If Charles Saatchi were Dinah Washington - famed for the 1950s hit "TV is the Thing this Year" - he might now be singing: "Conceptual art was great, but now it's out of date, Painting is the thing (this year, this year), Painting is the thing this year." To kick off 2005, Saatchi is putting his Britart toys away and exhibiting six painters at County Hall, in a show whose title echoes those Venetian and Egyptian blockbuster exhibitions at the Royal Academy. "The Triumph of Painting" is the first in a year of exhibitions of painting at the Saatchi Gallery. Succeeding shows will hang work by progressively less well-known painters - a strategy that is probably intended to make a few young artists' reputations.
The first show looks at what happened to painting in the 1990s. There are the moody cinematic canvases of Peter Doig and the self-effacing monochromatic pictures of the Belgian Luc Tuymans and South African-born Marlene Dumas. There are also works from the Germans Jörg Immendorff and the late Martin Kippenberger, two legendary macho hedonists whose careers span the 1980s and 1990s. And we have the eccentric Viennese painter-performance artist Hermann Nitsch, whose career dates back to the 1970s.
In his choice of artists, Saatchi is picking up on an international trend: "the return of painting." Not that painting ever really went away; it is just that for ten years or so the gaze of the British art world was focused elsewhere. Where were we looking? At Britart. Who directed our gaze there? Saatchi. There is an unsavoury logic in the fact that it is Saatchi who is now telling us that we forgot about painting.
This is the third time that Saatchi has moved his art collection in a radical new direction. His first collection of the 1980s was based on large-scale works by artists with established international reputations such as Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra. In the 1990s he sold off much of this work and replaced it with a generation of unknown British artists, many of them graduates of Goldsmiths College, centred around Damien Hirst. The work of the six painters to be shown in 2005 are just a sample of the thousands of canvases which Saatchi has reportedly been buying up from galleries and artists' studios across the world.
There is a big difference between Saatchi's Britart collection and his new painting collection. With Britart, he got there first. This time he is following the trend. London gallerist Victoria Miro, who represents Peter Doig, told me that in the 1990s Saatchi was not convinced by her prediction that Doig would emerge as a big name. Now Saatchi is using the artist as a figurehead in the "revival." As Miro says: "Charles could have done this six or eight years ago."
The first inklings of a revival in painting came in the late 1990s, when a new group of painters from Leipzig, centred around Neo Rauch, became the talk of the art fairs. Rauch's clever paintings look as if they borrow the style of popular illustrations and the colours of interior design from the 1950s. They are figurative and look allegorical, but are hard to interpret. Although most 1990s artists wouldn't have been seen dead without a video camera, in Leipzig the tradition of painting remained strong, and the art world duly came back to it. When a tiny painting by Neo Rauch was exhibited at New York's trendsetting Armory show in 1999, it created a storm. Painting began to dominate the art fairs, and video became increasingly difficult to find.
Painters will also be prominent at the Venice biennale this year. Half the German pavilion is being devoted to the precocious young Berlin painter Thomas Scheibitz, whose subtle architectural canvases surprisingly recall the work of 1950s British artists Graham Sutherland and John Piper. The American pavilion will be decorated by Ed Ruscha's word paintings, in an extraordinary beatification of this pop artist and Warhol contemporary. (There is also a retrospective of Ruscha's work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.) In New York, the reopening of Moma this year featured British painters Peter Doig and Chris Ofili. Thus Saatchi's attachment to the revival of painting puts him at the end of a rather long queue.
For more than a decade, art has been dominated by sculpture, photography, video and installation. This work combined "found" objects with a love of industrial processes, media manipulation and advertising. If you worked on two dimensions, you were more likely to sew, like Tracey Emin, or knit, like the great German artist Rosemary Trockel. Sculpture was fine, as long as you used "found" objects, and taking photographs was a great idea - especially if you came from Düsseldorf, like Andreas Gursky. But, please, no painting. And if you did paint, then it was best to produce a facsimile of something that wasn't a painting (Sarah Lucas chose tabloid newspaper spreads).
That is a sketch of the dominant trends and attitudes rather than a comprehensive description of activity. There were, of course, paintings and painters in the 1990s. The Britart generation included the highly regarded Chris Ofili and Jenny Saville, both shown in the 1997 "Sensation" exhibition. Meanwhile, the great painters of the 1980s, like Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, had not put down their brushes.
So what do we mean by painting and what do we mean by its revival? First, it is all about labels. While there were painters in the 1990s, they weren't grouped together; they were put in other groups, such as Britart. Second, it is a question of quantity. There were fewer young painters around in the early 1990s; now there is a flood. Third, it is a matter of money. Having been persuaded to believe in the revival of painting, collectors are buying more of it and curators and art historians can regroup painters of the 1990s to bump up their reputations and prices (Luc Tuymans, for example, who got a solo show at the Tate recently, and the British artist Peter Doig, whom Saatchi will be showing). Fourth, it is a zeitgeist thing: the "revival" will frame what the galleries show and how the public sees it. Fifth, it is a source of critical chatter. Hence, I am writing about it.
Some art critics and gallerists will say that this is just Saatchi and the media hyping it up. They will maintain that they never forsook the joys and craft-based disciplines of painting. And, individually, they may be right. But there are greater forces at work, defining taste and shaping the way art is produced, displayed and explained. The art market, no less than other luxury and cultural markets, needs to create the sensation of novelty in order to stimulate demand. After a focus on sculpture and photography, it was inevitable that sooner or later the market would find new interest in painting. And this is not merely an economic market; it is an intellectual one too. The art world needs to tell its public that art has got something new to say. It needs new theories to define new trends to legitimise and sell new art.
The contemporary art market has built-in obsolescence. Artists are encouraged to become known for one thing and to keep on doing it - as with Andreas Gursky's panoramas of globalisation, Liam Gillick's coloured perspex installations and Damien Hirst's farm animals. This is how artists build reputations. But the same process also eventually leads to accumulated ennui among collectors and art lovers. Thus the revival of painting is, on one level, the product of an arbitrary cultural-economic seesaw.
And yet, if the art world merely craves novelty, why should it want to revive something old and familiar? In fact, the demise and resurrection of painting has happened before. In Britain, painting last had a comeback as recently as 1981 with an exhibition at the Royal Academy called "A New Spirit in Painting." Just like Saatchi's forthcoming show, this followed more than a decade of conceptual and minimalist art - the grids of Sol Le Wit, the vitrines of Joseph Beuys, the videos of Bruce Naumann. The curators of the "New Spirit" show, who included Norman Rosenthal and Nicholas Serota, wrote: "We are in a period when it seems to many people that painting has lost its relevance as one of the highest and most eloquent forms of artistic expression… however the three organisers of this exhibition feel strongly that the art of painting, whose recent history and development is far more complex and rich than has generally been acknowledged, is in fact flourishing… The artists' studios are full of paint pots again and an abandoned easel in an art school has become a rare sight. Wherever you look in Europe and America you find artists who have rediscovered the sheer joy of painting." Today, people are saying the same thing.
"A New Spirit" exhibited 38 painters who appeared to represent a diversity of styles, ranging from minimalism to pop to abstract expressionism. But it went down in history as the show that made the reputations of the neo-expressionists - Kiefer, Baselitz, Lupertz, Schnabel and others. These artists dominated the 1980s with their big, oily, paint-encrusted canvases. Then art critics lost their taste for this style and began criticising the grandiosity and opulence of the movement. And so painting fell out of fashion once again and in its place came a decade of new conceptual art.
The artists of the 1990s were attempting to digest the enormous legacy of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and the 1980s work of Jeff Koons. They brought an ironic pop sensibility to minimalism and conceptualism. From conceptual art and Duchamp came the idea of the "readymade" - a found object which could be put in a gallery and assume the status of a work of art, and which Tracey Emin transformed into the "unmade": her bed. Duchamp famously took a urinal and put it in a gallery, but he also took a bicycle wheel and perched it upside-down on a stool, thus inventing the unified sculpture constructed out of available objects, and paving the way for Hirst's sharks and sheep in tanks. Andy Warhol's point of departure was also ready-made objects, but he mass produced them. He took photographs from newspapers and turned out painting after painting by silk-screening on canvas. In the new consumer world of the 1960s there was no reason why an artist should produce unique works of art, any more than Buick should produce unique automobiles - hence Damien Hirst's dot paintings. Warhol's celebrity and media-based work made possible Sarah Lucas's tabloid spreads and Sam Taylor-Wood's portraits of her famous friends.
Similar things were happening in Europe and America. The late Felix Gonzalez-Torres, for example, took the ideas of 1960s neon artist Dan Flavin and, in the 1990s, reduced the austere effect of Flavin's arrangements of neon tubes to that of a string of common lightbulbs (hung from the ceiling in a banal and - for some - poetic image of the passage of time). Torres also did something similar to a Richard Serra idea of the 1960s, of pouring molten lead into the corner of a gallery. Torres poured a pile of boiled sweets into a 1990s gallery corner. These works, now considered to be among the most important of the period, debunked the claims of the modernists to create pure forms with raw materials. The most acclaimed artist of the last decade has arguably been the American sculptor and video artist Matthew Barney - his colourful cycle of five baroque films, The Cremaster Cycle, features him in various outfits climbing, crawling, racing. There are car crashes, zombies, supermodels, murders. This is conceptual "body art" and "costume drama," conceptualism for the MTV generation. Finally and inevitably, however, the interplay of the 1960s and the 1990s has exhausted itself.
And yet, boredom with the limited themes and forms of 1990s art does not on its own explain the return of painting. The reason why painting has come back now and the reason why painting came back in 1981 are the same: because the theoretical gripes against it are inane. There have been plenty of premature obituaries of painting in the last 120 years. Painting was first pronounced dead with the arrival of photography. Then, in 1912, Duchamp decided it was dead for different reasons, and abandoned painting himself. He came up with the ludicrous criticism that painting was "retinal," which meant that it provided only optical pleasure, while he was now determined to make art for the intellect. Another line of criticism prevalent in modernism permitted artists to paint, but increasingly circumscribed what could and could not be painted.
A cornerstone of the redefinition of art by modernists at the beginning of the last century was the idea that a work of art did not need to represent reality - it could be an object or an image in its own right, entirely fabricated by the artist. While in the era of 19th-century romanticism, the painter was a kind of visual-spiritual sadhu whose landscapes sought to reveal the existence of God in the world, for modernism the artist became God. He created original things just as God did. From this position, the idea of figurative painting - of representing the world - seemed far inferior to just painting.
Painters already had a clever response to the problem: abstraction. But it was not long before art theorists found fault with that too. Clement Greenberg - a critic so influential that he told a generation of American painters in the late 1950s and 1960s what to paint and how to paint it - emphasised flatness. It was acceptable to paint abstract canvases, said Greenberg, as long as the painting was really, really flat. If a picture was flat, there was no depth and therefore no illusion. So a colour field painter like the wonderful Morris Louis diluted his paints and then let them just dribble down the canvas. In the postwar era, painters struggled valiantly with the problem of how to remove the illusionism from painting. Yves Klein, who painted monochromatic canvases years ahead of his time, complained that in the 1950s every time he drew a vertical line on a canvas people thought it was a ship, and every time he drew a horizontal line, people thought it was a landscape.
Once again, painting was condemned as terminally ill, though for different reasons, by minimalists and conceptualists of the 1960s and 1970s. For artists of this generation, painting was a phoney activity which perpetuated the myth of the artist's spiritual powers, of the outdated notion of craft, and of the bourgeois culture of ownership. The activities of painters in this period did indeed suggest that the logic of modernism was leading to their extinction. Ad Reinhardt painted canvases that were only black, while Robert Ryman painted canvases that were only white. The medium was being, well, painted into a corner. But the minimalists and conceptualists proved to be hypocrites - they sold their work for huge sums and enjoyed the cult of cerebral celebrity which surrounded them.
The attacks mounted on painting, from the invention of photography to the conceptualism of the 1990s, belong to a key dialectic in the modern movement. One half of this dialectic was the expressionist-narrative tradition, dominated by painters, in which the artist offered a personal vision. The other tradition is the analytical one, which began with cubism and constructivism and then took the form of conceptualism. Though the analytical tradition itself began with painting, it contained the arguments that led to the negation of painting. And, in the 20th century, it gained the upper hand. The continuing survival of painting, however, suggests that it is not just the 1960s-1990s conceptual loop which has played itself out, but a central feature of modernism as a whole.
Today, there is a flood of new painters emerging in almost every country where the international art market exists. They are painting in such a dazzling variety of styles that one hardly dares make any generalisations - there are neoconstructivists (or at least artists who engage with the legacy of Russian constructivism) like Thomas Scheibitz, there are neo-postimpressionists like Peter Doig, and there are countless neo-neo-expressionists. Gallery owners would like us to avoid putting these artists in groups. The owner of the Eigen+Art gallery in Berlin, Gerd Lybke, told me firmly: "There are no isms anymore. Only individual painters. It's about creating from your own biography." But denying the notion of trends and developments ultimately denies the existence of history. Saying that there are no movements in art history is like refusing to make a section for jam in the supermarket.
In fact, there are two distinct directions in painting today. One of these directions is similar to the last revival of painting in the 1980s: a general expressionist-modernist revivalism, something we might call retro-expressionism. Here artists are returning to the big punches of painting - its ability to convey a vision of urban decay or a technological future, its power of narrative and symbolism. There are lots of thick swabs of paint, big brushstrokes, drips and splodges. The doyen of this field is perhaps Daniel Richter (though he doesn't do drips), an abstract artist who switched to figuration in 1999.
Richter, alongside Rauch, is the most highly regarded German painter of the moment. He paints what he calls "history" paintings. His sinister images of urban street scenes, crowd violence and the supernatural depict a world in which something bad is apparently about to happen. Is there anything new about the new expressionism? Not much. Curators point to the use of images taken from the digital media, advertising, maps and suchlike, but throughout the 20th century painters have used these sources. The new paintings are full of stories and symbols - like those of the mid-century German expressionist Max Beckmann. Novelty is not the point.
Why are so many artists returning to expressionism, the movement that began in Germany in the first decade of the 20th century? It is not hard to draw comparisons between the first decade of the 20th century and the first decade of this one. In both periods, people have marvelled at and felt overwhelmed by the rapid proliferation of new technology. For them it was the automobile and electricity; for us it is the media of digital communication. Expressionism is an appropriate choice of style for an artist today, if a slightly obvious one.
But some artists have made a much more interesting choice, which is to learn from, not react against, the conceptual art of the 1960s-1990s and its critique of painting. As an undergraduate in Cambridge, I studied a course on painting and sculpture in Renaissance Florence. Tutors spent two years trying to teach me the difference between Donatello and scuola di Donatello, with no great success. Although my memories are dim, the course compared painters and sculptors and looked at how they learned from each other. The painter Masaccio, if I remember correctly, studied the drapery folds of 14th-century figure sculptures. Meanwhile, Michelangelo's sculpture drew inspiration from the elaborate drapery arrangements of contemporary painters. The point the course made was that artists in different media learned from each other, and that artists were as likely to be inspired by contemporary works in other artistic media as they were by nature or philosophy.
The same thing is going on now. Painters have learned from conceptual artists, from photographers and sculptors. The best new painting is post-conceptual. Take Luc Tuymans in the Saatchi show. His small, wan pictures owe a huge debt to conceptualism. He paints newspaper photographs, film stills, close-ups and wallpaper - the world of media representations. His subjects are mercilessly modest and low-key: a semi-detached suburban house, church spires. He is constantly undermining the painter's claim to be or say anything important. His work imitates and synthesises all kinds of low-quality styles of pictorial representation; at times it resembles an insipid illustration from Reader's Digest, at other times the clumsiest sketch of a GCSE art student.
Tuymans is using a "style" of painting as a ready-made. And others of the new painters use modernist-expressionist styles in this way too. Marlene Dumas and Peter Doig are good examples of painters who have absorbed the conceptualist critique of painting. Dumas paints pornography in a precisely controlled expressionist style. Peter Doig paints threatening stills from horror films with a technique that cunningly evokes postimpressionism and symbolism. Martin Kippenberger, meanwhile, refuses - like many conceptual artists - to work in just one medium. An art work by him might include a painting, a photograph and a pair of underpants. And you can see the adoption of strategies from conceptual art in other younger painters that Saatchi will be exhibiting later in 2005. For example, Dexter Dalwood's primary pop palette is applied to empty newsworthy interiors (Bill Gates's bedroom or Kurt Cobain's greenhouse), imitating a recent fashionable practice by art photographers.
Not all the new painters are good. Few are great. Nevertheless, by integrating the lessons of 1990s conceptualism in their work, they have done something important - they have broken the cycle of the death and resurrection of painting. In future, it won't be so easy to banish painting or counterpose the expressionist and analytic traditions. For ten years painters have been unfairly excluded from the idea of progress in art. Now they are part of it again. And it doesn't stop there. Painting is offering conceptualism new creative opportunities. There is the potential for a big return to the narrative, the symbolic and simply the imagined in art. Tuymans's series "die Zeit" on mysterious moments from the story of the final solution is a case in point. Here are cropped film stills, painted as little canvases, one with a portrait of Nazi butcher Reinhard Heydrich, another with the interior of a barracks, a third with two small pills. Painting, compared to photography and installations, offers this margin for invention and control. This is surely the point of the work of Neo Rauch. His are paintings which appear to be collages of illustrations from 1950s home design catalogues or 19th-century self-improvement tracts. They present a fantastical world that seems to twist the dream of family, science and progress. But every image is - so I am told - the invention of the artist. There are leaps in scale, and weird syncretic characters (for example, raincoated Bavarian businessmen flying around with hockey sticks) that are only possible to make if they are painted. This is painting that has rediscovered confidence in what only it can do. It is post-conceptual painting.
Will Saatchi's new show have as big an impact on Britain in the first decade of this century as "Sensation" had here in the last decade? And on whom does this question depend? The British media? The patriotic press needs a British angle and a sense of outrage to run an art story, and there is little in the new show to rival Britart for headlines. But on the art world in general there will be an impact. Because this time Saatchi is part of something bigger.
This does not mean that Saatchi is picking the best painters. His choices are, as ever, hit and miss. Dumas and Tuymans are easy, A-list choices. But the highly-rated Leipzig school centred on Neo Rauch is represented by only one artist in Saatchi's shows. And then there is Hermann Nitsch. Nitsch is probably the most ridiculous painter of the postwar era. He conducts vast outdoor performances in Viennese castles where half-naked, hairy Austrians are covered in the entrails of oxen amid a burlesque of Christian iconography. Nitsch's gothic extravaganzas are the art world's equivalent of slasher movies. He has produced hundreds of canvases painted with animal blood. There is only one interesting feature of Nitsch's work: its bloody and bovine vocabulary was probably the main influence on a certain British artist of the 1990s, famous for cutting farmyard animals in half. There is a warning for us here too - about taking Saatchi's own taste too seriously. The rules of the new painting are in flux, the kaleidoscope is turning, and the art world is reordering itself. In Britain, we should be seeking out different, and perhaps higher, benchmarks of taste.
