You’ve probably heard at some point that painting is dead. It has died a few times, oddly enough. Delacroix made an early announcement after seeing a photograph for the first time in 1839. The Russian avant-garde lined it up for public execution in the early 20th century. The American abstract expressionists manage to kill it all over again and paradoxically resuscitate the corpse before Andy Warhol came along a decade or two later to set fire to the whole lot with his screenprints.
More recently, perhaps taking cues from the apocalyptic worlds of cinema and television, whole swathes of painters were declared “zombie formalists” by the critic Walter Robinson for using gimmicky techniques such as spraying canvases with paint-filled fire extinguishers. And all this before the current crisis threatening the existence of the humble painting: the devouring human centipede machine that is AI.
All these declarations of panic or triumph tend to share one assumption: that the story of painting is one of linear progress toward some kind of endpoint, an ultimate work that is either so magnificent or so revolutionary that everything subsequent is just a doodle or a delusion.
Books such as The Secrets of Painting are at least partly to blame for this. Going all the way back to Vasari’s 16th-century survey of the lives of Italian Renaissance artists, such books tend to plot the course of art history in terms of one heroic figure after another, each making their advance by cracking another problem, be that one of perspective, lighting or plain old verisimilitude. But to give Lachlan Goudie his due, he is at least partly aware of this. As he says himself towards the end of the book, “Art history is not linear. It’s not inevitable that one thing follows another, that the passage of time makes us more sophisticated as painters.”
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Goudie, who presented the 2015 BBC series The Story of Scottish Art and authored a book of the same name, follows the somewhat standard trajectory, albeit with a perspective that is both temporally and geographically broad. Starting with the 36,000-year-old cave paintings at Chauvet, the reader is brought on a journey through ancient Egypt, Song Dynasty China, Italy, Northern Europe and America, with a few stops in the Middle East, Australia and, finally, the digisphere. Many of the usual suspects appear: Giotto, van Eyck, Turner, Pollock.
The structure of the book too would also seem to hold firm to this direction. Each chapter considers a specific work by a canonical artist. Some choices may be mildly controversial: who would choose Rembrandt’s A Man in Armour over one of his magisterial late portraits? Yet despite appearances, the tale that Goudie tells is less the story of history’s greatest paintings as it is the story of paint itself.
Here the stars of the show are the likes of encaustic, a concoction of beeswax and tree resin mixed with pigment in a “hot syrupy mixture” that needed to be handled with great speed but resulted in colours whose luminosity would not be matched until the advent of oil painting 1,500 years later. Or egg tempera, the “putrid paint”, a sulphurous mixture binded with egg yolk the nonetheless results in a stable, durable, satin sheen.
Even specific colours get their moment in the sun: verdigris, a colour created by “alchemy” rather than nature, where copper sheets were stacked in clay pots, covered with vinegar and sealed. “After a couple of weeks the acetic acid in the vinegar would cause crusts of blue-green crystals to start growing, which could be strapped off the copper and turned into verdigris pigment.”
Goudie, a painter in his own right, takes great relish in such details and his wonder and enthusiasm is infectious. Yet they are not simply offered for their own sake. For Goudie, the history of painting is less the story of lone geniuses as it is one of myriad fresh possibilities arriving on the back of technological developments, a process that is ongoing. It is precisely such a perspective that allows him to be equally enthused by the artist Refik Anadol’s digital “pigmentation of AI” as he is about Titian’s use of white gesso.
Yet, worthy as that claim may be, it is not wholly convincing and, such is his devotion to the great masters, it seems unlikely that even Goudie himself is convinced. What is unimpeachable, however, is the writer’s passion for his subject. With a level of audaciousness that borders on cringe, he even includes his own experimentations with the various materials and techniques under discussion. Likewise it is impossible not to be moved by the rapt admiration apparent in his description of the traumatic genesis and development of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes.
Nonetheless, whether getting into the weeds with David Hockney’s iPad paintings, or telling of how red ochre, man’s oldest pigment, came from the intergalactic “ashes of long dead celestial bodies”, Goudie at the very least shows us that there’s more to the story of painting than a single straight line.
