A few words about why painting is still important Automatic translate

It is astonishing, but painting is in desperate need of defenders and explainers. This most primitive of arts, dating back to the very beginning of human history, seems to confuse and even repel much of modern civilization. Pronouncements about the death of painting are still heard, but the news of its death is exaggerated - painting is still capable of creating new worlds.

In the age of cold digital screens and AI-powered visual manipulation, we are told that canvas, oil and pigment are becoming irrelevant or somehow reactionary. But the public has never noticed. They queue, poor souls, to see the latest Hockney show or the current Van Gogh show at the National Gallery, and emerge with their heads pounding, too moved to speak, having experienced an emotional shock like that of, say, a great symphony performed by a great orchestra.

But in our conceptual age, animal hair brushes, paints made from stone, plants or roasted ox bones, oils from crushed seeds applied to wood or woven fibres may seem unacceptably old-fashioned, a dying song of an earlier time.

So painting needs its propagandists. Martin Gayford, along with Michael Prodger of the New Statesman and a platoon of talented newspaper critics and broadcasters, is one of the most fascinating of these. His books cover everything from Venetian art to British modernism; he has worked closely with Lucian Freud and David Hockney; he writes, thank goodness, for a general public rather than for the Jesuit theoreticians of the high art academy.

Gayford understands that painting has often gone in and out of fashion: in his new book, he writes that the mid-1980s was an interval “during which the art form was marginalised, declared dead or inanimate – as it has been, it is easy to count, more times than it has been since the 19th-century French artist Paul Delaroche first declared painting dead in 1839.”

The strength of this book is that it moves from the great artists of the past – Gayford seems to have seen everything and thought deeply about everything – to contemporary artists such as Oscar Murillo, Jade Fadojutimi, Cecily Brown, Eric Fischl and Frank Bowling, with whom he interacts and about whom he speaks with enthusiasm.

So, through chapter after chapter of colour relationships, brushwork, composition, subject matter, space, relationships with photography and so on, Gayford creates a lively conversation between modern painting and the work of predecessors such as Giotto, Titian and Cézanne. This, of course, requires a lavishly illustrated book, and I would say that at £35 the asking price for such a magnificent volume is well worth the price.

Writing about the masters is a safe and well-trodden business, but Gayford approaches it with an appealing skepticism. In a chapter called “What Does Rothko Mean?” he confronts the Russian-American artist’s insistence on the sublime, spiritual nature of his painting, and the significance of the fact that so many people weep in front of his canvases. He quotes the late New York critic Clement Greenberg, whom Gayford met in 1990, when Greenberg was 81: “People who talk about meaning! I don’t care about meaning. I can’t handle it, I can’t discern it – and when I do, I think it doesn’t matter. When I hear the word ‘spiritual,’ I want to pull the safety off my gun.”

Asked which of them is right, Gayford admits, “Like Greenberg, I perceive nothing but color and form and traces of paint when I look at a Rothko.” This is admirably honest, but for many art lovers for whom a Rothko is a gateway to heaven, or oblivion, or somewhere great, it is heresy. Gayford, however, goes on to explain that the longer he spends in front of Rothko’s yellow-and-red painting (1952-53 and “rather irritatingly titled Untitled”), the more he sees, perceiving subtle shifts and nuances of touch and color as the painting itself takes over, so that as I looked at it more and more, I wasn’t thinking at all. My consciousness was filled with the painting; my experience was just looking at it.”

This is as clear a description of the experience of looking at a great painting as I have ever read. Just as someone who has never heard a Mahler symphony in a concert hall, but only through headphones, has never experienced Mahler properly, so you cannot truly experience a painting through the illustrations in even the best book.

You have to be there, body to object, in front of the work for a decent amount of time, with full concentration. Then you really "fill the painting" and everything changes. And that’s really all you need to know - not the endless intricacies of art history, not the arguments about how certain paintings were made. The main thing is just to be there.

Gayford, of course, is a professional, paid, lifelong contemplative, so he sees things others might miss: how Picasso anticipated the “vibrancy of the 1960s,” for example, in the acidic, electric color combinations of a 1931 still life that also obscures the form of his current lover; or the close connections between the markers of the British-Haitian artist Bowling and the late Titian; or the eerie echoes between Picasso’s infamous painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and the deeply religious El Greco of the early 1600s.

These revelations are a lot of fun, and I’ve learned a lot about paintings I thought I understood. But there’s nothing particularly complex or “inner” about them. Writing well about art is hard because it’s about clarity. It’s about making complex and nuanced reactions to complex works as simple and obvious as possible.

Perhaps I am a biased reviewer, because Gayford speaks enthusiastically of many of my personal art heroes, from the Italian master Giotto to the English abstract artist Gillian Ayres, and also discovers artists I didn’t know but will now seek out. After discussing the great Velázquez and his Las Meninas (1656), he concludes that painting can captivate you, captivate you, and hold you for life:

“It can contain profound paradoxes that you know without having to think about, at least in words, because looking is a way of thinking. Every successful painting creates a new world into which we can immerse ourselves as long as we are interested in looking at it.”

Fortunately, these new worlds are still being created around us by passionate, determined artists. As someone who tries to make a painting every day – mostly by painting, and when I can, by writing – and who finds it the most challenging and intriguing thing I do in my week, more challenging even than writing for the New Statesman, I often wonder where to begin in explaining what I’m talking about.