​In 2013 I used the phrase “Painting spits on your grave” to conclude a Village Voice review of the Christopher Wool retrospective at the Guggenheim. I wanted to emphasize that the medium has outlived the many critics who have declared it dead over the past . . . let’s call it two centuries.

Supposedly, after seeing a Daguerreotype for the first time, in 1839, the history painter Paul Delaroche said, “From today, painting is dead.” Perhaps he feared that painting had lost what some might consider its primary function: expansively sensitive depictions of human beings and their behaviors.

Marcel Duchamp viewed visual aesthetics as a zero-sum game, favoring puzzles for the intellect over what he dismissed as “retinal art.”  In 1922, photographer (and proselytizer for the medium) Alfred Stieglitz organized a symposium, which asked the question, “Can a photograph have the significance of art?”
Shortly afterward, he received a letter:

“Dear Stieglitz,
Even a few words I don’t feel like writing. You know exactly what I think about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. There we are.
Affectueusement. Marcel Duchamp.”

But where some perceived a death match between painting and photography, many others saw two very different mediums, whose functions, emotional impact, and conceptual possibilities have continued to evolve, entice, and overlap to the present day. 

Since that original challenge from Daguerre, various movements have risen, ruled, and then faded. One mid-20th-century painting by Jasper Johns, “White Flag,” can be seen as both touchstone of postwar art and oracle of the pluralism that defines our own age. As I wrote (in an otherwise negative review) of “Jasper Johns: Gray” at the Met:

“Marvel at the contrast between gelatinous encaustic and scruffy passages of oil paint, at the amber glow of the yellowed newsprint ground; behold not only a gorgeous painting but also the tomb of abstract expressionism's macho passions. American art after Johns was dominated by pop's brashness, minimalism's astringency, and conceptualism's conundrums, all of which radiate from the seminal field of this luscious 10-foot-wide canvas: pop art in the co-opting of the flag (a thing, Johns pointed out, ‘the mind already knows’), minimalism in the drained color and emphasis on materiality, and conceptualism because ceci n’est pas une drapeau but a painting of a symbolic abstraction of a nation.”

A decade or so after this triumph, Johns settled into comfortable repetitions of concept and form, painting as exquisite brand. Perhaps such complacency renewed belief in painting’s imminent demise. In his 1981 essay “The End of Painting,” art historian Douglas Crimp pilloried Frank Stella for first killing the medium with his late-1950s Black Paintings—terrific negations of the illusory depth of classical art and the feverish emotions of abstract expressionism—and then trying to reanimate the corpse by building the picture plane out into three dimensions.

In 1986, Stella answered this complaint in his wonderfully idiosyncratic book “Working Space,” in the process capturing both his hopes for the medium and the dawning of the Internet epoch’s visual onslaught: “Abstraction has the best chance of any pictorial attitude to be inclusive about the expanding sum of our culture’s knowledge. It is flexible and expansive. It has no need to be exclusive, even perhaps of representationalism itself.”

There have been quite a few painters making terrific, groundbreaking work since Crimp’s essay and Stella’s riposte back in the Age of Reagan: On just the fingers of one hand you can count off Mary Heilmann, Terry Winters, Coady Brown, and Kerry James Marshall, plus a thumbs-up for the late, irrepressible Sigmar Polke. Through far-ranging techniques and subject matter, these artists affirm that painting’s melding of rich materiality with infinitely varied imagery still probes the uncharted territory between mind and body with more grace and gusto than has any other visual art.

Few have perambulated that no-man’s land more insouciantly than Rene Magritte (l1898—1967). Perhaps that is why his visions have been co-opted for everything from the CBS eye logo to album cover art, from Monty Python animations to James Cameron’s floating Avatar landscapes. Yet such paintings as The Light of Coincidence (1933), when seen in the flesh, exude a remarkable power that shrugs off later appropriations. Unlike hyper-realistic Photoshop fantasias, Magritte’s lush fictions remorselessly expose the simultaneous disconnection and entanglement of the ravenous meat and imaginative neurons that make up the human body.

Kanye West struck a different cognitive chord at the “12-12-12” concert, with a print of Caravaggio's Deposition on his black hoodie, shifting his musical conglomerate into some neo-Baroque epoch. The spare stage set and stark lighting echoed the 17th-century painter’s vision of Christ being entombed, even as Kanye, a living, gyrating collage, seemed to be heralding his own second coming. It took more than three days to arrive, but Yeezus is finally among us, and a painter dead four centuries remains starkly relevant.

And few artists of his generation remain as relevant as David Smith, a sculptor from whose small spray drawings young painters can learn more than from acres of abstract-expressionist canvases. Smith's spray-enamel works combine volume, space, movement, texture, color, and contour—all the visceral gestures your eye, gut, mind, and spine respond to when communing with great painting. (A similar boldness energizes the drippy red dots and hand stencils in France's Chauvet cave; these still feel fresh 30,000 years after the pigments were blown from the artists' mouths. Smith once noted that Paleolithic art “defies word explanation as does any art.”) Smith created contours that were sharp or soft, opaque or transparently overlapping by varying the distances and angles of aerosol cans as he sprayed around cut-offs from his abstract metal sculptures. He would “toe” into position the hunks of steel arrayed on canvases spread out on his studio floor, composing with the verve of his action-painting contemporaries Pollock and de Kooning, yet the “action” in these paintings is the missing subject. What objects made these beautiful shapes? It's a kind of Rapture—the godly disappear into the ether while those less pure are left behind amid a radiant, earthy absence.

Where would you rather be?

Unlike images seen on computer screens, paintings have a bodily presence; it’s the difference between information and beauty, data and emotion, statistics and wisdom. Painting has been called “slow art,” and it may be more important today than ever as a focused alternative to the Internet’s visual logorrhea.

Art is always reconnoitering the frontiers of being, and perhaps some new art form with the visceral impact of painting will come along. It isn’t anything you’ll find in a video game, as yet, but if you see it, drop me a line.

In the meantime, a T-shirt design is on the drawing  board. —RCB