasn't changed anything visually, but he has taken an object and pumped up its energy level-in roughly the sense that you can load energy into a rock (without changing the rock) by lifting it against the force of gravity. Johns thought (if he said what he is said to have said) that he could turn a rubber mask into art by loading it with energy. He was probably right.
Claim three: ordinarily, as I have said, the high energy level of a painting reflects the intense labour an artist has put into it. But when we say that an artist is often someone who works relentlessly, we are also describing a personality type: a perfectionist, an obsessive. Given two people, one who turns things out quickly and moves on amiably to the next task, the other who labours over each task and moves on reluctantly, the first is likely to be a happier person but the second is more likely to produce energy-charged artworks.
Being a perfectionist does not mean that you achieve perfection. It makes you more likely to feel that you never achieve it. A perfectionist is a dissatisfactionist. The same force that drives artists to work relentlessly on their artworks, to load them up with energy, makes them unlikely ever to be wholly content with what they have done.
Giacometti again: "from 1935 onward, I never made anything the way I wanted it. Not even once." All Giacometti's great works date from 1935 onward, but no one ever doubted the sincerity of his statement. It seemed to capture something fundamental about art. C?zanne and Vollard, Picasso and Gertrude Stein: superhuman accomplishments require superhuman talent, or a superhuman capacity for unhappiness with your work, or both.
An artist sees pictures in his mind and tries to transfer them out of there-tries to get them out of his mind we could say, thereby italicising the relationship between art and obsessive or compulsive personalities. "When I paint," Matisse said, "I am giving plastic expression to objects in my mind. When I close my eyes, I can see things better than with my eyes open... This is what I paint."
Here is another paradox: at the bottom of the art of painting there is a mismatch between mind and hand. However long and hard an artist might work on a picture, the original mental image came to him in a flash; that is how mental pictures work. They appear instantaneously. Having imagined a picture, you might play with it in your mind for a long time-but the basic idea took no time to imagine. So no artist ever catches up with the pictures in his mind; no artist can ever hope to realise more than the tiniest fraction of what he imagines. An artist is, therefore, someone who spends more time suppressing his visual imagination than egging it on.
I have been painting since I was a child. One morning in 1977, two pictures occurred to me: a gentle lyrical one having to do with a nude drawn a certain way, with certain colours; and a dark one, having to do with a crucifixion seen from behind. These images took seconds to imagine and have kept me busy, on and off, for 25 years. I have made many versions of each, and have yet to realise either in a wholly satisfying way. The thing is to keep trying.
Claim four: art doesn't progress, any more than human nature does. A scientist builds on the work of his predecessors and science as a whole makes progress. But an artist merely does his best to convert mental images into physical ones.
Many great artists had no direct pictorial influence on anyone. No one but Cornell, Rothko, Giacometti-this list could go on-could make anything resembling a Cornell or a Rothko or a Giacometti for obvious reasons: their styles were wholly personal. Essentially, the same holds for Titian, Vel?zquez and Vermeer. They had spiritual influence, of course, but that is not the sort of thing art historians usually have in mind when they speak of influence.
What they have in mind is (for example) Michelangelo's influence, which was huge, a gale sweeping the 16th century. Artists who might have made good had they trusted their own resources tried to imitate him and were swept overboard. No one could stand where he stood. (Beethoven would not go to Mozart operas because he did not want his own style to be compromised. Influence can be dangerous.)
Picasso had enormous influence: the canonical case. But when we round up the other great painters of the 20th century, we find that very few ever made a major painting that looked anything like a Picasso. He invented cubism, but what good did cubism ever do? The virtues of Picasso's cubist masterpieces are the virtues of Picasso, not of cubism: the sense of balance, the virtuosity, the uncanny eye for capturing and abstracting likenesses, the energy.
Certain cubist paintings by Picasso are said to be indistinguishable from paintings by Georges Braque. My guess is that in the long run, no one but historians will ever look at any of them-or any other paintings by Braque. (Are Braque and Picasso sometimes indistinguishable, or is this a story art critics tell gullible laymen? I have sometimes mistaken a weak Picasso for a Braque, but cannot ever remember mistaking a Braque for a Picasso; and I would bet that many people could say the same.)
On intellectual (as opposed to artistic) grounds, cubism is a racket: a catch-all for sorts of styles in which the picture space is not quite flat, the image is not quite abstract, and the nervous juddering ostinato lines have a wound-up, caffeine energy that is exhilarating for short periods and impossible to sustain. The art historian Meyer Schapiro called the browns, ochres, and greys of Picasso's cubist palette the "colours of thought"-but they are also the colours of coffee. Of the many styles Picasso developed over his lifetime, full-blown analytic cubism is the only one he dropped from his harem.
Another paradox: the aspects of an artist's style that other artists can imitate, that are the most "influential," are exactly the ones that are most generic and least valuable. Nothing could be more characteristic of Beethoven than the phrase of irregular length, or the theme that encompasses several keys. Every composer admired Beethoven and most wanted to be like him. But admiration did not make them capable of inventing irregular phrases, or themes that encompassed many keys.
Science is a crescendo. Art is an expanding circle.
I began by saying that painting has not been in favour lately. The art establishment has been acting strangely since the 1970s. Acclaim for artists has been in short supply. So why have recent decades been ideal for painters?
For one thing, no artist who tries to please a crowd of more than one is likely to do anything of value. As EB White remarked in another context, let a writer "start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and he is as good as dead, although he may make a nice living." No crowd means no temptation; it means that the act of painting is boiled down to its essence, sheer obstinate compulsion.
It also means no encouragement and the danger of turning your back on your own era. Painting changes and a painter has to be part of his times. A few artists have rejected the here-and-now and got away with it; but it rarely works. Picasso said, "art that is not in the present will never be." A painter must know and feel what is going on around him. And a painter, like any human being-probably more than most-wants and needs approval and acclaim.
However, if you are going to be rejected by the establishment, today's is the perfect establishment to be rejected by. Steven Vincent wrote recently of the art world's "nostalgia for the days when art was not riddled with postmodernism's adolescent smirk." "Smirk" is exactly right: the paradigmatic teenage response to a thing you do not understand but feel obliged to make fun of anyway. When the middle class used to ridicule "modern art," it usually took an affable "it's beyond us" tone. Today the art world ridicules art pure and simple with naked contempt and a mirthless nihilism that is chilling.
It used to be that an artist could be part of the establishment, in which case he was well-known and made money, but chances are his work suffered; or he could be an outsider, free to work and mope undistracted, virtue intact, ego in tatters. Today's dissident artist enjoys the best of both worlds, proud not to belong to the smirk-art establishment.
There is a new, dissident art today-"post-ironic art." It is rarely charming and is sometimes violent or ugly. Mostly it centres on human beings-portraits, nudes-and often it rides between the subway cars of established genres: the painted high relief, the painting that is part stained glass, the painting that, boiled down, intensified by digital photography and reduced-scale reproduction, becomes the ground for another painting. Often it is religious art.
The galleries where today's dissident art is shown, and the artworks themselves, are far from the art world's centre. But they will be the centre some day. For all its fine qualities, the smirk is not an emotion for the long term.
In the meantime, most of us live in rich thriving countries where anyone who wants to paint can easily find a job doing something else; can easily get all the tools and materials needed. What more could anyone ask than the means to keep trying?
