Don't put Painting on a pedestal, let it end our epoch of expulsion and diffusion instead. Don't objectify it within a frame or within a 'form' based framework, and don't put it out to pasture condemning it to obscurity and aimless repetition or over self-examination because of its lowly allotted status by TATT. Where do we sit today? Well, the Cold War destroyed public faith in Art participation because of elevated Conceptual. (DeP)ART in the West combined with all of its Summer Painting colonies for the rich, whilst Soviet dictat determined Art enforcement of political propaganda via Socialist Realism' in the East. But it was the political extremism of the 1930s and 1940s that targeted Painting and Modernism by falsely associating them purely with the Dark Arts of Nazism, Fascism and Stalinism that remains its worst enemy! Modernist Painting, however, did more than any other medium to expose totalitarianism in Europe during this period. Furthermore, the relocation from war torn Europe to the America that was physically unblemished by war was seen by many Painters as avoidance, and who returned swiftly to re-engage in the debris and rebuilding of their own countries! The trouble was that Painters had been swept-up by the adrenalin of confronting evil that they could not find terra firma in the brand of air-brushed America. The America of the middle-classes, the nuclear family, the aspirational consumerism of America only damaged the modernist Painting movement by its ambivalence to leaving their roots of defiance, resistance, and resilience behind!
The nation of the diaspora (America) should have been the perfect haven for dissident Modernist Painters, but instead many felt debilitated and not enthused by its freedom, its open society, its positivism, but felt alienated by America's unsympathetic view towards Failure, defeat, loss and suffering etc!! They couldn't relate and did not find America a sympathetic a land in order to process their individual ,national and continental grief and the trauma of tragic loss and unending agony; both the Art scene and the vibe and zeitgeist in America at the end of the 2nd WW did not provide closure for what for many new American refugees was beyond the count of grief that they remained haunted by.
Perhaps there was a degree of resentment from Europeans but how far this constituted antipathy to fresh positivity existed or was mutual is hard to say. The American dream was a well-crafted open invitation by self-advertisement, as the diaspora nation had to accept its new world status as the only superpower other than the USSR, and that involved growing pains, that perhaps European Modernist Painters were the collateral damage of such change? This was unchartered waters for all and imbued with a can-do positivity excluded, on many levels, those who would slow it down, especially when it came from the old world that itself was in full Imperial decline! Could Modernist Painters not find their space in the Art Race in New York or even remake from broken European cultural wreckage beyond the gravitational pull of New York and LA? Were they accused of regressive nostalgia for European centricity and a proclivity to Euro-centric adrenalin junkyism!? Too right they were! In fact, they were soon replaced by an American nationalistic 'Abstract Expressionism'! Now many American Art enthusiasts bought Impressionist Paintings at the end of the 19th century that rescued Impressionism from obscurity and drove the movement of modernist Painting to be embraced as an entity itself, so although America had saved early modernist Painting it would be its undoing decades later.!
Post WW2 Painters may well have been underwhelmed and not just overwhelmed by this bright fresh land that would produce Warhol and pop Art. After all, this was the land of the 'Frontier spirit' and the country of 'manifest destiny’, so why should it have to kneel at the feet of European exiles suffering from PTSD, of which many never recovered from the War and the ensuing Cold War anyway? Art wasn't seen as a charity; it was seen as a business. This was the land of transactionality and purchase was mainstream public communication and best represents the cultural personification of the perfect package and brand of the American dream afterWW2! It broadcasted the view that European painting had become 'retentive self-perpetuating agonising of a worn torn Europe!!!? Unfettered 'brash enlightenment' and not entitlement solved the modernist Painters dilemma ; now it wasn't simply a victim of the new American frontier consumerist art, it was its championed counterpart that has been an ever present (but as the subtext of all Cold War and post-Cold War), 'working contrast 'to the American Art scene since the end of WW2!!.
Ironically, some of the most advanced ideas of modernism was salvaged by great American architecture, but to house and ironically incarcerate modernist inspired Painting placed in the context of US led Abstract Expressionism'!?! So why incarcerate the medium of imperfection and humanities escape from automation and the conventional, by some of the leading lights of Galleries and Museums of Painting? Why did we all have to figuratively walk on eggshells and wear white gloves to a living breathing series of work in an apt context but not as an open but a closed mixture of deference and academic retro hierarchical elitism? Or was it too perfect, too clean, too original, but too contrived?? Let's not preserve Painting as a curio or antique please!!!
Our humanities fingerprint enables our evolved unpredictability, our mutation that survives and thrives in adversity. This is an undisguised random accidental collision of opposites or compatibles, by attraction and repulsion that is based upon the 'human irrational' just as much as it is by the inducement of logic! In post war America, Painters withdrew from being hemmed-in as opposed to being crammed-in! But the Art language of pre-war Europe was overstretched whilst the canvas in Boomtown America became loose and flabby!! It was easier to historicise and mourn the prewar Painters and was good for sales too!
But did Painters themselves actually adopt a counterculture, a subterranean angry youth movement that reemerged as youth culture in the 50s and 60s? Is this where the radical modernist Painters reincarnated themselves into? Open vision or none at all? Was this counterculture about rejecting Art post War genealogy of stuffy but elegant buildings that were not communicating their legacy and their point for our departure inspired by them? free open vision did lead to huge 'Land Art,’ just to dust-off the cobwebs of 1950s Art? Indeed, today even Pop Art, the American iconographic trailblazer, is seen as more dependent today on sales than in its originality to Art!!??!! Art should not imprison you under the need for commercial value, it should affirm you! Why should Artists have to follow Art traditions or Art Commissions? Why do we have to compete or withhold from the past? Isn't pressure of Paint, canvas, and image intention (not ending how we may have once originally considered) enough to be working on?? Is it the creative risk to Paint through commercial failure? Why stop a fair fight between the Painter and the image? How else do we compete but with ourselves, for each other??!!
Painting maybe more episodically popular than we would care to admit in the continuous flame of Art from hand stencils 40,000 years ago to today, but there were never guarantees or inevitabilities as an eternal return - maybe similarities are more reincarnations of victories and failures that all need to play out! But we are not bound to it, and we must consent to choose it, more so today than since the end of the last world war! There is always a pendulum swing to both modernism and Painting, of which they often concur, but it is subjected to variables that ignite both the free will to develop in which ever trajectory the Painter chooses,; that is the new Frontier spirit of Art, Paint against curbs or falsehoods to make noble your Art work! But mass popularity by an explosion of Painters in the UK tells us that we are on a unique trajectory that downstream when everybody has chipped-in is completely different from the original vision! A fusion of all Painting, both new, old (I'm now in my 60s) and bold is not as well established as many would want but remains all inspiring for every generation! We may move onwards, but we have created history by our collective Painterly will that espouse the liberating freedom of the medium of Painting, as well as the emergence of a new epoch of Modernist Painting! We are guardians as well as participants by catharsis or as catalysts, where we guard the possibility of Painting beyond binary classification. So, we live in a post Landscape and post Portrait world where they are no longer mutually exclusive, in fact actually more mutually inclusive than ever before! But we also have to negotiate between ancient and 20th century ideological minefields as well as contemporary ideological slippage or heresy!! Like the proliferation of the now multiple number of superpowers of today, the medium of Painting and the eras of modernism will always emerge and then reemerge, and there is still a stigma attached to Painting because it is the oldest medium of Art that re-births generationally! It is like a type of jellyfish that rejuvenates itself and is reborn and never dies!
But Painting is used to improvising either by trial and error or by self-definition! It is our deviation from mortality from which we aspire to be 'a society of Art by Paint'! We are not flawless but enjoy the true burst of a visual encounter that is always idiosyncratic and not repetitive! Indeed, Hitler and Stalin's legacy of overshadowing the 1930s and 40s with the destruction of modernist Painting because they defined it as middle-class intellectual, degenerate act of bourgeois free will, should never colour our judgment! Moreover, it should be a badge of honour that we should celebrate the fact that because Hitler and Stalin hated it! We should acknowledge the fact that many Painters died often in Nazi concentration camps because they were both Painters and Modernists! The 1930s and 1940s were indeed one of the most salient but not remembered acts of rebellion against totalitarianism by Painters!! When we recall those dark days on Remembrance Sunday and on Holocaust Memorial Day, lets pay tribute to those Painters who never made it through the most vile and barbaric dark days of inhumanity!
But Hitler and Stalin didn't kill modernist Painting, not because it is a sacred institution but because it is organic and grounded beneath our feet, and by earth gravity it remains organically sound, grounded and yet defies and goes against the grain! But we will always have our detractors saddling us like an old nag that once was a racehorse that now wants to join its wilder cousins defining its right to roam! No time to dwell on the darkness of dictators past and present, but renounce agony for embracing this Surreal collision of past pain and new gain; after all, we have AI to fend-off today let alone Climate Change social media etc!!!!!
The Surreal back and forth will explain the counterattack against all the lies and deliberate half-truths and misquotations that new AI can deploy! In fact, Art Historians have come under attack too by it becoming a self-cannibalising instrument of self-parody - well that's a shame!! My heart bleeds for them! But it nevertheless disposes us to remember just how much and how frequently vandalism to Art and its inteligensia occurs!!! Perhaps we have to acknowledge that even Picasso retreated away from explaining his work, only saying it took him a lifetime to learn how to paint like a child, (but perhaps he was more like a raging hormonal teenager) flawed by his human limitations and yet resigned to the judgmentalism of posterity, removing any other comments that would come back to haunt him! But Painting is about self-redemption by imperfect undisguised Paint adorning a canvas that once dry will remain vertical on a surface etc. So, it's not how could a failed man rise to such global acclaim, but what was his salvation but through his Art? Hitler was once a failed Artist; Art rejected him and heralded a world that would be exposed to him as a pathological narcissistic maniac!! Art was the first to predict what the world would ignore at their peril! Art has a clear functional aspect, to root-out the non-100%ers as well as exposing the threat and the dangerous!
Art regained where we could take back our Culture by reemergence of the medium of Panting and the values of many who represent a new Art Culture- by mass practitioner involvement, where we have embodied not the American sass but British under spoken resilience and resistance to whim, fashion and entitlement! So, it is ironic that we live in an era of creative traditionalist 'formist' philes whilst we engage our campaign for Painting as a matter to end its low-profile form of redaction. The end of apathy and passivity has begun, and we don't negotiate with plea-bargainers or Conceptual barterers! Those days are yesterdays, where binaryism and/or multiple and endless choice is not so deterministic any more!
We have cross-pollinated and spread ourselves too thinly! When we paint the changes of state (gas to liquid to solid) we also paint threat and danger that many of us have experienced danger on some level, and we do so in order to catapult us beyond our comfort zone. But be a firework and not a grenade! Remain in touch with terra firma, plant your feet firmly on the ground and take aim! Take every episode of Modernism and Paint to be unique but recognise that it will also fade or be ripped apart from the world of dubious reasons once more.... only to rebirth later! Fate will always reside against modernist Painting, but its destiny will be to awake from any hibernation renewed, reformed, and energized, but never the same as its predecessors! It will always mutate, and it will always deviate from its expected flight path. Of course, Modernism and Painting will never be mutually exclusive or mutually inclusive, they'll return in an original symbiotic format recontextualising etc. They are always capable of being a healer and a cleanser of turbulence and monotony, even if it is often accused of being a harbinger of doom that we all missed and avoided in the 1930s, and of course not just a benevolent space for idealists or ideologues! The centre of the Art world of after 2nd WW may have rejected Painting and modernism in America because no one wanted to admit to not recognising the warnings from Painters, and may prefer to redact, omit or counteract the pantheon of Modernist Paintings Art History, so as to displace it with the consumption of amnesia.....well at least Modernist Painting does distort the Post-Renaissance need for literal perspective, so it mutates realism by degrees of the Surreal and the abstract, so it should be used to TATT distorting the Art world and its Art movements often in a Surreal and abstract or conceptual way too????? - But paradoxically, that is their bonding convergence - they often do share at times the irrational and the Surreal in their deliberations and perspectives on Art?? Such mutuality brings home the multiplicity of how different eras of Modernist experimentation may or may not combine or intersect, both by nature and nurture, but they all reset the boundaries by an esprit de cours that can never be permanently expelled, even by TATT!
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