It is astonishing, but painting desperately needs her defenders and explainers. This most primal of arts, which goes back to the very beginning of the human story, seems to confuse and repel much of contemporary civilisation. Like bad-omen comets, proclamations still come of the death of painting.
In an age of cold digital screens and AI-enhanced visual manipulation, we have been told that canvas, oil and pigment are becoming irrelevant, or somehow reactionary. But the public has never really noticed this. They queue up, poor sods, to be transported by the latest Hockney show, or by the current Van Gogh in the National Gallery, staggering out with their heads ringing, too moved to speak, having experienced the emotional punch of, for example, a great symphony played by a great orchestra.
But in our conceptual age, the business of animal-hair brushes, and colours ground from stone, plants, or the broiled bones of oxen, and oils from crushed seeds, worked on to wood or woven fibres, can seem irredeemably old-fashioned, a dying song from earlier times. So painting needs her propagandists. Martin Gayford, along with the New Statesman ’s own Michael Prodger and a talented platoon of newspaper critics and broadcasters, is one of the most engaging of them.
His books have covered everything from the art of Venice to British modernism; he has worked closely with Lucian Freud and David Hockney; he writes, thank God, for the general public, not the Jesuitical theorists of the higher a.