For decades, most "advanced" commercial galleries and museums have focused on ev

erything but painting. These bastions to art were over-flowing with installation
s, photo-based work, conceptual art, new media, digital and video art. But all h
as changed; exhibitions, art theory, and the art-market have witnessed in the pa
st few years a resurgence of painting.
As is the nature , from time to time in the art world, activities such as painti
ng have been poorly valued in relation to other visual arts disciplines. The dem
ise of painting claim has been postulated at regular intervals since the middle
of the 19th century when, in response to the rise of photography, the art critic
Paul Delaroche declared, "from today painting is dead". Within a broader contex
t G.W.F. Hegel asserted "art is, and remains for us, on the side of its highest
destiny, a thing of the past", for Malevitch it was specifically tied to the des
truction of the subject, whilst Rodchenko, referring to his three monochrome can
vases of 192 concurred, "this is the end of painting, "These are the primary col
ours. Every plane is a discrete plane and there will be no more representation".
and for Duchamp, it was about overcoming "the retinal". In more recent times (s
ince the 1970s) this notion that "painting is dead" has become an insistent refr
ain from some artists, academics and critics; however, this notion does not amou
nt to the extent that others imagine. The implicit assumption that painting has
died is a fallacy. Throughout these debates (and despite the ascendancy of insta
llation art, performance, photography, video and computer technology) painters c
ontinued to paint and paintings never vanished.
A plethora of "isms" abounded during the 1960's, and into the 1970's in the USA,
and within European counterparts. These decades presaged a fundamental change i
n thinking about art. Major shifts occurred, not only in artistic spheres, but a
lso in the cultural sphere of intellectual theory.. the time was ripe, and Marce
l Duchamp's subversive ideas found a willing audience. The anxieties of the time
(1960's and 1970's) condensed most specifically around what it meant to be a pa
inter, and the dubious spectre that anyone could be an artist and anything could
be art. Not surprisingly, the traditional notion of applying pigment to a surfa
ce, and art in general, as a specialist craft broke down.
In course of any art movement, the passage of time and its very success renders
the radical insight routine, as formally exciting discoveries became natural and
familiar features of the landscape. Beginning as radicalism and visionaries, th
eir success exposes them to the danger of becoming the orthodoxy, if only to the
ir own members, with their own structure of deadening conformity. However, despi
te this state of affairs, that did not mean artists stopped painting during the
60's and for much of the 70's, artists that had appeared to drop out during this
time continued to paint, independent of fad and convention, and as we shall see
, they were to come back with a vengeance.
Beginning in the late 1960's, new directions in art emerged and merged - diverse
post minimal styles, pattern and decoration painting, and new image painting. T
he 1980's brought other new tendencies; neo-expressionism, media, deconstruction
, and commodity art. In response to these challengers artists aimed at restoring
the credibility of painting on canvas undertook a variety of strategies and sty
les. Eclecticism and appropriation of past styles became common in paintings; as
well, paintings were generally on a monumental scale, and highly gestural with
expressive brushwork.