Indeed, instinct and freedom allow us to look at great Paintings from stela Painters and ask our own set of questions: where did they change tack? What did the Painter do to not take a different or indifferent subject matter to reduce or expand our perception of it? What did he see that we didn’t in his first decisions or when he was finishing his work? When and where did he definitively reach a cross-roads or turning point in rejecting elements or characteristics that he then changed his mind on or stuck too? What did he miss? Could the Painting have been better, or would he have overdone it? What was his priority — technically or formally? Did he or did he not finish? Does he like the final piece? Did it work? Why should I ask such impudent questions? Because I believe that the most error ridden era of the history of Art is the 19th to the 20th centuries modernisms!! And their 21st century version also could have that flexibility. In fact, it was a magnet for human folly and unhinged beauty too that drove its most originality! The hundreds of decisions made in each Painting of these eras of modernism (they may be markedly different from each other, but they connect as a school or oeuvre of Art that stretches almost 300 years up to the present day) provide us with the most human of ‘perfection in crisis’!
The agony of Modernist Painting that had confronted extremism was never given full credit for its bearing witness and its contribution to destroy Fascism and Stalinism! But it too had been through other crises and exceptional hardships that began with Europe being unable to take fundamental transformations in its stride! It wasn’t experienced enough to handle immense turbulence internally and externally! Mass production of change had comprehensively destroyed any chance of an international winding down of Imperialism to a more globalised platform and upgrade for mutual and not adversarial benefit! We had to wait until the Berlin wall came down in 1989 for that to happen. But have we learnt all about our transformations or are we still catching -up?? Or are we on the cusp of a quantum leap into AI and the global cyber threat? 1930’s or 2020s?
So, what did we do and what didn’t we do? Well back then not only were major transformations of narrative (political, social, and economic) but that at every level, demographics were being strangled by their own industrialisation and imperialist over-stretch, but Europe was degenerating into mass production of war and trigger happy inter-aristocratic conflict. The world produced extremism and consumed it like a terrestrial hungry black hole, leading centuries of slow progress into the Pied Piper of mutual destruction on steroids — there is not much that can be rescued from terror on the planet except that by 1945, conflict on the battlefield was made redundant by absolute nuclear apocalypse! We had learnt that hate, ignorance, and the vile siblings of psychopathy in Fascism and Stalinism led to nuclear technology being invented decades before it would otherwise have reared its ugly head! Not much solace if you are one of those that almost lost all of your ethnicity under dehumanised evil, and not much solace to those millions who were tortured beyond the count of grief well after world wars by mass PTSD — millions never held to account, millions terrorised in their nightly nightmares well into the 21st century!
There was never an escape from trauma, and Painters were left traumatised in the very modernism that they had fought for literally and with the Paint brush against Hitler and Stalin etc, then abandoned in a new continent, free and inspirational but never able to fully connect with the positivism and vitality of Capitalism USA style. Slumped in the back streets of individual despair, Art Modernism US style was absolutely a world away from its European ancestors!
But the 21st Century isn’t in such turmoil, and a 21st century may be being led by a Painting mass practitioner Art where its ‘modernism’ is being led by a more woman than male Painters in a challenge to TATT that TATT could not have anticipated in the 1980s! These original new voices are groundbreaking augmenting as well as consolidating new priorities, new image making and a new message that is not simply about the ‘male gaze’ of the 1980s or other male concentric issues, but about making stories and histories visual that were once only largely passed down orally but could find a medium of homegrown talent in the multiverse harnessed within the framework of self-definition. This vibrant individualism finds its own spectrum from the more pedestrian comfortable all the way to quantum leap inflamability, a barely contained explosion or implosion stretching the boundaries of risk and counter risk, the provocative to the ironically banal, the angry to the liberated etc.
The 19th and 20th centuries versions of modernism were too preoccupied with defying the Renaissance and its dialectic, but it would be undercut by mass production of cheap prints, mass communication, the post Europe American version of its brief liaison with modernism via abstract Expressionism and in part Pop art, and the 1980s obsession with ‘breaking-down Soviet absolutism’, via Soviet cultural brutalism of Art being undermined by Western relativism and the structuralist shaggy-dog story that could undermine any dialectic at a drop of an argumentative hat! But todays 21st century modernist Painting involves not the cultural hedonism and diversity rather than diffusion that followed the end of the Cold War, but the popular individualism of a horizontal movement relying on the explosion of new Painters impacting unprecedentedly on the cultural horizon of the 3th decade into the 21st century in the UK!!??!!
Instead of the market defining g the Art world, the Practitioner led new demographic supersedes and self-refines work that entrepreneurialize (not in financial terms) and evangelise the non-invisibility of the hand that’s painting a new selfie of self-Art and the landscape of seminal reversion to the rudiments of visual metaphor, that conjoins all Paint Art from 70, 000 years ago of Paint in caves to a new but ancient fingerprint and footprint of being literally grounded and held by the past to explore not as restrictive form boundaries, but as markings as road signs to encourage and the Painter to follow or deviate. Indeed, this is addressing the widening gap between the numbers of the public who view Art and the numbers of those who produce it, which determines a need for galleries and Museums that should be dedicated purely to today’s Painters and their Paintings. But this broad church that includes the demure versus the confrontational, is the very random and unhinged beauty that TATT fears the most I Why? because it produces the very instability and insecurity of the very Art Market that has undermined and tried to pacify and exclude contemporary Painting, not just from before the end of the Cold War but from after it too! Well, what goes around comes around but without the agonising political terrors of Fascism and Stalinism! But wait…. Europe is in the grips of a War in Ukraine, and Israel and Hamas are torturing their mutual civilian populations!!!?? Is this the way for multi-nonliteral Paintings to have to grapple with? Not again!!?!! Or is it a challenge and an honour to do so?
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