Modernists rejected tradition in architecture, literature and music, and painting was no different. The rise of abstraction has been much heralded, but it is arguable that no such thing is possible. The Dutchman Piet Mondrian saw in his abstractions various theological, gender, and existential categories, and his Broadway Boogie Woogie is suggestively titled. Kasimir Malevitch’s abstract, geometric paintings carried ontological and divine connotations, while Wassily Kandinsky’s abstractions are fraught with mysticism and secret messages. Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist drip paintings contained in them a strong human presence in the very kinesthetic style itself, and he labelled his works with telling titles such as Autumn Rhythm and Lucifer. The Dutch-born Willem De Kooning’s canvases are filled with an explosive and frantic application of the paint, often illustrating highly charged subject matter. Mark Rothko’s fields of bleeding colours sprang from the artist’s philosophical notions, and he wanted his viewers to be deeply moved by his pictures. Colour and shape had come to fill the gap left by the departure of the Virgin Mary and martyred saints, classical gods and triumphant generals of earlier artmaking. The older technique of oil painting was supplemented in the twentieth century with new or reborn substances: acrylic, aluminum paints, encaustic, enamel, and other binding agents, with the occasional quotidian object mixed in or glued onto the surface for good measure.
A reaction to the psychological intensity of the Abstract Expressionists was inevitable, and it took two forms. One was in a new objectivity and minimalism, championed by sculptors such as Donald Judd and David Smith, but also painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, who set out to take a good deal of the human emotion, mysticism, and moral subjectivity out of painting. Another response was found in Pop Art, which vividly brought back the represented object, often in mirthful ways. Andy Warhol’s soup cans, the collages of Richard Hamilton, and the comic book style of Roy Lichtenstein, works often carried in large scale, were serious in their intents. The commercial products of modern societies come spilling out on to the canvases of the Pop Artists, who ask us to consider the nature of consumerism and mass production as well as issues of artistic representation.
In the end, painting has triumphed in Western art over a host of opponents. In the Renaissance, the debate raged over the paragone, that is, the comparison of the visual arts, and Michelangelo and his camp proclaimed that sculpture was more real, more literally tangible, and less deceptive than painting. Leonardo and others fought back, with words and deeds, and one can argue that painting remained the preeminent art from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. It is telling that the average viewer can only name a few prominent sculptors of the Renaissance, but might easily name a small army of painters from that period. The same is true of the nineteenth century: in the nineteenth-century French context, for example, beyond Rodin, and perhaps Carpeaux and Barye, the sculptors are paled by the schools of painters who came forth with innovative ideas. Painting has overcome the cheap supply of prints that flooded the markets beginning in the fifteenth century, the attempts by some Baroque artists to merge painting with other visual arts, the promise of greater verisimilitude claimed by photography in the nineteenth century, and the competition offered by moving pictures in the twentieth. Digital media threaten a challenge once again in the early twenty-first century. But painting is too powerfully present, too flexible in results, and too rooted in our sensibilities to give way easily to upstarts. Even in practical terms, paintings can be rolled up and shipped, or when not in use they can be stacked, while, on the other hand, they can fill a blank wall or a ceiling with great effect. You cannot turn a painting off with a switch or an easy click of the mouse. They are flat, like the pages of our books and the screens on our computers, and can be reproduced in a compatible, two-dimensional format, without necessitating the difficult decisions of lighting called for in the reproduction of sculpture or with the questions of viewpoint as in the photography of architecture. Renaissance thinkers said a painter can exercise divine powers and, like God himself, create an entire world, and thousands of different pictorial worlds have been created since then.
The works chosen for this book demonstrate the variety of great painting to be found in our public museums. Surely, painting continues to have a lasting appeal in a changing world. Will the field continue to produce masterpieces? That is a more difficult question to answer. The works collected here indicate that physical craftsmanship is an important component of successful painting. It is also clear that painters succeed when they “stand on the shoulders of giants” and respond to art of the past, be it in admiration or in rebellion. Perhaps the world is awaiting the next great painter who, like Raphael, Rembrandt, and Picasso is steeped in the art of the past, and has the knowledge, sincerity, and technical skills to create something new and outstanding. If painters of the future produce works that are little more than sarcastic one-liners, or are by nature ephemeral in form and meaning, or disdain or ignore the whole of the history of art, the field of painting has little hope of success. However, manual skill and a determination to create a novel yet savvy work of art can go a long way towards preserving the art form. The pages of this book contain, without setting out to do so, a blueprint for painting’s future.
13th Century
1. Bonaventura Berlinghieri, 1205/10-c. 1274, Gothic Art, Italian, St Francis and Scenes From his Life, 1235, Tempera on wood, 160 × 123 cm, San Francesco, Pescia
Following the Romanesque period, the Gothic period emerged in northern France. The centres of religious and intellectual authority moved from a rural-monastic environment to urban centres.
The Gothic ribbed vault, because it was light and thin, allowed for a new aesthetic to develop in which lux nova defined the new architecture. “New light” was communicated through the uplifting vaults and the stained glass that illuminated the new lofty spaces made technologically possible by flying buttresses on the exterior that provided support for the thin walls. Phillip II (r.1180–1223) built Paris into the capital of Gothic Europe. He paved the streets, embraced the city with walls, and built the Louvre to house the royal family.
Thomas Aquinas, an Italian monk, came to Paris in 1244 to study at the renowned university. He began, but never finished, the Summa Theoligica in the Scholastic model being taught in Paris. Based on Aristotle’s system of rational inquiry, Aquinas used a model in his treatise that organised the work into books, then questions within the books, and articles within the questions. Each article then included objections with contradictions and responses, and answers to the objections became the final element in the model. Aquinas’s work is a foundation of Catholic teaching.
When King Louis IX (1215–1270) assumed the throne, the Parisian “court style” of Gothic was at it height. Paris was not only revered for its university faculty and architects, but also for its manuscript illuminators. In Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) Divine Comedy he noted Paris as the capital of the art of book illumination.
The rest of Europe tried to emulate the Gothic style of the Ile-de-France, but the German and English traditions did not emphasise the soaring height in the way that the cathedrals of Reims or Amiens did. England’s great achievements in the thirteenth century were political, including the Magna Carta (1215), generally thought by later generations to be a guarantor of human rights for all, and the establishment of Parliament during the reign of Edward I (1272–1307).
The crusades were in full force by the thirteenth century, but the battles were largely defined by Muslim counterattacks. The Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) was mainly played out in Constantinople and served to discredit the crusading trend, as Christians attacked Christians, and the schism between the Eastern Orthodox Christians and the Roman Catholics widened.
These military ventures did, however, create long lasting cultural exchanges. New foods and luxury items such as silks and brocades entered into circulation. Italian traders particularly benefited from this merchant exchange with the East, even expanding its reaches.
The famous Venetian explorer, Marco Polo (1254–1324), travelled from Europe to Asia and spent seventeen years in China developing Merchant contracts. While Italians used timber beams rather than high stone