Painting After Postmodernism: Belgium - USA

The Grande Dame of American art criticism on contemporary painting

Painting after Postmodernism: Belgium - USA investigates why so many believed Marcel Duchamp when he made his infamous statement of 1918: that painting was dead. After all, as this book goes on to show, Duchamp was wrong. In the decades before and after World War II, Picasso, Matisse, Miró and the New York School continued to make monumental mural scale paintings on the level of the greatest art of the past. However, in the politically radical 1960s and 1970s it once again became fashionable to toll the death knell for painting, now perceived as the product of bourgeois culture. In its place galleries and museums defined the avant-garde as conceptual art, video, mixed media and installations, all of which denied painting its position of pre-eminence. Painting was reduced to just another form of Postmodernist endeavour. Barbara Rose investigates how contemporary artists rediscovered the art of painting, juxtaposing works from Belgian and American artists to create a cross-cultural dialogue.