On 9 August 1839, the French government officially presented to the world the miraculous process of chemical photography that had been invented ten years earlier by the painter Daguerre. Painting died on that fateful day. The painter had killed painting. From then on painting no longer had a purpose beyond a self-reflective solipsistic muddling that for the next 150 years would tumble and slop into a morose and romanticized past time. The much celebrated figures of the post-realist era were nothing more than elevated color-daubing athletes. Painting had become a sport, along the lines of staple jumping and fox hunting. Degas, Cezanne, Monet, Pissarro, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Vlaminck, Braque, Picasso and yes even Dali and DeChirico, who despite a valiant last effort, all joined the ranks of frolicking dabblers, were now content with pushing around colored paste for effect. Simply look at a Toulouse Lautrec painting to be convinced of the sporting attitude. What fun, what carelessness, what derision.
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| Henri de Toulouse Lautrec |
Prior to the invention of chemical photography, which had the magical property of allowing for multiple identical reproductions of an image, painting held a lofty position with a noble purpose. Painting's fundamental societal role was to depict reality as we see it and to picture a new reality that we could only imagine. It enabled us to see our idealized world in a mirror and therefore admire it and make corrections where necessary. After photography, painting was no longer concerned with building the world but instead became an overnight destroyer of worlds. Out of spite at having lost a seat at the royal table and the bishop's antechamber, painters turned into a pack of savage mercenaries intent on pillage and rape. Pillage and rape they did, first by mocking photography with Impressionism, then tearing the last remnants of realism to pieces with Fauvism and finally killing off any pretenses at representation with Cubism.
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| Early Cubist Painting, Pablo Picasso,1912 |
The word re-presentation here is important to examine. It connotes taking stock of reality and then seeking to understand it as if to hold it in one's hand in order to present it to the viewer as a fully functioning system. With Cubism instead, the system is torn asunder and all we see are broken parts. Although at first it can seem interesting to investigate the wreckage, in the end it amounts to rubbernecking at a disaster site. After Cubism, all that is left are increasingly useless fragments of meaning such as Dada, Expressionism and finally the tombstone of painting which is Abstract Art. Does there exist a more stark and haunting grave site than a Motherwell, a Rothko or a Cy Twombly?
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| Mark Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton |
That painting is dead is still hard for us to understand, much less accept and so the art world rambles on about this or that sub-movement as if staring at the dirt long enough will raise a corpse. Certainly subsequent cultural expressions such as Pop Art and Graffiti do include some form of painting as part of the arrangement but in reality these belong to the only true post-modern canon which is Conceptual Art.
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| SEEN, New York City Subway, early 1980s |
Mysterious and seemingly invisible by it's very nature, Conceptual Art can of course include painting as a facet of meaning, although very often in a derisory way. The invisibility of Conceptual Art however is its greatest superpower, as it is no longer concerned with simply being a mirror. We have better tools for that now.
© B♥! * Beau Tardy Artist. 2026
