One of the first things we did when starting the BA in Fine art was to look through the book Vitamin P which has an introduction by the American art critic Barry Schwabsky who has some very interesting things to say about the status of Painting in contemporary art.
“Once historical narratives were organised by “Schools”; although the notion persisted into the Modernist era ( Ecole de Paris, New York School), a new historical unit, the “Movement” (Cubism, Abstract expressionism), eclipsed it. But today an introduction to contemporary painting no longer forms a chapter in the chronicle of successive movements any more than it charts the geography of adjacent schools. Positions are now multiple, simultaneous and decentered.
It is no longer possible to presume to know all that is going on in painting.”
So today painters are individuals and their styles do not align them with movements. They are free to paint what they like how they like where they like.
Schwabsky goes on; “One can wonder if today’s painters consider themselves heirs to a tradition that stretches back to Giotto and the the beginning of the Italian renaissance or if they feel themselves utterly cut off from all that, participants in or competitors with a wholly immediate image world that includes billboards, video games, magazine adds,pornography, instruction diagrams, television, and an infinite number of other things, among which the paintings seen in those great entertainment halls, our museums, play a part not much greater than anything else.”
The book itself (Vitamin P) is a cornucopia of painting that seems to overflow with different styles, subjects and sources. The accompanying blurb to Chris Ofili’s paintings states; “Chris Ofili’s mosaic-like paintings blissfully sweep aside the whole history of conventional art opposites – abstraction/figuration, high/low, sacred profane- by ignoring or combining these all at once.”
Elizabeth Peyton paints “genre-portraits” from magazine photographs or images from MTV.
Luc Tuymans also uses photographs or scenes from films or TV as source material. the blurb says; ” the subjects he renders are always caught between history and collective memory.
George Shaw again works from photographs of very mundane subjects and creates “unforgettable forgettable places” using paints intended for use on plastic models and a high degree of painterly skill.
All these, and more seem to reinforce Schwabsky’s assertion that there really are no rules what so ever when it comes to contemporary painting.
