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07/29/2005: "Is Painting Dead?"

Here I am in my study, sitting in front of the easel on which my latest picture hangs, immobile. "Is painting dead?", I wonder. At the age of 77, it is certainly not the first time that I have asked myself this question. In the past, other people have asked me the same thing. And many other times I’ve read, on the pages of some newspaper or other, a statement with words to this effect.


For painting, this difficult period started between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when it stopped performing the public function that it had traditionally fulfilled. From then on, painting was no longer the only means of narrating, or representing, civil and religious history. First photography, and then cinema and television, because of the speed with which they are able to transmit images around the world, have replaced the role that was assigned to painting in the field of communication.
Painting has lost its actuality; but its profundity, and the specific characteristics of painting are not identifiable, luckily, with any particular role. We can admire a work of art without necessarily having to refer to the social reasons for which it has been painted.
Perhaps we should remember that, ever since the early years of the twentieth century, many artists were already well aware of this problem, so much so that they concluded that, freed from any moral, illustrative or didactic restraints, the very essence of painting would finally be revealed. No longer under obligation to represent the world from an ideological point of view, it would be free to champion the cause of “Art for art’s sake”.
In all this, I agree with my friend Vittorio Sgarbi, who states that the arguments of those who claim that the revolution in the sector of communication coincides with the end of painting are weak and irrelevant.
Unfortunately, these arguments that my friend considers weak and irrelevant have become so intrusive and deafening that, today, it has become difficult to question them.

* * *

I am still sitting in front of the easel.
And I still don’t like the way my picture is developing.
As a painter, you are not only the author of your pictures, you are also often the first person to regard them with indulgence, or, at times, with severity. When you decide that a picture is finished (always a difficult decision to take), your judgement is generally based on the structure of the composition, the energy of its lines, the intensity of its colour, and so on. The issue of the message behind the work is, strangely, a matter that hardly enters into it.
I am interested in measuring my painting through certain characters, environments, or atmospheres. I try to do my job as a painter well. When I paint, I don't send messages and I don't pass judgements. My painting demonstrates: it does not deduce.
I speak as a painter, and can only speak in those terms. When I am in my studio I paint, I think, I torment myself. I do not imagine that I am creating a masterpiece. I paint a picture, I revise it, move it, destroy it, and refer to it as something that does not seem to have any practical use. It is, in fact, the absolute lack of any practical aspect that allows me to create a good painting, which can serve to make the person looking at it reflect. I am convinced that the job of the painter does not end with the finished picture. Instead, it ends in the eyes of the person viewing it. If there is no possibility of re-inventing it, to put the painter’s experience in his studio to our own use, then painting really dies.

* * *
On a previous occasion I wrote that I do not generally agree with the way that art is promoted today.
Yesterday, on the phone, I discussed this with a journalist from Rome. He said: "Alberto, do you think that the number of visitors to museums is growing mainly because people need to go to places where everyone else is going?"
This is a very curious situation indeed. You stand in a queue in front of a museum. One exhibition attracts 30,000 people, another one, 100,000, yet another one, 20,000. It’s viewed in terms of a market survey. But nobody tries to understand why it attracts so many people. It is difficult to imagine, as I have already said, why people go to see an exhibition and then hurry on to another one that is completely different. And of course, more often than not, they can't even manage to see the paintings on view properly, because there are continuously people passing in front of them. It is rather like going to hear a concert where people are making so much noise that you can’t hear the music. Nobody worries. They only worry about the tickets that have been sold at the ticket office. And this kind of market phenomenon is all very good business for administrators, art dealers, and politicians. In the past, when you went to see an exhibition, you stopped to concentrate in front of a picture, to think, to reflect. I remember when I was boy, I went to Urbino to see the Flagellazione by Mantegna and, in the most complete silence, I admired it and tried to understand and capture the meaning and hidden value of that masterpiece.

I do not think that painting is dead. But the way of promoting it, and perhaps the way of capturing its meaning, is dead. However, the history of painting cannot be reduced to the last 30 years. It seems highly conceited, to me, to believe that we have arrived at a point where we have an accurate method of measuring everything, in every single field. Before it matures fresh in the spring, wheat decays under the winter snow. I am convinced that art will also revive and bloom, even after a long, cold and dark night.

And I don't think (unlike others) that multimedia installations or other technologies can replace painting. These are other types of experience, just as the cinema, for instance, with the novel, with painting and the theatre. Even if the cinema has given life to a new form of language that has neither been an antagonist nor a substitute for traditional art forms.


Alberto Sughi, Rome
For more info on Alberto Sughi see www.albertosughi.com

Replies: 11 Comments

on Friday, August 12th, Grasshopper said

Is painting dead? I don't want it to be dead. I feel that my life is meaningless without painting, without the possibility of painting, without such mystery as Sughi's paintings. How many people feel the way I do? It has to be plenty. Like me, these people don't go feel satisfied by just watching a good movie, listening to great music, or even owning a good sculpture. We are also craving for a good painting, constantly, from within ourself or from others.
Maybe the glory of painting is not what it used to be. Maybe the glory of painting is dead in general public. But if "we" are not part of that general public, who are "we"? Are we dead people? Then who is asking the question? Maybe the general public who is not interested in painting is what is really dead! Spiritually dead. But it is difficult to be spiritual in the world nowaday. What do you do to be spiritual? Creating or painting? And that is a difficult process.

on Sunday, August 7th, Karen Lindsey said

Alberto you stated "Here I am in my study, sitting in front of the easel on which my latest picture hangs, immobile. "Is painting dead?", I wonder. At the age of 77, it is certainly not the first time that I have asked myself this question."
Painting is not dead. Although there are more "modern" forms of creating art, there is something about an original painting that speaks volumns and has an appeal that no other printed form can live up to. Using the computer for art creation is not so much a talent as a desire to create and will to put in the patience it requires to complete a piece. I admire your work and sophistication it brings to the art world.

on Wednesday, August 3rd, Ada Balcacer said

Painting has been continously my profesional activity for 55 years.And Sughi

Sughi's question has been a constant inquire ;yet this has nothing to to do with painting and the creative applications of people to develop art.All over the world young people are attending art schools and the public ,turning their backs to the publicity of "the current art",continue on their appreciation of "pure painting".The visual art activity is today an infinite horizon,and with the impact of technology,publicity , fast media,cinematography,fotography,applied arts,painting might appear as the cinderella of the field;yet any of the contemporary expression has been able to create a new image,outside of painting, the use of the historical painted image is the source of all themes.Painting is the very personal expression of one,and one is the basis of all,the one"s laboratory is for the use of all,and this very unique private experimentation is needed for the creation of imaging,the same way an individual creates a gadget for a new use and makes a patent to own his invention,but painters can not patentized their experiments,generously are given for all to see and use.
We most recognize that the market strategy of the economical status,does not have an answer for the creative painting,and that today art is promote and sell by intermediates,also the national goverments have reduced or eliminate the cultural investment,the artist has no voice,and whatever money is available for his profesional development is administered by art organizers and events propositions on a vertical action,that puts the artist at the end of the ladder.This negative situation weakens the the artist social and economical position,and this is the area that is dead,because it has proven failure,and when the social actions fails,is bound to be change,and this is the direction we painters should move forward.
Painting is not dying,what is dead is the way painting is placed in the market economy, their stablish gurus,the illegal system of comissions,the pricing,the great fairs open only to galleries and not the artist,road blocks for the "pure painting",preference for art events that are paid by the technological industries,that gives their products "art excellence,museums without investment capital,absence of cultural national strategy,with the exception of France and Holland,and more that we have not space to broaden.Thanks,A.B.

on Monday, August 1st, luis robles said

Today is very often find performances, videos, blogs, etc. But, I think that the painting act itself doesn´t have comparation. The feelings that experiment the artist can´t be the sames, feel the texture, the color, the form is very exciting.

on Sunday, July 31st, Ursula E. Rettich said

Dead? What is Dead? Think practical, think consumer, think the average collector, who would hang a few bloody bones on their diningroom wall, does not go well with caviar. We as artists just like to ponder. Just because the critict and margazines ( is the in thing to do) write more about experimental art than painting, the world will want their paintings, so keep on "coloring".

on Sunday, July 31st, Alejandro said

Art at this crossroad is a way of scape for viewers.
I could remember Boticelli paintings inspired by
change. The viewer might have looked that famous paintings.Picasso portrait of Casagemas dead inspired by Greco don´t looked like Picasso work in the end.
Later that night Picasso found a way to think about the viewer, one of the most misterious & revolutionary of all time.
A few views of Museums you see a invisible line that you could walk.I walk the line gladly signed by views.
Sometimes you have to know & understand about strange things,...
But it was worth the time & trouble; many still believe that could change things & facts making things spànning painbrush in hands, a paint brust blow up keen eye for carats, mainstream haunting, best know as Beat, he know sophisticate things.
The change of art in this time, as all we know is other canvas, blue canvas, not a Klein; maybe a B. Viola or N. J. Paik.
So the turn of a century we were in the same channel, but what about subliminal future inside.
Repetitions in history,the idea of that plane or planet of paper crashing buildings is inside of this century.I hope you woldn´t jugde me.
The last century was an Art change in mood.
It was the end of an era.
Why paintings? Why not T.V.?

on Sunday, July 31st, Hyacinthe Baron said

Thanks for asking. I believe I address the question in my blog (appearing on Aug. 1st) about CREATIVITY, THE BARON CONSERVANCY.

I too have been asking the question. Here is a dichotomy. When I paint everything else in my life works. When I sidetrack to write books or design clothes I am successful, but it is not the same.

When an artist ages they are expected to truly break free and innovate new pathways, lead the viewer and collector to new lands and new ways a'la Picasso...Pollack...DeKooning...Oh I could tell you such stories about how they happened.
DeKoonings success came in a moment...when he mustered the courage to literally deface his beautifully rendered woman paintings...that the critics thought made the art great.?. Or there was an artist who couldn't sell a single portrait until he put a huge x across each canvas and sold out his gallery show.
Duchamp said it: Art has an aura. It dies in a time. Unless the artist allows for change. Painting on glass allowed changes in the reflections and backgrounds. He riduculed Museum goers oohing and ahhing over masterpiece paintings he felt had long ago lost any aura, that they were only doing what they had been told to, reacting as they thought they were supposed to.

I am convinced as you will discover in my forthcoming blog that today artists must find a niche, a place in the world for their creations to exist, and then to post those creations on the internet so the world can share them. True, the artist will never know who or when, or even ever sell anything...but it is still a lot better than achieving fame, a la Van Gogh, after the artist is dead. DEAD. Do you hear me?

on Sunday, July 31st, Paul said

Alberto,still at 77 you are asking yourself this!What hope us poor buggers,with far less experience of the artists life than you,who also ask that same question,among many others,actually unanwserable requests,as Brad so eloquently puts it,we are all indeed 'strangers in a strange land'.And recently Ive realized that there is a lot of philosophy in the artists life,the ongoing questions about everything,and also we do find answers sometimes,just the sheer curiosity about the world and everything in it.Probably one lifetime isnt enough to say what we would like to say in our work about it all.

on Saturday, July 30th, Andrew Wielawski said

Caro maestro, I am convinced also that the job of the painter does not end with the finished painting. If it ends in the eyes of the person viewing it, that is because the artist has also done his work in bringing it to the viewer. Success in art today depends upon being a tireless self promoter, and since that's what the competition, skilled in artistic technique or not, is doing, we should not blame anyone but ourselves if we are not up to this part of our task. It's like claiming to be a tennis player even though you can't hit a ball an adversary sends over the net with a spin on it. I also agree that new art forms do not replace older ones, they merely stand alongside them, as in architecture, new buildings stand alongside those of a different epoch. One sees, however, that buildings today are made using economy of effort and of materials, possibly similar to the economy of technique and education visible in some of today's art forms.
Vittorio Sgarbi is correct in defining as weak and irrelevant the arguments being shouted by the few and their many brain washed desciples. Dogma is always invented by one, and then repeated by the masses. We must always remember that despite their silence, a large group remains that appreciates and understands what is meant by exellence.

on Friday, July 29th, Michael Fornadley said

People will have to admit that in today's society the attention span is not as it was several decades, let alone several hundred years ago. We are in a visual TV bred generation, particularly in the Western culture, the time to consider a great piece of visual art is a real chore for most of us. The contemporary artists being observant of this will produce art that reflects the superficiality of the marketplace. Therefore what gets the attention of our society is the shock art, in all fields, not just the visual arts. Could be why some of the better known artists living today do not excite the visually trained, just too much studying of the past masters of the medium to be fooled by fluff.

Face it alot of us artists are playing "too many notes" for today's viewing audience. Either Dumb down, or don't expect any applause or recognition. Believing painting is not quite dead yet, just having a hard time with educating it's viewers. May see a positive change on the horizon, how much more fluff can our society take before people start to wake up. One thing that would help could be for everybody throw out their televisions and start reading books again.

on Friday, July 29th, Brad Michael Moore said

The world at large and the conventions designed to satisfy its ever-growing pace towards consumption is a far cry from the processes of artists making art. Indeed, the artist is the stranger in a strange land. Art for art's sake today is a tonic to an artist's sanity - pehaps the viewer's as well. Maybe the viewers perception of the time taken to produce the art they find at shows and exhibitions provides them with the same kind of fascination as viewing the bones of dinosaurs. Concepts of slower mechanisms ongoing on through present and past may ground human beings, by and large, as they navigate and Google their way through these times.