What is painting? You can answer the question simply, by picking up a brush: but if you reach for words, it turns out that there are many replies, and that while they are interrelated, each of them begs further questions that are philosophical and historical. This book tries to present that complex of thought compactly and in common straightforward language. If you read it I hope you may be prompted to further thought, whether expressed with words or a brush. I don’t expect you to agree with everything I say.
Why ask the question? Back in the 1990s, many people in the art world thought that the practice of painting had had its day. Nikos Stangos, one of art publishing’s great editors, asked me to write a book examining why. Earlier in his career, Nikos had worked with John Berger on Ways of Seeing, a book that has been more widely read since its publication in 1972 than any other in the field of art theory. Nikos thought that over two decades on from Berger, there might be reason to write a book under the working title Ways of Representing. He felt that the concerns that came together under the heading ‘representation’ formed the crux of debates about painting at that time.
I wrote a rather different book from that which Nikos had expected. It was the attempt of a largely self-taught painter to reach out, after twenty years’ studio work, and investigate the theories that were claiming to define his practice and those of his fellow artists. We thought it best to entitle the result What is Painting?, but we hoped that readers would understand we were not offering a programmatic solution to that problem.
Enough of these readers have welcomed this lay reader’s guide to art theory for Roger Thorp, my present editor, to ask for a new edition. We bring out the book again at a point when that late-20th-century animosity towards painting has largely faded. It turns out that the practice persists. I have tried to reflect this change of circumstances in my revision of the text, but I have also tried to respect the internal dynamics of an argument that was formed almost two decades ago.
These, then, are some of the questions into which my title question breaks down:
·Does anything unite those objects we call ‘paintings’?
·What happened to the idea of representation in modern art?
·What factors have changed the nature of painting over the past two centuries?
·What does the ancient practice of painting amount to in today’s world?
The six chapters that follow address these questions by looking at the historical evidence, and by reasoning from common experience.
Chapter 1 looks at traditional ideas in the West about the nature of painting, and at some of the bases of our feelings about paintings. Chapter 2 discusses painting’s historical relations with photography, which involve questions about ‘knowledge’, ‘reality’ and ‘sensation’. Chapter 3 relates the idea of ‘modernity’ to our changing understanding of time and space – changes which help define ‘modern’ (or ‘postmodern’) art. Chapter 4 suggests how the idea of personal expression has shaped the practice of painting in our culture, while chapter 5 considers the interaction between the particular art called painting, other arts such as sculpture, and the notion of ‘art’ itself. Finally, chapter 6 discusses painting in relation to its academic theorizations, and attempts theoretical suggestions of its own.
These chapters are not independent, but follow one another in a developing argument. Further information and asides to the main arguments can be found in the Sources and Resources appendix.
Julian Bell