Painting

• 1. Introduction

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  In Leang Karampuang, a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, there is a scene of human-like figures crowding around a pig. It measures 36 by 15 inches. In July 2024 the journal Nature reported that this scene is roughly 51,200 years old, the oldest known painting in the world. Before that record, other Indonesian caves had already pushed the date back: a pig in Sulawesi dated to over 45,500 years ago, a pig-hunting scene in the Maros-Pangkep karst estimated at 43,900 years, and a figurative animal in the cave of Lubang Jeriji Saleh on Borneo, perhaps as old as 52,000 years. Painting is, at its plainest, the practice of applying paint, pigment, color, or other medium to a solid surface. The person who does it is called a painter. Yet that simple definition hides a strange history. How did an art form built to record the visible world survive the camera that could do it faster? Why do painters speak of color the way musicians speak of chords? And how did beeswax, egg yolk, ground glass, and even bodily fluids all become ways to make a picture?

• 2. The Camera And The Revolt

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  In 1829 the first photograph was produced, and painting lost something it had held for centuries. As photographic processes improved and spread in the following decades, painting was deprived of much of its historic purpose, which was to provide an accurate record of the observable world. A run of art movements answered that loss in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Dadaism each challenged the Renaissance view of the world. Eastern and African painting did not undergo an equivalent transformation at the same time. Both continued a long history of stylization rather than breaking from it. Modern and Contemporary art then moved away from craft and documentation in favor of concept. This shift has not stopped living painters from continuing to work. Writers had repeatedly declared painting dead, yet its vitality in the 21st century defies those declarations. In an epoch defined by pluralism, there is no agreed representative style of the age. Artists keep making important works in a wide range of styles, and their merits are left to the public and the marketplace to judge. One of those later currents was the Feminist art movement, which began in the 1960s during the second wave of feminism and sought equal rights and opportunities for female artists internationally.

• 3. Color As Music

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  Color, made up of hue, saturation, and value, dispersed over a surface is the essence of painting, just as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music. Color is highly subjective but carries observable psychological effects, and those effects can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, white is. Goethe, Kandinsky, and Newton each wrote their own color theory. The word "red" reveals the gap between language and pigment. It can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is no formalized register of colors the way music agrees on notes such as F or C sharp. For a painter, blue is never just blue. It can be phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, Cobalt blue, ultramarine, and more. Wassily Kandinsky pushed the music analogy furthest. He called his most spontaneous paintings "improvisations" and described more elaborate works as "compositions". He held that "music is the ultimate teacher", and went on to begin the first seven of his ten Compositions. Hearing tones and chords as he painted, he theorized that yellow is the color of middle C on a brassy trumpet, and that black is the color of closure and the end of things. In 1871 the young Kandinsky learned to play the piano and cello. His stage design for a performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition illustrated his synaesthetic idea of a universal correspondence of forms, colors, and musical sounds. Jackson Pollock pointed at the same interest in his 1950 painting Autumn Rhythm (Number 30).

• 4. What A Painting Is

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  In 1890 the Parisian painter Maurice Denis declared that a painting, before being a warhorse, a naked woman, or some story or other, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order. That sentence reframed what painting was about. Many 20th-century developments, including Cubism, became reflections on the means of painting rather than on nature, which had previously been its core subject. The argument over painting's worth is ancient. Plato disregarded painters in his philosophical system, holding that painting cannot depict the truth. To him it was only a copy of reality, a shadow of the world of ideas, and nothing but a craft, similar to shoemaking or iron casting. Leonardo da Vinci answered from the opposite side, saying "La Pittura e cosa mentale", that painting is a thing of the mind. Aesthetics, the study of art and beauty, mattered greatly to 18th- and 19th-century philosophers such as Kant and Hegel. Kant distinguished between Beauty and the Sublime, giving priority to Beauty, and though he did not refer to painting directly, the idea was taken up by painters such as J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. Hegel placed painting among the three "romantic" arts, alongside Poetry and Music, for its symbolic, highly intellectual purpose. Iconography, the study of a painting's content rather than its style, gave the discipline another tool. Erwin Panofsky and other art historians first sought to understand the things depicted, then their meaning for viewers at the time, and finally their wider cultural, religious, and social meaning. The painter and writer Julian Bell continued this thinking in his book What is Painting?, and in Mirror of The World he wrote that a work of art seeks to hold your attention and keep it fixed, while a history of art urges it onwards, bulldozing a highway through the homes of the imagination.

• 5. The Many Recipes

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  Heated beeswax with colored pigments added: that is encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting. Metal tools and special brushes shape the paint before it cools, or heated tools manipulate the wax once it has set. It was the normal technique for ancient Greek and Roman panel paintings and remained in use in the Eastern Orthodox icon tradition. Egg yolk binds the colors in tempera, a permanent, fast-drying medium whose paintings are very long-lasting, with examples from the first centuries CE still surviving. Egg tempera was a primary method of painting until after 1500, when it was superseded by the invention of oil painting. Oil paint binds pigment with a drying oil such as linseed or poppyseed oil, and the oil was sometimes boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense to make prized varnishes. The transition to oil began with Early Netherlandish painting in northern Europe, and by the height of the Renaissance it had almost completely replaced tempera across most of Europe. Ground glass fused to metal gives enamel its surface, fired at 750 to 850 degrees Celsius. Limoges enamel was the leading centre of Renaissance enamel painting, and in the 18th century enamel enjoyed a vogue in Europe, especially for portrait miniatures. Acrylic paint suspends pigment in acrylic polymer emulsion and dries fast, becoming water-resistant once dry. Between 1946 and 1949, Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden invented a solution acrylic paint under the brand Magna paint. In 1963, George Rowney became the first manufacturer to introduce artists' acrylic paints in Europe, under the brand name "Cryla". Watercolor suspends pigment in a water-soluble vehicle, most often on paper, and finger-painting with watercolor paints originated in China. Fresco, whose name derives from the Latin word for fresh, is mural painting done on plaster, with buon fresco worked into wet lime mortar and a secco painting done on dry plaster.

• 6. Past The Brush

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  Andy Warhol made his Oxidization series by covering canvases with metallic paint and having his assistants and friends urinate on the still-wet surface. Bodily fluids have a longer place in painting than that single example suggests. Blood from menstrual periods has been used to paint images, and the contemporary artist Sarah Maple has used her own menstrual blood to create portraits, working to erase the taboo around the topic of periods. Collage stretched painting in another direction, beginning with Cubism, and it is not painting in the strict sense. Some modern painters press metal, plastic, sand, cement, straw, leaves, or wood into their surfaces for texture, as in the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer. A growing community of artists now uses computers to paint color onto a digital canvas with programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter, and these images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required. Digital painting is not computer-generated art, because the computer does not automatically make images through mathematical calculations. The artist still uses a personal painting technique to create each piece. Aerosol paint took painting onto the street. In the late 1970s, street graffiti writers' signatures and murals grew more elaborate, and a unique style developed as a factor of the aerosol medium and the speed required for illicit work. Many now recognize graffiti and street art as a unique art form, and specially manufactured aerosol paints are made for the graffiti artist.

• 7. Schools And Subjects

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  Roger Cardinal, an art critic, coined the term outsider art in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut, the "raw art" label created by Jean Dubuffet to describe art made outside official culture, with a focus on art by insane-asylum inmates. Outsider art has since become a successful marketing category, and an annual Outsider Art Fair has taken place in New York since 1992. Style itself works in two senses. It can mean the visual elements and techniques that typify an individual artist's work, or the movement or school an artist is associated with. Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism, marked above all by self-consciousness, which led to experiments with form and a drift toward abstraction. Impressionism was the first example of modernism in painting, a school that initially worked outdoors, en plein air, rather than in studios. The Impressionists were at first rejected from the government-sponsored Paris Salon, so during the 1870s and 1880s they organized yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues, timed to coincide with the official Salon. In 1863 the Salon des Refuses, created by Emperor Napoleon III, displayed all of the paintings the Paris Salon had rejected. Across the world, distinct traditions grew with their own subjects. Miniature paintings were the primary form of painting in pre-colonial India, done on a special paper known as wasli. Mughal miniature painting emerged from Persian miniature painting, itself partly of Chinese origin, and developed in the court of the Mughal Empire of the 16th to 18th centuries, taking a much greater interest in realistic portraiture. Kangra painting, named after Kangra in Himachal Pradesh, took the erotic sentiment, Shringar, as its focal theme, drawing on the love poetry of Jayadeva and Keshav Das about Radha and Krishna. Pichwai paintings, made mainly in Rajasthan, depict stories from the life of Lord Krishna and served to narrate his tales to the illiterate. The Bengal School arose in the early 20th century during the British Raj, reacting against academic art styles, and Abanindranath Tagore turned to China and Japan to promote a pan-Asian aesthetic, incorporating the Japanese wash technique. One of the best-known portraits in the Western world is Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo.