Periodic reports on the death of painting have appeared for well over a century, with little sign of abatement.
Always the idea is the same: Technological advances give other means for doing what painting does, thereby questioning its relevance and, more, its continued existence.
But painting does continue, despite the best of arguments about why it should not. And, inevitably, the most extravagant claims accompany such painting, attempting to turn a fundamentally conservative act into something new, radical, even revolutionary.
Motives of the marketplace are often behind this, as to the collecting temperament painting is still the quintessential visual art. Yet artists have other, less obvious reasons for persisting in a practice that does not communicate as well as it once did and frequently seems out of its time.
This month the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago examines such reasons in the work of four very different painters: Judy Ledgerwood, Jim Lutes, Kay Rosen and Kevin Wolff. All are from the Chicago area, though, in the main, they are not involved with the fantastic imagery that has shaped the Chicago tradition.
Organizers Susanne Ghez and Joe Scanlan sought work that resolved the eponymous question in ways that were not specifically regional. The reasons the artists gave themselves for painting are reasons found not only in Chicago but all over the globe.
That Chicago has such painters perhaps indicates it has finally come of age. For one test of a major art center is that it can accommodate artists who help form an international mainstream as well as artists who develop hermetic styles in isolation. Now, for the first time in decades, Chicago has both.
Ledgerwood is a painter who began as a landscapist with conceptual underpinnings. She meant the large scale of her work to refer to a kind of machismo in 19th Century representational art. Her faint, misty images recalled paintings by members of the Hudson River School and Claude Monet.
For some time, Ledgerwood emphasized the concepts behind her painting more than the painting itself. Like many younger artists, she recoiled from the idea that she was only a painter.
Then, about a year ago, she started to feel more comfortable with her semi-abstractions, if not abandoning the conceptualism at least no longer grafting it on. This soon allowed her to hook into the American abstract tradition of the `50s and `60s.
The two mural-sized canvases on view are more ”about” that pleasure than ever before. They still have reminders of Ledgerwood`s conceptualism but also a stronger sense of the beauty achieved when one`s focus is tighter. Now she paints to exercise an impulse that has moved close to art for art`s sake. The works Lutes first exhibited put him in the line of an earlier generation of Chicago painters, the Imagists. His pictures were perhaps more autobiographical and socially oriented, but their figuration also was monstrous, and for that there has always been a local audience.
In several works, Lutes himself appeared as the subject, a shambling and bloated Everyman. This gave the paintings a chilling atmosphere. But his painting as painting was something else. Usually it looked troubled and expressionistically hot.
Lutes painted with arabesques that he eventually freed from a descriptive purpose. His last gallery show about two years ago had such loops coiling wildly across each surface, obliterating representational scenes.
The paintings he shows now are a bit less dense, allowing some of the images-a crib, a landscape-to come through. It seems as if Lutes is after a balance between abstraction and figuration, requiring both in equal measure. He continues painting to develop this language into the instrument by which he may best tell unsettling stories.
Rosen paints words and phrases in various type faces on (generally small) canvases in different colors. The paintings are poised and cool in appearance, the wordplay is warmly good natured and often fun.
Text is a big deal in art today. The lengthier and more abstruse it is, the better. But Rosen is close to an epigrammatist, using relatively few words that come clear after the spectator sounds them out. Her work is not, then, forbiddingly cerebral. If the sense of the words isn`t apparent, their sound invariably gives help.
Sometimes the paintings look like examples of concrete poetry, where the placement on the page is as crucial to the overall effect as the meanings of the words themselves. But one need not go outside of visual art to find an antecedent for what Rosen has done. Ed Ruscha also has played with words on canvas since the late 1960s. He is her probable source.
Still, Rosen does not find the tradition that Ruscha represents venerable enough. It seems important for her to be part of the tradition of painting as a whole, as if only completeness can give validity. So the act of painting is closer to her than to most conceptualists. She paints to be adopted into an old and distinguished family.
Wolff is part of the tradition of academic figure painting. His images of disembodied arms and hands have as their antecedent a study of severed limbs by Theodore Gericault. That image came scarcely 20 years before the invention of photography, the advance that first sounded a death knell for painting.
Wolff uses photography to generate painting. Then he works from life, pairing mirror images of his arms and hands with renderings of the same appendages directly observed. He is basically a realist, although his paintings on view are so disorienting that one remembers them as having an eerie glow.
Part of the strangeness comes from how Wolff presents the limbs as abstractions. You know precisely what they are, yet their placement and reflection nudge you in a different direction. It is like staring into a mirror until familiar characteristics are replaced by the lineaments of a stranger.
This legitimately qualifies as mystery of the everyday, but Wolff paints in so deadpan a manner that he undercuts it, leaving spectators somewhere in between academic realism and a hallucination. In our time, that is just about what it takes to get ”sophisticated” people to look at figure painting. So Wolff paints to revivify representations of the figure and, in a sense, reclaim the human body for use by contemporary artists.
Why paint? The most sensible response is as critic Arthur C. Danto wrote: ”Why not?”
