Just published ‘Modern Painting’!
I’m back in Korea, and finally over jetlag. Waiting for me when I got home were the author copies of my new book: Modern painting. A Concise History. It’s published by Thames & Hudson as part of their World of Art Series, and is available now in the UK and in October from Amazon.com.
Here is s a sneak preview of the Preface:
It may come as a surprise that the predecessor to the present book in the renowned World of Art series is Sir Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting, first published in 1959, revised by Read in 1968, and finally reprinted with an additional concluding chapter by Caroline Tisdall and William Feaver in 1974. Read’s history assumes without question the importance of painting, or at least some forms of painting, as a vitally ‘modern’ art medium. One of the reasons for the delay in the appearance of a new survey in the World of Art series is that around the time Read published his book, and certainly when it was revised, painting’s status fell into question. The experimental impetus driving art forward, the desire to innovate, seemed to have ended up producing blank canvases, or near enough. At the same time, painting as a medium was condemned by the artistic avant- garde as outdated and too much of a commercial product. Instead, various conceptual practices that were anything but paintings took centre stage. But times have changed. Within contemporary art, paintings in many, many styles have secured valued places alongside a host of other practices that embrace radically expanded ideas about art.
Read began his history with the French artist Paul Cézanne – that is, in the late nineteenth century. This new volume starts about one hundred years earlier, with the emergence of Romanticism in European art. Read’s choice was primarily motivated by the fact that for him the honour of being called a modern painter was only to be awarded to those who made certain kinds of paintings. He argued that it was not enough for an artist to ‘belong to the history of art in our time’ in order to be described as ‘modern’ in the specific way he defined it. His narrative drew a line between late nineteenth-century Post- Impressionism and what came before, as well as a line around types of painting associated with less innovative styles that did not reject the conventions of optical realism forged in the Renaissance. Read saw ‘modern’ art as being geared towards challenging these conventions and dedicated to perpetual innovation – with one style trumping and making redundant what came before as art moved inexorably towards what Read described as the goal of ‘making visible’ rather than ‘reflecting’ the visible (which is what he assumed realistic painters did). In stylistic terms this boiled down to either abstract art and the repudiation of any obvious reference to the visible world, or the dreamlike imagery associated with Surrealism.
This new concise history tells a more inclusive story than Read’s, one that places painting in a broader stylistic, historical, geographical, and gender and ethnic frame. It is structured as a loose timeline. Where it seemed interesting to do so, I have quoted the words of the artists themselves, but I have avoided quoting from critics, theorists and art historians. At the end of the book there is an Appendix in the form of a series of questions that the reader might like to ask of the artists and the ideas discussed, but also of the text itself. This is followed by a Further Reading section for those that want to dig deeper.
I hope this new history allows the artists and paintings it discusses to be appreciated within a diverse and inclusive intellectual, historical and social framework. I am certain that, especially from the perspective of the new plural centres of the globalized
contemporary artworld, the story told in these pages will still look overtly centred on Europe and North America. But the concept of ‘modern art’ was born in Western Europe, and it is inextricably bound up with the forces of westernizing modernity. Furthermore, there is no escaping the fact that ‘‘art history’ as a genre is in itself a fundamentally western discipline invented for organizing cultural artefacts and their relationships within specific categories across time and space.
Finally, I want to stress that there is no substitute for knowledge by acquaintance. Only by seeing real paintings in museums and galleries will we be able to develop valuable relationships with them. This truth is especially important to recognize nowadays, since we are becoming more and more dependent on experiencing the world via digital media. While the Internet allows easy and free access to an unprecedented number of images of paintings, compensating generously the inevitable difficulties involved in seeing real ones, we should always remember that a photograph of a painting is just that, a small-scale, flat, synthetically coloured, digitally generated reproduction. But, more concerningly, a photograph of a painting on a screen or in a book displaces it into a context in which we experience it sitting down within the kinds of spaces that encourage the more cerebral or intellectual modes of thinking associated with word-based knowledge. Real paintings, by contrast, are meant to be experienced in three-dimensional environments within which we physically move around, and where we are open to more embodied, sensual forms of experience and knowledge.
Follow this link to order the book on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Modern-Painting-Concise-History-World/dp/0500204896