This book is an introduction to the history of painting. The mood is light. You can use the book in two ways – as a reminder of the changes in painting throughout our history, or (and the two ways are not mutually exclusive) as a sort of jumping-off point for learning about art. I would not wish to give an impression that there is something marvellous about painting that can be summoned more or less like a genie, where you waft your hands and a fantastic experience starts. That isn’t how I think that painting or writing works. This kind of accessibility is okay for a beginning, but I think you have to put a bit of work in before real appreciation begins.
You get more out of art the more you’re willing to put in. And I find the more you’ve got out of it, the more particular and finicky you tend to become on all sorts of levels. You will find you become very discriminating about paint. You categorize it – you see it as flatter or more disturbed, or sheer or transparent or spread out, or lumped-up or glutinous or coagulated or whatever – and you have mental frameworks for all these effects. You can read them. You don’t like everything in the same way, and maybe there’s a lot you never like at all.
I could never like anything by the Surrealist, Yves Tanguy, for example, but I find his contemporary, Salvador Dalí, to be full of magnificence, even if it’s wildly inconsistent and always on a jokey level. He is magnificent in the way that certain comedians are magnificent. Dalí and Tanguy share a generalized, horrible, paint-killing technique, but within the ghastliness Dalí often manages to come up with surprises of colour, space and form. Of course the overall wackiness of imagery is what Dalí is known for, and this is indeed where his power lies. But the difference between the Dalí of the classic Surrealist period, the 1920s (which is also Magritte’s great decade; and he’s another murderer of oil paint) and his later paintings is really a difference of psychological tone, where the superior believability of the earlier work is due to a more intuitive and thus more nuanced, dramatic and less routine handling of materials.
So what I’m saying here is that within a visually rather low-grade mode, which is what Surrealism is, there can still be a hierarchy of good and bad. And if you’ve got any curiosity or enthusiasm or natural thinking power, and you’ve found yourself somehow in the world of painting, you’ll be surprised by how important these kinds of intuitive or instinctive judgements soon become. You’ll realize that being interested in art and being able to think about it – and maybe even communicate your thoughts, or put your thoughts into action if you want to be a painter yourself – is its own reward. You don’t get into it for reasons of snobbery or wanting to gain the power to intimidate people with a lot of weird terms or jargon you’ve just learned. Instead the attraction is something more inward. There is an inner yearning that painting answers.
In any case there are certain things that paint does that you may come across in your first encounters with the tradition and be impressed by, and the pull of this initial attraction may always remain with you. You might realize later in life that your interest is actually rather narrow. Perhaps it’s that certain way (and you want to see it again and again) that Monet and Tintoretto have of dragging an undiluted bit of oily matter across a more thinly laid-in area. For the rest of your life liking and disliking certain things will connect to this original attraction. In this way painting is trans-historical, but as we saw with the earlier examples from Surrealism, it also kind of rises above categories generally. It is its own category. Then there’s the way that taste develops through experience. You learn to see more, so a famous painting you always knew becomes slightly different in stages, and eventually you realize it’s become quite amazingly different to how you originally saw it. Remember we’re only talking about the paint here – we haven’t even mentioned what might be going on in the representation or in the story of the artist’s life or what was going on in society at the time. To find this level of painting fascinating, namely the way the paint works, is to be a kind of connoisseur.
You will probably find that you start to apply discrimination to art writing as well. On the whole, you will want the language that is used to describe and evaluate painting, to convey a sense of the dignity of the tradition and discipline of the medium, to be lucid and super-informed, to be inspired in a certain way, to feel as if it were born for this task and no other. When it’s different to that you know it’s a type of writing for someone else, not for you. You’ve already found that kind of thing not quite as vibrant and flexible and observant and thoughtful as you need writing on art to be. But maybe you remember when you were moved by whatever you could find, maybe sometimes more moved then than you are capable of being now, if that’s not too sentimental.
From personal experience I know that the starting point for getting interested in the history of painting is pretty arbitrary. Painting is like a stream, where you can step in at any point. For me it was a few little basic well-intentioned primers that told me what Impressionism or Paul Klee was supposed to be. I had no idea what I was reading. I looked at the reproductions and read the text and found them equally odd but not equally attractive. I definitely thought the pictures had the edge. Art writing is a peculiar thing. It’s not self-sustaining. It’s not like novels. The greatest art writers are just not that interesting if you’re not already interested in the subject. Paint and painting speak for themselves but art writing never does – it follows where art leads. On the other hand you can’t have such a thing as art appreciation unless you’ve read a few books about art. It’s not really appreciation otherwise, it’s a hobby or a distraction, or a bit of nonsense. In other words I think painting is serious and it calls for a high seriousness on the part of its audience and on the part of those who want to be its champions and leaders and explainers. But you can acquire that seriousness via all sorts of diverse and even dubious routes.
Is the painting we have today, that we see in exhibitions and in the Turner Prize for example, connected to the past in any real way? I think the answer is no. The stuff we have now (and have done for about fifteen years) is really a new kind of ideas-art, connected to the type of art that is fashionable now. Painting today defines itself not according to its own tradition but according to this new tradition, which is profoundly non-visual. Its look comes from photography and film when it’s most visual, but its main look is just a kind of convenience – whatever visual arrangement is the most convenient and clear for getting the idea over, whatever it is. Consequently painting today is mostly visually boring. In its weird obstinate incompetence, its refusal to mature, its insistence on remaining at an arrested adolescence stage, it makes painting-puppies of an earlier era, such as Salvador Dalí, seem genuinely like Velázquez (rather than a gagster who often referred to Velázquez).
But again as with Dalí there is still a hierarchy of good and bad. For example, Damien Hirst’s spin-paintings offer little visual pleasure. They just have arbitrary runnings-together of different colours. Their interest is really ‘performative’ – they are records of a certain kind of theatre. It’s a spectacle that involves a lot of the materials we associate with painting, but it doesn’t have the same aesthetic aims as the high tradition of painting. It’s a kind of skewed comment on Jackson Pollock. At the time when Pollock still lived there was an English painter who enjoyed a bit of success, who used to ride a bicycle over a paint-spattered canvas. He really didn’t seem to understand that Pollock was a supreme artist of composition and placement, of transforming space, of creating space through mark making; he thought Pollock was a bit of theatre. And the English public laughed when they saw this guy on TV in a documentary about painting. In a way Hirst’s spin-paintings re-do that moment, but instead of remaining on a slightly pathetic philistine level, they make the moment into something glamorous and memorable. There is a zero-level aesthetic aspect to his spin-paintings, but on all the other levels – sociological, fashionable, humorous, punky, witty, and so on – they represent a high achievement.
Yet Hirst’s spot-paintings, where you might imagine the colour effect to be just as arbitrary, often have a level of visual rightness to them. The reason seems to be the whiteness round the spots. Maybe it’s the proportion of white to colour. I don’t know. I do know that there is something similar in Bridget Riley, who otherwise is a very different kind of artist – she really is interested in the art of the past and has a deep knowledge of it. But in Riley’s work, up till the mid 1970s, you generally find very small amounts of colour surrounded by much larger amounts of white, and the graphic balance somehow makes the colour seem exciting. Whereas when she puts larger and larger bands of colour next to each other, so that what used to be a mark now becomes an area, the results often seem out of control, almost bilious.
I often find myself liking Hirst’s spot-paintings, and wondering if the only reason some are less successful is simply because he occasionally does something fiddly with the canvas shape, or he cuts a row of spots off in the middle, or otherwise de-regularizes the layout in some such way. But Hirst’s spin-paintings have no positive effect on me whatsoever, although I see why people find them striking. The art world is fascinated by populism now, by attracting to itself an enormous audience that doesn’t have any real interest in art but is willing to pause for a moment if there’s a shock or scandal or a bit of depravity on offer. The hated thing now is to think of painting as involved with aesthetic pleasure. The loved thing is anything extreme – extreme emotion, extreme states of being, extreme difference. And to make a painting in such an evidently silly way as these spin-paintings are made is extreme.
To resort for a brief moment to anecdote, I found myself in the Beaux-Arts Gallery in London’s Cork Street the other day, where there was a retrospective of the work of the Scottish expressionist John Bellany, the guy who had to have a liver transplant because his drinking was so extreme. I overheard the dealer telling someone that Damien Hirst had just bought three early Bellanys. I supposed it was because of Bellany’s slightly religious content. I looked at all the paintings. The good things were an impression of spontaneity and a sense that he meant it. I thought the basic mode was illustration – maybe the most competent thing was illustrative drawing. The bad things were out-of-control colour, corny symbols and too many different types of contrasts. Bellany filled-in spaces and then seemed to think the painting was finished when there was no emptiness left to fill. But the effect was always visually banal. The corny symbolism would be all right if there wasn’t the problem of too many visual differences (different types of drawing, colour, shapes, handling – all jangling against each other in chaos). Although a catalogue essay stated that Rembrandt was an influence, the Australian painter of the 1950s and 1960s, Sidney Nolan, in fact seems closer. Nolan’s virtue is minimalism – paring back, so the dubious symbolism he goes in for doesn’t seem so grating. The point of this anecdote is that when you get seriously interested in art you learn to think for yourself, and not just believe a lot of easy clichés that art writers tend to go in for, and even many artists tend to believe in too.
To remain with Hirst for a bit longer (which is okay, I think, since he’s become a barometer of taste), it’s the Hirst idea of Francis Bacon that we’re now encouraged to take seriously – that Bacon’s writhing blob-monsters are actually expressive of something. I find these screaming monsters tedious and idiotic. I think it’s the Matisse-like backgrounds that make Bacon stand out. He handles flat areas of colour impressively. Maybe this sounds disappointing. Surely art should be about something more mind-blowing than this? Compared to the thrill of monsters, mere ‘colour’ seems anticlimactic. That’s the problem when taste gets so corrupted.
How do you negotiate connoisseurship? The point is that you don’t – at least not the positive, democratic kind that I am trying to explain here. The other kind, where you do an art history course for several years and learn to bray about identity politics and so on, is pretty deathly unless you’ve really got personality problems. But the kind of which I speak is about liveliness and enthusiasm, and living up to the quality of feeling that is painting’s true content.
When did we last find that quality of feeling in painting generally? The painting tradition that began with the early Renaissance ran down in the 1950s. Its last gasp was American colour field painting of the 1960s, and its last heyday was American Abstract Expressionism. The highpoint of the heyday, as it were, is Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman at exactly mid-twentieth century. Throughout the 1950s Abstract Expressionist painting, having established itself as the international dominant style, settled in as a mannerism, so that by the middle of the decade it was already routine. When the Abstract Expressionist look was defeated in the early 1960s, first by Pop art and then by the immediate offshoots of Pop – Minimal art and Conceptual art (and all their various nutty offshoots too, performance and video art, and so on) – it was not a tragedy but merely a case of something being knocked out that had hung around too long.
What continued from Abstract Expressionism into the Pop and geometric art of the 1960s, and can be seen throughout the five hundred-year-old western tradition, going as far back as Italian painting of the fifteenth century, is the will to find a pattern, to create abstract loveliness and order, to find a design and create a dynamic, satisfying flatness – and all this in the process of painting, whether the starting point is a scene out there in the world or just the blank canvas. But what was almost immediately lost was a sense that this might be enough for painting. From the 1960s on, a general idea takes hold within the art world and within the audience for art that these visual qualities, so essential to the culture of painting before, are now a bit trivial. The whole idea of painting possessing an ‘inner life’, an existence and a reason for being that doesn’t care about imagery and subject matter or history or outside reality, seems an oddity to this new mind-set, which is the mind-set we have now. This is the idea of art that is celebrated now by Tate Modern and the Turner prize, and so on. These new institutions are big public signs of art’s ‘success’, its recent movement from the margins to the centre of social life.
What we have now as far as painting is concerned – at least fashionable, centre-stage painting – is weak. Of course as a critic I see a hierarchy of good and bad within our present set-up. But I see the whole set-up as weak compared to the old tradition, both the tradition of Modernism and of the Old Masters. The weakness is caused by distraction – painting is distracted by irrelevancies. Think of painting as a culture, not as paintings but ‘painting’. There are loads of paintings being done today, but painting as a culture or a discipline isn’t considered to be viable contemporary art. Viable art is videos and installations, a photo-based vision of the world, or mass media-based vision. Contemporary painting tries to incorporate this mass media vision in order to keep up with it, in order to be popular and successful (since these are the aims of the mass media), instead of defining itself by being different to this vision, and thereby risking being unpopular but being successful on its own terms. (That is, painting falls over itself trying to be popular.)
In the twentieth century the great paintings up to the 1950s – with abstract painting of that time being the last great phase of modern painting – were about self-definition. The result was a certain kind of simplification, with broader colour, simple forms, and less going on in terms of story and imagery. We don’t seem to be able to tolerate this any more. Instead of liking the qualities that are liberated through this simplification, the visual richness of abstract art of a 1950s kind (Jackson Pollock and so on), we perceive only a loss – the lack of the buzz of instant contemporaneity that turns us on, or that we believe turns us on, like drugs turn on people who have something that makes them anxious which they want to avoid. The pseudo-profundity and titillating freak-show shocks of contemporary art are our drugs, and what we want to avoid is humanity, seriousness, depth and feeling.
It’s from the Old Masters and from the recently defunct tradition of Modernism that painting can learn to be itself again. I don’t mean that new painting should look more like old art in a literal way – that would be absurd. Also, I don’t think ‘Old-Master-ness’ as such, any more than Modernism as such, is what contemporary painting lacks, so much as ‘genuine-ness’, a sense of integrity. It might seem odd to deplore painting’s separation from its own tradition when the trendy painting of nowadays seems to be full of references to the past. But to refer to something isn’t the same as being connected on a profound level to it. The typical successful painting of today will often quote from the tradition of painting, but the reference is always deliberately shallow and trivial. It’s really about pointing up in a spirit of black humour or despairing glee our modern difference from the past, not our connection to it.
The quote – a bit of imagery or a bit of handling that has the look of a style or mannerism from the past (but also of course that might be a direct quote from the imagery of the past) – will be deliberately enigmatic. We don’t know why it’s there, whereas we know why Picasso quotes El Greco or Manet quotes Goya. We know it is to invoke something wholeheartedly, to connect back to something, even if the new thing being made out of the old might appear initially to be a bit staggeringly different to anything the quoted artist would recognize as ‘art’. But the motivation for trendy painters of nowadays to quote from the past isn’t to connect to the past’s achievements but to insincerely drag in the past in the same way that the present is dragged in. Both are seen as popular, flat and ironic, like ads. This new type of painting is fascinated by futility and impotence, these anti-qualities seem wonderfully glamorous to trendies. Art culture generally is about fast, empty stimulation now. This culture forces painting to be a kind of illustrative demonstration of the pointlessness of anyone taking painting seriously. (So if anyone does take it seriously they will seem marooned on an island of sincerity, a pathetic position.)
An optimistic view might be that as it continues to hover around the history of painting, or at least keeps coming back via one route or another to this history (however corrupt or crass the conscious connection might be), new painting might start to become more like old painting, if only by accident. I personally think that’s too passive and depressing an attitude. I think we need to see more clearly what we’ve become in order to change our state positively. We have to know ourselves. Obsessed to the point of illness by anti-elitism, art culture has become silly and shallow. Its products are often amusing but never genuinely playful, or genuinely free, and consequently never really serious – only either trivial or solemn or both. We now ask art to turn us on with shocks. This is our corruption as a society. But the history of painting mapped out through the illustrations in this book gives the reader or browser a set of shocks of a different kind. In these reproductions we see a culture of humanity and beauty that is shockingly different to today’s mainstream painting, or the kind of painting that makes it into the Turner Prize and exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery.
Of course the same tortures and murders and nastiness, and the same buffoonery and human weakness, and the same emptiness and blankness and tedium are there in the old as in the new. (Ironically perhaps, this is especially true if we think of the Old Masters rather than Modernism compared with the present.) But whereas in the Turner Prize these things are literal and graspable, part of an amusement park or freak-show type of experience, where you are confronted with something amusingly disagreeable (appalling or disgusting) or temporarily compelling (like an adolescent’s display of emotion in order to get attention), in the great tradition of painting they are all only one aspect of the art experience. They are the hallucinatory surface aspect of something that has other more substantial and powerful aspects. Sometimes these less easily definable or more abstract contents are tuned in to the hallucinatory content, and sometimes they seem indifferent to them, with the two just running alongside each other as if in connected but separate corridors. Sometimes they even seem antipathetic or opposite.
What I’m doing is pointing out the difference between the inner life of painting and painting’s subject matter, and also the difference between painting’s inner life and the personal biography of the artist. I think this inner life becomes more available and see-able through being examined again and again in every context conceivable – which includes the historical and social meanings, the artist’s life, ideas and thoughts, and relationship to the times generally and to patrons and bosses. But I also believe in what Modernism teaches us, that the use the painting has in the end, if the painting is important, is to do with its identity as a painting, and not the surrogate it offers through imagery, history, documentation and recording and so on, of various other experiences.
How do you look at the paintings of the distant past? How else but with your own eyes, with your own experience and thoughts? But you need frameworks of ideas as well, within which your intuitive perceptions can deepen. Sometimes the Old Masters have a strongly moral dimension. Bruegel and Bosch, for example, are moralists. But their moralizing goes along with a high formalism. Both of these painters are astounding organizers and colourists, as well as amazingly convincing observers of objective forms (of nature) and inspired concoctors of fantasy forms. In the case of other Old Masters sometimes the moral is there but we’re not convinced the artist really means it – as often happens with Titian and Tintoretto. Here the moral story is a framework for something else that the artist feels more urgently. But just as Titian and Tintoretto combine form at its most heightened and powerful (broad, dramatic, expressive) with colour and handling each pitched to an exquisite highpoint (it’s actually quite rare for painting to have such a combination), so they convey moral content precisely through the very thing that we might think would oppose it or diffuse it – visceral, delicious, almost physical pleasure. The pleasure is the feeling we get from a scintillating, breathing and infinitely tender paint surface, from passages of different thicknesses and thinnesses of paint.
Sometimes art from the past is pious and monumental, like the High Renaissance painting of Raphael, or pious and monumental but also explosive and dynamic, like the Baroque painting of Rubens and Caravaggio. Sometimes it’s moving because of simplicity, sometimes because of complexity. Or conversely, again as in Baroque art, the complexity is initially off-putting. We feel we want Masaccio not Rubens. Rubens is all fireworks, it seems, all show – where’s the feeling? Then we see the distressed surfaces of Masaccio, the way he comes up with visual equivalents for walls and skies, the folds and planes of tunics and cloaks and the heavy graceful contours of the profiles and backs of the saints. Being drawn into those abstract qualities we start to see how abstract Masaccio is, and how abstract too is Rubens. He is really offering a variation on the feeling in Masaccio, rather than a departure from feeling or dilution of it. Masaccio seems noble, monumental and quiet, inward, contemplative, massive and deep, while Rubens seems frothy and noisy, steamy, panting, violent, stirring up feeling for the sake of feeling.
The old idea in art history, which goes back to the eighteenth century when art history began to be established as a discipline, was that Masaccio stands for a type of organization where details are as convincing as the whole, while Rubens stands for a type where only the whole is truly coherent; the parts are always in the process of forming and melting. But Masaccio and Rubens are both deep, both monumental, and both offer a kind of experience that is more inward and arresting and profoundly human (in the sense of individuals being capable of sympathy and empathy for other individuals) than we are used to being offered by the art culture of the present moment.
The difference between the past and the present is not stylistic as it is between Rubens and Masaccio, but moral – one has depth, while the other deliberately doesn’t. Rubens and Masaccio’s depth unites them and separates both of them equally from what we now have as art. Our shallowness, which new institutions like the Turner Prize, the Saatchi Gallery and Tate Modern celebrate, is connected to the desire we have for meaning in art to be literal. The audiences of the past might have been moved by the literal meanings on offer – ‘that crucifixion looks real’; ‘those saints are pious’. But the meanings these works have now are only partly to do with literalism. We’re often not really in touch with this level of meaning, for one thing. And in any case even if we were we might find it repellent. For example, Bruegel is generous and humane in the richness of his artistic vision, but his attitude toward the peasants whose daily existence he portrayed is not generous but patronizing. He’s mocking them.
The humanity in Bruegel is not in the peasants but in the painting, and to understand this you have to think about how the painting is put together, what the shapes are doing, how the rhythms are working, how one set of patterns opposes another and then subtly unites with it. The richness of this visual experience is what gives life to the other kind of ‘life’, which is the painting’s narrative content – everyday life in the early seventeenth century. And this same expressive richness changes Bruegel’s original motivation (to fulfil a brief to amuse his patron with a condescending image of low existence) into an experience that can’t be pinned down and that remains truly deep.
I think the reproductions of the world’s great art in this book speak for themselves. If you stick with the subject of painting and its histories, having read the book, you will find that painting never stands still. You only have to look at individual paintings for a short time, but if they’re good you can come back to them again and again, and they’ll always have something new to say. If this is your first encounter with some of these images then it will be a moment you’ll look back on in the future and feel moved by.