Brush aside the rumor. Painting is not dead

You might caption today’s column The Three Faces of Lee Miller owing to two recent books and a movie about the Surrealist photographer, none of which concur with the other.

Consider the biopic “Lee” released in the UK last month. It describes a fashion model who became an acclaimed WWII correspondent for Vogue magazine.

Then there’s last year’s book “Lee Miller Photographs” – more than 100 images that served as a preamble to the movie. Kat Winsel, starring as Miller, wrote the forward, recounting the photographer’s backstory.

While studying painting at the Art Student’s League in New York, Miller turned to photography because she saw painting as a dead art. Winslett quoted her saying, “All the paintings had been painted as far as I was concerned.”(I’ll get back to this in a moment).

Finally, there’s the 2021 novel about Miler “Age of Light” by Whitney Scharer. But given its focus on the photographer’s failed love affair with Surrealist photographer Man Ray, the book title seemed less about photography and more about Miller’s awakening to Man Ray’s attempts to control her.

The term “the age of light,” then, also speaks for all the female artists who fell for a famous male artist who turns out to be controlling, too. I’m thinking of Dora Maar’s relationship with Picasso, and Francois Gilot’s relationship with Picasso. Their stories form an age of light shed on sexism in the art world.

But my big takeaway from all of the above is her saying, “All the painting has been painted,” as if it can be wrung dry like a wet towel. I’d been hearing that death knell for painting since I was in art school many moons ago.

In fact, painting’s obituary has been foretold for close to 200 years, ever since photography was invented in 1830. Don’t believe it. Painting has been around since before we knew how to write. It’s not going anywhere.

Miller’s view about painting and photography impels me to say that neither art form is better than the other. One obvious difference comes down to when a work is finished.

Release the shutter on a camera and you’re done. When is a painting done? Unlike photography, painting can be left unfinished. Da Vinci was known for this, leaving fewer than 20 completed works.

One of my favorite tales about an unfinished painting was recounted by art historian Heinrich Wilhelm Tichbein talking about the 18th-century artist Pompeo Batoni.

Despite the trappings of antiquity in Batoni’s work, he was known as man of deep feeling who loaded his figures with expression at a time when emotion gave way to reason.

As the tale goes. when Tichbein said goodbye to Batoni after a visit to his studio, he spotted an unfinished painting of Coriolanus and His Mother on a wall and asked him why he didn’t finish it.

Coriolanus, you may remember, is the tragic figure in Shakespeare's play Coriolanus about a Roman general known for his military prowess but also disdain for the common people of Rome. This failing led to banishment from Rome.

Batoni’s answer to Tishbein’s question went like this: “It moves me too much for me to finish it. Just look at Coriolanus’s mother, whom he has found amidst the throng of women. He goes up to embrace her, and she pushes him away and says:

‘You beast! You were born in Rome, Rome nourished you and gave you strength and now you want to let her die of hunger and thirst. That city, where I fed you from my breast: If you want to go to Rome, the road to it goes right through my breast.’”

In painting, each brushstroke is a decision, a commitment.

When Jackson Pollock was asked how he knew a work was finished, he famously replied, ”How do you know when you’re finished making love?” Completing a painting is like that.

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