Painting is back

Those who didn't know that painting was out of favor may be amused to learn they are so far behind that they're in the vanguard again.

In the past two decades, cutting-edge galleries and museums have focused on everything but painting. The halls were chockablock with installations, photo-based work, conceptual art, new media, and digital and video art.

But a fundamental shift has taken place. For a survey exhibition of contemporary work at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Charlotta Kotik and her cocurator looked at thousands of works by emerging artists. Ultimately 198 artists from Brooklyn - the current hot spot for new work - were chosen for the show, which teems with works in oil, acrylic, and watercolor.

"The taste of the art world is changing," Ms. Kotik says. "Suddenly painting is allowed to exist again."

"We're living in an extremely fruitful and exciting time for those captivated by contemporary art," says Dan Cameron, senior curator at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art. "I've been in the trenches for 20 years, and there's more good art being produced in more places than I can remember at any one time. We're in a sort of Golden Age."

No one claims painting ever disappeared. But the critical spotlight had shifted, leaving its practitioners in the dark.

The first hint of this demise came in the late 1960s, when the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth declared painting dead. When it revived in the 1980s with neo-Expressionist painters like Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, and Eric Fischl, Mr. Kosuth remarked that it was still dying but taking longer than expected.

In the 1990s, his prediction seemed true as paintings became conspicuously absent from the forefront of critical discussion. Theory, more than objects, prevailed.

"Photography was pervasive, and before that, installation was ubiquitous," says Nicholas Baume, chief curator at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art.

Now that painting's been declared "undead," the question arises: Can an art form that's been around for centuries still express the zeitgeist? Or "Is it a vampire, feeding off the blood of its history?" as John Weber, curator of education and public programs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, puts it.

In other words, is the new painting more about nostalgia - a throwback to a time of greater stability - or is it vital and original, shaking up one's assumptions and forcing the viewer to feel and think about the present?

It depends upon whom you ask.

"They are not tackling very difficult issues, although they are first-rate stylists," Robert Storr, professor of modern art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, says of the new painters.

Professor Storr sees none of the younger generation attacking social injustice like the established painters Gerhard Richter or Leon Golub. "New narrative paintings by younger artists are not addressed to large world problems. The new work is much more antiheroic or deliberately modest in ambition."

But some aren't afraid to tackle issues in the headlines. Terry Marks, a committed figurative painter who has a solo show at Brooklyn's Koi Gallery through June 2 certainly feels that impetus. "I saw the Towers fall on 9/11," she says. "It was a huge kick in the pants to get on with important stuff. It's now or never."

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