Flirting with Death: Dispatches Along 19th to 21st Century Painting

Painting has suffered at least half a dozen major existential blows since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, starting with Hippolyte Delaroche declaring “from today, painting is dead” in 1839, when he first set eyes on daguerrotypes. From this precedent, debate still abounds today as to whether photography, with its more effective means of documenting events and immortalizing faces as well as democratizing the whole imaging process — and now allowing anyone to embrace the once elitist talents of painters with a point-and-click camera — killed off painting.

There must be more to painting than the territories claimed by photography, since it certainly hasn’t lost any of its appeal to audiences, nor has it lost any market value. On the contrary, painting seems evermore the dominant commodity for commercial galleries, art fairs, and auctions. Of the ten top-selling artists at auctions worldwide, nine are painters.¹ 1 - Source: Blouin Art Sales Index, (accessed March 1, 2012), http://artsalesindex.artinfo.com. Each time painting is declared dead, more kudos and column space are dedicated to the deceased. If violent scenarios make for good television, perhaps the same is true in the art world. Today, so many paintings adorn the walls of art institutions that one is tempted to wonder if this art form was ever under serious threat, or if all this death talk was just an elaborate marketing campaign.