What a Painting Can Be About
The pictorial language offers four answers to what painting is for. They are not chronological steps.
Representation is a convention
In Art and Illusion (1960), Gombrich argued painters begin with a schema. This is an inherited way of drawing an object, corrected against reality. "Making comes before matching." Representation is a learned code, which means it can be refused.
Abstraction and its origins
The usual account credits Kandinsky with the first abstract painting around 1910.
Key milestones include:
- 1906: Hilma af Klint starts painting non-objective works in secret.
- 1911: Kandinsky publishes Über das Geistige in der Kunst.
- December 1915: Malevich exhibits Black Square.
- 1917: De Stijl is founded.
Abstraction sacrifices denotation. In return, it gains focus on surface, scale, and colour. Clement Greenberg (1960) argued painting's unique domain is flatness.
Conceptual and contextual practice
Sol LeWitt's "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" appeared in June 1967. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. His wall drawings are instructions executed by others.
Contextual painting instead draws meaning from location. Daniel Buren has used alternating stripes of 8.7 cm since 1965. The uniform stripes ensure meaning comes entirely from their placement.
| Practice | Gives up | Buys |
|---|---|---|
| Representation | The claim that the code is natural | A shared language a viewer already reads |
| Abstraction | Denotation of particular things | Surface, scale and colour as the subject |
| Conceptual | The maker's hand as the site of value | Ideas that can be executed by anyone, anywhere |
| Contextual | The autonomy of the object | The site, the institution and the frame as material |
Common pitfall: treating these modes as a ladder of progress. They are simultaneous choices. That means the painter must decide which trade-offs suit the work.