Published on Saturday, May 15, 2021 by Agitator Co-operative

The Continuing Relevance of Figurative and Narrative Painting in Modern Art

by Andrea Kaspryk, Agitator member and co-founder

Representational painting is in some circles, schools and galleries perceived as traditional, perhaps even old-fashioned, and even a thing of the past, while experimentation with materials and alternatives to oil painting have become widespread since the mid-twentieth century in visual art. And I can see for myself when I visit people’s homes that rarely do I see any original paintings in their homes, perhaps as rarely as one would see, say, custom and hand-built furniture. And for good reason: original paintings and hand-built furniture are quite expensive! But painters can offer high quality color reproductions of their oil paintings for sale in order to make their art affordable and accessible to a wider public. In contrast to painting reproductions,  three-dimensional printing of custom-made furniture may also be possible, but it will likely remain costly.

The most recognized traditional American paintings were made in the early to mid-twentieth century by artists, like Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930) and Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942), the giant flowers and modernist-in-style landscapes of Georgia O’Keefe, the colorful scenes by the African American painter Archibald Motley. Mention can also be made of Mexican artist Diego Rivera, whose enormous Detroit Industry Murals were made in 1932–1933 in the Detroit Institute of Modern Arts. Likely, most Americans would be familiar with a famous painting, like American Gothic, which features a dour looking couple, farmers from the Midwest, but they would likely not be able to identify its creator Grant Wood, nor know much about this painter whose life was tragically cut short by alcoholism fueled by living in the closet as a gay man.

If you ask anyone, who is not an artist or avid art viewer or collector, who is a current or recent famous American artist you are familiar with, they may likely not have an answer, or they may pause, and reflect and perhaps mention a modernist or an experimental painter or an artist who borrowed from street art who were last active in the 1980s, like Andy Warhol with his commercial-in-style screen prints and flat graphic art images or Keith Haring’s outlined figures. Or since graphic art and comics for adults have become since the 1980s regarded as a serious medium deserving of treatment as a fine art, some people will know or mention artists like R. Crumb or Art Spiegelman. Indeed, since the 1980s, graphic novels, or representational comics for adults, have attained acceptance and respect as an art form, as well as popularity. Browsing in a bookstore or library, for example, the graphic novel section will be more prominent and popular than the section devoted to traditional and fine art.

When I studied art as a BFA student at the School of the Art Institute from 2010 to 2013, students in the painting and drawing department were offered a chance in their final year to get a studio space they would share with another student. This special course in which students would work independently was named Advanced Painting; this setup reminds me of offering advanced placement (or AP) classes for college credit in high school, and it implies that students taking advanced placement courses are a step ahead of their peers in advancing their education. But in advanced painting most students who signed up for this course stopped painting and instead made sculptures, three dimensional objects, or relied on found objects and materials to arrange or display, or shifted to collage, photography, video, and conceptual art. This situation makes me question the appropriateness of naming this course Advanced Painting; perhaps the title, Beyond Painting or Post-Painting would be more fitting. The few students who continue to paint did so in a decidedly modernist or critical manner, that is, they called attention to the materials and composition itself of their work first and foremost rather than its representational qualities.

An underlying implication of Advanced Painting reflects the position in the visual art world that painting on canvas with a brush is old-fashioned, outmoded, and thus needs to be left behind. It also reflects the modernist perspective on painting which the art critic Clement Greenberg advocated; he succinctly described how flatness becomes a marker of modernist painting:

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment—were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged openly. Manet’s became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surface on which they were painted.*

Modernist-inspired painting becomes even more pronounced in the master’s degree program (MFA) in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute; for example, in the MFA graduation show, almost all the two-dimensional visual art on a flat surface offers some form of experiment or innovation or unusual materials such as glass, spray paint, tape, stencils.

I ended up only taking Advanced Painting for an intensive summer session, but I was not selected to do so in my final or senior year, which is just as well, for I would have felt out of place. Instead, I did vary my usual drawing and painting routine of classes by signing up for relief printing classes like etching, screen printing, woodcut or linoleum relief. 

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Beginning in the early twentieth century with the Dada anti-art movement, which called for an end to traditional art, especially easel painting in reaction to the senseless and enormous loss of life and widespread destruction of WWI, there have also been calls in the visual art world and its schools to constantly innovate and change, to look for new materials and ways to present art. The most radical call for change in art that has become emblematic of revolution against traditional art is Marcel Duchamp’s found object. He held that any object could constitute a work of art, and he planned on displaying a readymade or found object, a urinal, which he named Fountain and identified the artist as R. Mutt in 1917 in New York. Choosing a urinal to display was clearly a Dadaist-inspired satire on the elevated conception of art accorded to artwork in an exhibit, but this particular readymade was never shown. It did, however, appear in Alfred Stieglitz’s photo of it published in The Blind Man, a New York Dadaist journal, and Duchamp made small copies of this original urinal for an exhibit in 1935 and a replica same size urinal in 1951.

I am not opposed to such experimental, revolutionary, alternative or conceptual art; in fact, some of it appeals to me. In fact, I have been to art school shows and academies where the profusion of well-made, technically accomplished rendering of value and detail in realist representational painting is to be sure impressive, but it can often leave a viewer feeling empty. I cannot but help ask myself, Where is the risk-taking with content and ideas, where is the experiment? Thus, I  enjoy the experimentation in painting by artists, like Elizabeth Murray, who makes large, brightly colored, irregularly shaped canvasses inspired by street art graffiti; the comic book drawing-inspired paintings of Roy Lichtenstein; the neon and bright colors of commercial marketing in Ed Paschke’s paintings, and the strangely alluring transmutation of commercial art into fine art by Ray Yoshida. 

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I have provided some discussion of my art education and briefly described the situation of painting in the art world that demands innovation and experimentation. So, what remains in my view the value and purpose in continuing to make and display traditional representation painting?

One purpose of representation painting is to represent figures and people who have been left out, excluded and marginalized from this tradition. It is important to keep in mind that for the most of the duration of European and Western painting from 1500 to 1900, the vast majority of painters were men, so we rarely see a woman’s perspective of the world and themselves and their place in it. As a result of such prolonged marginalization and exclusion, I believe contemporary women painters have a good chance now to comment on and reflect through the visual language of images on themselves, on both their present moment and culture, as well as their absence and/or subordinate and secondary status throughout modern art history. Until we allow and give painters, as well as people of color, as well as gender minority painters, time and a chance to express themselves and their perception of our time in a medium, even if regarded as old-fashioned, such as oil painting, it is premature to declare that figurative and narrative painting on canvas is no longer relevant at all. Kerry James Marshall, for example, comments thus on the absence of black people in paintings: “I had never seen a grand, epic narrative painting with black figures in it, and that’s the kind of painting that I became interested in making—pictures in the grand manner.”** An exhibit called Mastry of Kerry James Marshall’s painting about the African American experience in representational paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2016 proved quite popular, and its art catalog sold out.

Another value of representation painting in my view is the opportunity to explore and share one’s personal identity, and this trend in painting has been evident since the 1980s, as one art critic observes: “This new concern with painting is related to a certain subjective vision, a vision that includes both an understanding of the artist himself as an individual engaged in a search for self-realisation and an actor on the wider historical stage.”***

My recent oil paintings give me a chance to explore and present ideas on my differently gendered or transgender identity, its formation, conflicts and experiences. I would like to believe that they offer a new perspective that has not yet been seen. In terms of influence for my work, I do recognize and acknowledge some degree of popular or folk art sources, such as comic books, which I read as a child, in particular the bold lines and geometric stylization of Jack Kirby; science fiction and fantasy illustration and painting, especially of paperback books, which I read as a teenager and young adult, and iconic, neo-Byzantine images, which provided some relief from my sense of desperate tedium inside Ukrainian Uniate churches as a child. In terms of fine art influences, notable on me are the artists who tap into mythology, like William Blake and Max Beckmann, and Mexican muralists with heroic conceptions of humanity, notably Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera.

As a representational, figurative and narrative painter today, I can learn and apply ideas from the painters in the past from the Renaissance and up through movements such as impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, and cubism. (In a painting I have included in this article, At Odds, the influence of cubism and surrealism is evident in my own personal narrative of gender conflict.) And I can also observe and take into account how recent and current painters are working; for example, not exhausting their time and patience with meticulous rendering (David Hockney), but streamlining the painting process, just as the process of stylistic elaboration has been streamlined in architecture.

One intimidating challenge of figure and narrative painting is that in the West a 500-year-long tradition of such painting began in the Renaissance. This can cause what literary critic Harold Bloom has aptly called an anxiety of influence that today’s painter fears. Thus, they may ask themselves, Has what I’m doing been done before, and more effectively than I can manage? Or am I just a derivative latecomer to the painting scene in which everything has been done? And my answer is Yes.  For the present moment of social and political change that began in the 1960s has allowed for heretofore unseen artists and perspectives to find visual form and expression.

*Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, vol. 4, The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 86.

**Cited in Helen Molesworth, “Thinking of a Mastr Plan: Kerry James Marshall and the Museum,” in Kerry James Marshall Mastry, ed. Helen Molesworth (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, exhibition catalog, 2016), 37.

***Christos M. Joachimides, “A New Spirit in Painting” in A New Spirit in Painting (London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 1981), 14. 

IMAGES:

Kerry James Marshall School of Beauty, School of Culture, Acrylic on canvas, 108” x 158”, 2012

Andrea Kaspryk, At Odds, Oil on canvas, 50” x 32”, 2011

Grant Wood, American Gothic, oil on beaverboard, 30 ¾” x 25 ¾”, 1930

Marcel Duchamp, attributed to R. Mutt, Fountain, readymade, 1917