In 1839 Paul Delaroche declared, “From today painting is dead.” The advent of painting had led him to believe that there would soon be no need for painting. Instead photography’s arrival has seen painting reinvent itself, using photography to its own ends.

The Modernism championed by Clement Greenberg in mid twentieth century America gave one purified response to photography. Jackson Pollock represent the peak of a rejection of imagery and subject matter, a closed door on association in favour of self referential painting. Paintings, we were told, were to be about their own unique properties, flatness and the spreading of a coloured medium over a two dimensional surface.

Modernism led to painting martyring itself, sending the artwork down a myopic and tragic pathway, with an inevitable finite end point. Painting of this kind died under the weight of restrictive, singular and limiting philosophy.

Lucy Lippard is one of many thinkers to emerge around the 1960’s and 70’s in what was a revolution for many ways of thinking, not just those connected with painting. The period can by summarised by a shift away from detached and singular rhetoric towards a plural and interdisciplinary mode of analyse. There had been a paradigm shift, with ideologies questioned, if not destroyed, in favour of a philosophy which prides itself on problematising any stance and seeks to deny ideology. This, of course, is an ideology in itself.

In terms of painting the impact has been initially liberating. Imagery and subject matter have returned on mass, painters feel no need to follow a single style, but freely reference a multiple range of sources. The same statement applies to subject and image. This openness has developed at an ever increasing pace as we moved towards and beyond the millennium. The shift if not just philosophical, but has also manifested itself in the technological revolution of recent history. The internet has change our ability to communicate, to access information and has remapped our thought process.

More and more painting has imbedded itself in its past, as if it can only exist as a shadow of itself. Painting has killed itself off and been reborn as a zombie. Many paintings of today are the living dead, with mournful cries to the past. Such a condition fits the inherent qualities of painting, which by its very nature sits between life and death, think Keat’s ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’,

“Thou still unravished bridge of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow time”

Paintings very existence is founded upon a constant play between life and death, silence and sound, movement and stillness. Its essence is the moment in flux, the play between binary oppositions of being and not being. Its very nature, that which makes it tragic, is the tension it holds between a desire for a particular state and its inevitable failure.

Each individual painting and the whole history of the medium exist in a process of constant renewal. It dies and it is reborn, in a cyclical process which gives nods to nature, evolution and certain religious ideologies. Each epoch of painting presents itself as a new figure head, a new prophet or king, holding similar forms of power in a new guise and a new context. As such we are right to be constantly proclaiming:

“Painting is Dead
Long live painting“