Contemporary Painting

World of Art

by Suzanne Hudson

This international survey of contemporary painting by a leading author features artwork from over 250 renowned artists whose ideas and aesthetics characterize the painting of our time. The twentieth century brought radical changes in art―including the shift from modernism to postmodernism―which were accompanied by fierce debates regarding the place of painting in contemporary culture. Contemporary Painting argues that the medium has not only persisted in the twenty-first century but expanded and evolved alongside changes in art, technology, politics, and other factors, developing a unique energy and diversity. Renowned critic and art historian Suzanne Hudson offers an intelligent and original survey of the subject, organized into seven thematic chapters, each of which explores an aspect of contemporary painting, from appropriation to the ways in which artists address and engage the body. Hudson’s inclusive and compelling text is sensitive to issues such as queer narratives, race, activism, and climate and demonstrates the continued relevance of painting today. Bringing together more than 250 eminent artists from around the world, such as Cecily Brown, Julie Mehretu, Theaster Gates, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Takashi Murakami, and Zhang Xiaogang, this is an essential volume for art history enthusiasts, students, critics, and practitioners interested in discovering how painting is approached, reimagined, and challenged by today’s artists. 245 color illustrations

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

Published April 13, 2021

About the author

Suzanne Hudson is the author of two literary novels, In a Temple of Trees and In the Dark of the Moon. Her short fiction has been anthologized in almost a dozen books, including Stories from the Blue Moon Café and The Shoe Burnin’: Stories of Southern Soul. Her short story collection Opposable Thumbs was a finalist for a John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her latest work of short stories, All the Way to Memphis, brings characters from the South to life in a way any reader will know and love. She lives with her husband, author Joe Formichella, near Fairhope, Alabama.

Reviews

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

la bibbia per chi studia pittura.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Contemporary Painting' is a tricky term but it is probably best understood as 'painting' (more conceptually than traditionally understood) that follows modernism and post-modernism and that will eventually cease to be contemporary simply because time passes.

This Thames & Hudson book is a competent if not particularly exciting guide to what, from the outside, looks like the utter mess that is art under late liberal capitalism - an almost hysterical attempt to be constantly new under market conditions, often while critiquing those conditions.

The book itself is well illustrated by Hudson but she gives us little more than the thematic representation of a catalogue of artists, most of whom get no more than a long paragraph. She cannot escape but manages to minimise use of incomprehensible 'International Art English'.

It is a useful addition to any library as reference work but it has the unfortunate effect of pointing up the hollow core of an immense amount of technical and conceptual 'creativity'. It is an explosion not so much of talent as of attempts to be noticed in a volatile market.

The book indicates just how fragmented and socially shattered cosmopolitan urban Western culture has become with two extremes co-existing - cynical market exploitation and a rather narcissistic and increasingly futile political art centred on a posturing identity politics that talks to itself.

The conceptual often indicates a one trick pony of an artist, some perhaps clinically unstable, or an inability to do no more than become what my grandmother called 'The Great I Am'. The idea is transient, useless except as status or investment within a close-knit self-referential world.

The political is worse. Simplistic, unsophisticated, assertive and often ending up as merely the cause of vicious reaction from other aspiring artistic social justice warriors wanting to introduce censorship and something close to Byzantine iconoclasm to an art world of trust fund posturers.

There is some serious talent here and some interesting work but one constantly feels as if the best are treading on eggshells in order to be 'relevant' and not attract the disapproval of the wolves who lurk in the jungles of New York intellectual life and its sad global suburbs.

It is all very disheartening. Capital rules and few of these artists really escape it but who does? The masochism of neurotic capitalists allows them to be critiqued as villains but not in any way that actually changes anything. This is a cultural dead end. It epitomises the death of a system.

This is also not effective politics, de-linked as it is from national community or grand narrative. It is a closed world, a parasite on a system correctly identified as exploitative yet failing to understand that the same system that feeds them exploits those that the artists patronise.

In a world where half the population is 'populist' in some form or another, there is no meaningful populist art, no connection to the working class and only rare if important connection to the urban poor. The politics is often childish, 'infantile' as Lenin might have used the term.

Wasting energy (literally) on international art events and travel, the rising artist too often seems to be lost in the spectacle, rootless, hungry for acclaim, fundamentally trivial, ready to latch on to the latest simplification if that simplification is one shared by the idle but emoting liberal rich.

The text reminded me why I no longer visit galleries or retain membership of museums or institutions like the Royal Academy, happy to leave their survival to those people who seem to be entranced by artists as brands, art as novelty and simple messaging and ideology as art.