(A continuation of the article posted earlier)

Why did painting disappear? And why has it reappeared in such abundance?

One reason is rarely voiced: The postwar rise of New York’s cultural dominion — and its more recent fall — explains a lot of it.

Painting was always said to be “a New York thing.” After World War II, when the New York School bumped the School of Paris off the charts, a few sculptors were present at the coronation. But mostly they were painters — Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko, Kline, Still, Frankenthaler, Guston, Newman, Hartigan and many more.

Back then the bond between Modern painting and New York was intense. Eventually, it swelled to imperial proportions.

The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, initially slow to respond, got on board. The otherwise adroit 1970 history of the New York School by NYU professor Irving Sandler (himself a former painter and gallerist) is titled “The Triumph of American Painting.” It was axiomatic: Masterful American art was painting, and masterful painting meant the New York School. A local event was inflated into a national phenomenon, claiming worldwide stature.

But that was then, and this is now.

The triumph of American painting was actually a thrilling neighborhood affair with great public relations. So was the subsequent skirmish over painting’s death.

These vicissitudes mattered in Manhattan, where the triumphant painters’ watering hole at the Cedar Bar gave way to the anti-painting grim reapers’ club at Max’s Kansas City. But neither posture prevented Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke in Germany or Ed Ruscha and James Hayward in L.A.from painting up a storm.

What actually was dying was not painting but its complement — a provincial enslavement to the primacy of the New York School. As the 21st century approached, surging globalism meant the slow, irreversible erosion of New York as contemporary art’s preeminent center.

First Los Angeles and Cologne, then London and Berlin, lately Beijing and Mumbai joined the party. It turns out the old argument over the freshness-or-obsolescence of colors smeared on canvas was less about painting’s legitimacy — really, how can an artistic medium be illegitimate? — than about shifting centers of power…

In fact, I wonder whether the ingrained confusion about painting and assemblage sculpture isn’t itself a legacy of capitulation to the power of the New York School. Starting with assemblage represents the assumption — mistaken, I believe — that 1950s painting is all locked up in the history books. Pimping the primacy of assemblage sculpture offers L.A. art a veneer of independent, maverick style.

But that’s just silly — and redundant too. Painting is by definition maverick.

Painting, unlike most image-making practices in industrial or post-industrial society, is already pretty much a solitary job. Rarely do production assistants, teams of fabricators and collaborators gather in a painter’s studio, as they do for movies at Paramount, TV shows at HBO and at the far-flung art factories established by video artist Bill Viola, sculptor Jeff Koons or installation artist Ann Hamilton. Usually it’s just one person in a room, with a flat plane and some colors, trying to juice the corpse and make it dance.

That’s the real legerdemain facing anyone determined to be a painter, whether the student who asked the original question gets the support of her teachers and peers or not. Painting isn’t dead — or, more precisely, it always has been and always will be. The perpetual trick is to give a painting life.

Christopher Knight
Los Angeles Times