7 October 2024

Why painting (still) matters

Reports of the art form’s death have been exaggerated – it retains the power to make new worlds.

The modern moment: She and Her (2017), by the American artist Eric Fischl, whose work draws on photography and cinema. (c) Eric Fischl

It is astonishing, but painting desperately needs her defenders and explainers. This most primal of arts, which goes back to the very beginning of the human story, seems to confuse and repel much of contemporary civilisation. Like bad-omen comets, proclamations still come of the death of painting.

In an age of cold digital screens and AI-enhanced visual manipulation, we have been told that canvas, oil and pigment are becoming irrelevant, or somehow reactionary. But the public has never really noticed this. They queue up, poor sods, to be transported by the latest Hockney show, or by the current Van Gogh in the National Gallery, staggering out with their heads ringing, too moved to speak, having experienced the emotional punch of, for example, a great symphony played by a great orchestra.

But in our conceptual age, the business of animal-hair brushes, and colours ground from stone, plants, or the broiled bones of oxen, and oils from crushed seeds, worked on to wood or woven fibres, can seem irredeemably old-fashioned, a dying song from earlier times.

So painting needs her propagandists. Martin Gayford, along with the New Statesman’s own Michael Prodger and a talented platoon of newspaper critics and broadcasters, is one of the most engaging of them. His books have covered everything from the art of Venice to British modernism; he has worked closely with Lucian Freud and David Hockney; he writes, thank God, for the general public, not the Jesuitical theorists of the higher art academy.

Gayford understands that painting has often gone in and out of fashion: in his new book he writes that the mid-1980s was an interval “during which the medium was marginalised, declared deceased or moribund – as it has been more times than can be easily counted, ever since the 19th-century French painter Paul Delaroche first made the declaration that painting was dead in 1839”.

Confounding Delaroche, this book’s strength is that it darts from the greats of art history’s past – Gayford seems to have seen everything and thought deeply about all of it – to contemporary painters such as Oscar Murillo, Jadé Fadojutimi, Cecily Brown, Eric Fischl and Frank Bowling, to whom he speaks, and about whom he bubbles with enthusiasm.

Thus in covering, chapter by chapter, the themes of colour relationships, brushwork, composition, subject, space, relationship with photography, and so on, Gayford sets up a lively conversation between painting today and the work of precursors such as Giotto, Titian and Cézanne. That requires, obviously, a lavishly illustrated book and I’d say that the £35 being asked for such a gorgeous volume is well worth the price.

Writing about the masters is a safe and well-trodden career, but Gayford approaches it with an appealing scepticism. In a chapter entitled “What does a Rothko mean?”, he confronts the Russian-American artist’s insistence on the sublime, spiritual nature of his painting and how important it is that so many people burst into tears in front of his canvases. He quotes the late New York critic Clement Greenberg, whom Gayford met in 1990 when Greenberg was 81: “People who talk about meaning! I don’t give a damn about meaning. I can’t cope with it, I can’t discern it – and when I do, I think it’s beside the point. When I hear the word ‘spiritual’, I feel like releasing the safety catch on my revolver.”

Asking which of them is right, Gayford admits: “Like Greenberg, I do not perceive anything but colour, forms, and paint marks when I look at a Rothko.” This is admirably honest, but for many art-lovers – for whom Rothko is a gateway to heaven, or obliteration, or somewhere big at any rate – it is quite a heresy. Gayford, however, then goes on to explain that the longer he spends in front of a yellow and red Rothko painting (from 1952-53 and “rather annoyingly titled Untitled”) the more he sees, perceiving subtle shifts and nuances of touch and colour as the painting itself takes over, “so that as I looked at it more and more, I did not think at all. My consciousness was filled by the painting; my experience just was looking at it.”

This is as clear a piece of writing about the experience of looking at a great painting as I have ever read. Just as someone who has never heard a Mahler symphony in the concert hall, but only through headphones, has never properly experienced Mahler, so you cannot really experience painting through illustrations even in the best book.

You have to be there, body to object, in front of the work for a decent amount of time, with full concentration. Then you are indeed “filled by the painting” and everything changes. And really, that is all you need to know – not the endless curling intricacies of art history, nor the controversies about how particular pictures were made. Just being there is the thing.

Gayford, of course, is a professional, paid, lifelong looker, so he sees things the rest of us might miss: the way Picasso anticipated “the vibe of the 1960s” in the acid, electric colour combinations of a 1931 still life which also hides the form of his current lover; or the close connections between the mark-making of the British-Guyanese artist Bowling and late Titian; or eerie echoes between Picasso’s notorious brothel picture, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and a profoundly religious El Greco from the early 1600s.

These revelations are a lot of fun and I learned a lot about pictures I thought I had understood already. But there is nothing here particularly difficult or “insidery”. Good art writing is hard to do because it’s about clarity. It’s the business of making sophisticated and nuanced reactions to complicated works as straightforward and apparently obvious as possible.

I may be a biased reviewer because Gayford enthuses about so many of my own personal art heroes, from the Italian master Giotto to the English abstract painter Gillian Ayres, as well as uncovering artists I did not know of but will now hunt out. He concludes, after a discussion of the great Velázquez and his Las Meninas (1656), that painting can draw you in, take you over and keep you looking for a lifetime:

“It can incorporate profound paradoxes of which you are aware without needing to think, at least in words, because looking like this is a way of thinking. Every successful painting creates a new world, which we can inhabit for as long as we care to look at it.”

Gloriously, those new worlds are still being made around us by passionate, driven painters. As somebody who tries to make some kind of picture every day – mostly drawing, painting when I can – and who finds it the most difficult and intriguing thing I do each week, harder even than writing for the New Statesman, I often wonder where to start when explaining what it’s all about. Handing over copies of this book might be an expensive solution, but it’s a good one.

Andrew Marr is the author of “A Short Book about Painting” and “A Short Book about Drawing” (both Quadrille)

How Painting Happens (and Why It Matters)
Martin Gayford
Thames & Hudson, 365pp, £35

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