THE DEATH OF PAINTING?

THE DEATH OF PAINTING? I posted here about Jackie Wullschlager’s observation that: ““Landscape in 20th and 21st century art is less than unfashionable – it has dropped off the radar screen.” I found the observation surprising. Now, I have been surprised again in reading a review by Sanford Schwartz in the New York Review of Books of books by Peter Schjeldahl, who has been the art reviewer for the New Yorker. Not only have landscapes dropped off the radar screen. Schwartz writes that: “[S]urely one of the key aspects of the altered art terrain of these last four decades is the collapse of painting as art’s preeminent form” and that: “[A]nyone involved in contemporary art understands that painting, in part because artists, in effect, experimented the life out of it, is today merely an option for a young artist, and not one full of possibilities.” Schwartz quotes Schjeldahl himself as having written dismissively that painting “‘survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.’” I can only repeat what I said about the death of landscape: I had not noticed this trend.