CONTEMPORARY FIGURE PAINTING FREE

'When people started to become interested in my work in the late 1980s, painting was completely off the agenda,' says Peter Doig, a 49-year-old Scot living in Trinidad. Scattered from Brooklyn to Trinidad to Leipzig, Germany, the artists represented in these pages are renewing 'a belief in painting,' says Laura Hoptman, senior curator at New York City's New Museum of Contemporary Art. What we're seeing now is very interesting. Today nobody cares about that.' For the young generation, he says, 'the polarization between abstraction and representation that existed in the last half of the 20th century is just meaningless. 'Thirty years ago, there was all this talk of the end of painting. 'The excitement around my profession right now is tremendous,' says Joachim Pissarro, a curator of painting and drawing at New York's Museum of Modern Art. They are mixing the human figure and other recognizable forms with elements of abstraction and ambiguous narrative in ways not seen before. But in recent years, a number of contemporary painters have begun reaching back to the roots of modern art to find new modes of expression.

With a few obvious exceptions-Pop Art, Photo Realism and artists such as David Hockney-representational or figurative art was largely considered a thing of the past by the end of the 20th century. By the 1960s, conceptual artists-inspired by Marcel Duchamp and other Dadaists of the 1920s-adopted the view that art should aim at the mind, not the eye, turning out paintings in which the idea behind the work was more important than the work itself. In their 'abstract' works, the paint itself became the subject. Picasso also used photographs to paint his 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with each figure seeming like a multiple exposure, seen from different angles at the same time-a decisive step into Cubism.Īs the 20th century progressed, painters such as Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock abandoned the concept of art as representation altogether, producing canvases that contained no recognizable objects at all.

CONTEMPORARY FIGURE PAINTING FREE

Matisse disfigured the figure with his bulging Blue Nude in 1907, painting from a photograph to free his imagination and break habits formed by drawing from life. Then, one hundred years ago, Matisse and Picasso made the radical paintings that would define a new era of modern art. They began using photographs for inspiration-cropping their images as the camera might, for example, and introducing distortions of perspective based on the camera's lens.

Some of their contemporaries, including Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, took a different tack.

Impressionists such as Monet and Renoir, rejecting the static, mechanical imagery of photographs as well as the stale academic painting of their time, set out to paint their own impressions of how the eye perceives light and atmosphere in nature. 'If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions,' wrote French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire in 1859, 'it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely.' Artists have been trying to come to terms with photography's implications ever since. The death of painting was first predicted in the middle of the 19th century, when the advent of photography seemed to snatch reality out of the painter's hand.

Contemporary figure painting