The Evolution Of Contemporary Painting in the Face of Claims of "The Death of Painting"

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Art - History of Art, grade: 92.4, , course: BA(Hons), Fine Arts, language: English, abstract: Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s the pronouncement that painting was dead was often heard. In 1966 Andy Warhol had an exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery that featured hot pink and yellow wallpaper with large images of a cow's head. It was as though Warhol were saying that the painting was expensive wallpaper. "Andy killed painting," was the popular conventional wisdom of the day.

But painting did not die, only the limited assumptions of what a painting was, or could be.
Painting, freed of the restraints of a modernist creed, is reborn into an art form that is not only more accessible to the masses but also more multifaceted than it has ever been before. Once more the emergence of new art forms has forced painting to greater heights just as the arrival of photography did more than a century ago.