The Triumph of Painting

From sublime to ridiculous at the Saatchi Gallery

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

The Triumph of Painting sounded on paper like a cop-out. Charles Saatchi offers an exhibition whose argument - that painting rocks - we can all get behind, and whose stars Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans are very much on the Tate Modern menu. But Saatchi's feel for painting reveals itself as saltier and less fashion-bound than the Tate mainstream. If he ends with the sanctified duo of Tuymans and Dumas, the meat of this show is an expressive selection of painting from Germany.

In the 1980s, Saatchi was all about neo-expressionist painting and in particular its splashiest practitioner, Julian Schnabel. In 1988 Damien Hirst must have looked to him like Schnabel's natural successor - not at that time an insult. Saatchi is loyal to his autobiography of taste in including the grandiosely historical Jorg Immendorff with his pastiches of Dix and Grosz. Immendorff's paintings do not endure as their early 20th century models will. But I was tastelessly glad to see them.

Immendorff is juxtaposed with Martin Kippenberger. For all Kippenberger's jokes - I love the painting of a bar with two cheap brass lamps fixed to the canvas - he too is a romantic. Then there's a real Wagnerian nutcase - the Viennese Hermann Nitsch, notorious for actions with blood and guts, throws red paint at giant canvases in a reductio ad absurdum of expression that is profoundly impressive.

After this sublime and ridiculous detour we come to Dumas, who suddenly looks a bit tame; only shocking if you've never looked closely at Degas, and even sharing the sentimental figuration of the exhibition's great disappointment, Peter Doig.

It is Tuymans who looks like a giant among painters. His colossal still life painted in response to a request for images of September 11 may be great, or awful or even banal - I don't know yet. But it's the only work of art I've seen whose response to recent history may survive.