SUBMITTED Essays Send us your essay

Is Painting Dead?

By Alberto Sughi


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 2005


(www.albertosughi.com)

  back to top | submit an essay | read other art essays

Copyright 2003-2006 © The Saatchi Gallery : London Contemporary Art Gallery : Site map