Learning to See Unlearning to Paint Six Centuries of European Painting

For six centuries, European painting was a language that had to be learned. Line, volume, anatomy, light, and color passed from workshop to workshop with the patience of those who inherit a craft. The journey that follows traces that thread from its beginnings to our own day, the painters who built it, the works that defined it, the paths that language took across the centuries, and the places it drifted towards in its final stretch. It is a long story told in a few minutes, with many unavoidable omissions, and with the intention of returning to the viewer not a judgment, but a way of looking. The beginning answers a concrete need. After a thousand years of Byzantine painting, flat figures on gold backgrounds, without weight or depth, a group of Italian painters decided to recover the representation of the visible world. In 1305, Giotto introduced the weight of the body onto the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. A century later, Massaccio applied mathematical perspective in the Holy Trinity of 1427, and Botticelli added the elegance of drawing in The Birth of Venus. In the north of Europe, Jan van Eyck perfected Flemish oil painting and signed the Arnolfini portrait in 1434. Albrecht Dürer carried that precision into German engraving. At the beginning of the 16th century, three painters coincided in Rome. Leonardo da Vinci brought drawing to the sfumato of the Mona Lisa. Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512, and a quarter of a century later The Last Judgment, a surface of 13 meters by 12. Raphael arranged in the School of Athens an imaginary architecture in which Plato, Aristotle, and all the philosophers could stand together. And in Venice, Titian replaced Florentine drawing with a painting built from the brushstroke itself. In less than 200 years, Europe had learned to represent the body, space, light, and character. When a language is fully mastered, it tends to speculate about its own limits. Parmigianino painted a virgin with an impossible neck. El Greco made the apostles look like flames. This is not decadence, it is virtuosity upon virtuosity, painting beginning to speak about itself. The Baroque was born of urgency. The Council of Trent asked artists for a direct and emotional art. The answer came from Rome in the year 1600. Caravaggio painted the calling of St. Matthew inside a tavern, with apostles dressed as ordinary people and the light entering through a real window. In Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens produced flesh and glory with a technical ease that still astonishes. His pupil Anthony van Dyck traveled to England and created, at the court of Charles I, the model of aristocratic portraiture that would rule Europe for two centuries. In Seville and Madrid, Diego Velázquez painted ordinary people as if they were kings, and kings as if they were ordinary people, all the way to Las Meninas of 1656. In Amsterdam, Rembrandt van Rijn turned chiaroscuro into a way of portraying the soul. In Delft, Johannes Vermeer applied the same principle in a quieter voice, with women reading letters by a window. And in Rome, Artemisia Gentileschi used tenebrism to paint Judith beheading Holofernes with the precise fury of someone who knows exactly what she is painting. The 17th century left Europe a lesson that would prove difficult to repeat. The craft can carry truth into the last corner of the canvas, without idealization. The 18th century lowered the tone. The French aristocracy asked for an art that was more intimate, more decorative, more amiable, painting for private cabinets, not always for the salons where guests were received. Antoine Watteau invented the fake Galanti in his embarkation for Sathira of 1717. Jean-Honoré Fragonard took the style to its most jubilant point in the swing. François Boucher painted Madame de Pompadour as a pagan goddess. The Rococo is the last European painting conceived without guilt. The French Revolution demanded morality, not pleasure. Jacques-Louis David turned the canvas into an ethical instrument. In 1784, three Roman brothers swear to give their lives for the Republic on the swords their father holds out to them. Geometry, sculpture, civic virtue. Later he would paint Marat assassinated in his bathtub with the dignity of a Christian martyr and Napoleon crossing the Alps on a rearing horse. His disciple Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres took drawing to an almost inhuman degree of polish in La Grande Odalisque. Neoclassicism is not just a style. It is technical perfection as an absolute ideal. Throughout the 19th century, the annual Paris Salon, the only official system of exhibition, would admit only works that respected that canon. What did not enter the salon, quite simply, did not exist for the market. On that bolted door, without anyone yet realizing, the fracture was already incubating. While the Academy ruled, another generation began to dispute it from within. In 1819, Theodore Géricault exhibited the raft of the Medusa seven meters of recent shipwreck with survivors piled together after the authorities had abandoned them. Eugene Delacroix continued the rebellion in 1830 with Liberty leading the people. In Spain, Francisco de Goya had already painted, in 1814, the 3rd of May, a nocturnal execution where the condemned man opens his arms in the shape of a cross. In England, J.M.W. Turner dissolves entire ships in storms of light. In Germany, Caspar David Friedrich places a solitary traveler before a sea of fog. Romanticism introduces a change that will not close again. The painter ceases to be an illustrious craftsman and begins to be an individual consciousness. In 1849, Gustave Courbet painted a funeral in his native village of Ornans on a canvas of six meters, a heroic format reserved until then for kings and battles, in order to bury an anonymous peasant. Jean-Francois Millet applied the same principle in the fields with the gleaners of 1857. Honoré Daumier did it from the satirical press. For the first time, the subject of the painting is the ordinary citizen, without elevation, without justification, and the craft is exercised intact. Realism does not challenge drawing or volume. It simply affirms that the craft also serves for this, and perhaps above all for this. In parallel, Jean-Léon Jerome and the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny took the descriptive virtuosity of academic Orientalism to a technical brilliance that still leaves the viewer breathless. And in Paris, an American born in Florence and trained in the great European workshops, John Singer Sargent, painted in 1884 the portrait of Madame X. The pose, the bearing, the black satin, the transparency of the skin, signing thereby one of the absolute peaks of European portraiture just before the fracture. The avant-garde criticism of the following decades would condemn these painters to oblivion. But there, in silence, the craft of the 19th century reaches its last technical summit. The fracture has a date. In August of 1839, in Paris, Louis Daguerre publicly presented the daguerreotype, the millennial monopoly of painting over the representation of the real had just been broken. 24 years later, in 1863, the annual Salon rejected an unprecedented number of works. Emperor Napoleon III ordered the opening of a parallel hall with everything rejected, and the Salon de Refuses was born. Among the canvases hung, there was Luncheon on the Grass by Edouard Manet. The scandal was enormous. But something more important happened. For the first time, a generation of painters confirmed that the official system no longer represented all of French painting. In 1872, Claude Monet painted Impression, Sunrise, and the dismissive adjective with which the critics tried to discard the group, Impressionist, remained as a name of honor. After him, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin began to transform the Renaissance principle, to paint what is seen, into its opposite, to paint what is felt while seeing. From here, unlearning becomes a program. In 1907, Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and, together with Georges Braque, Dismantled Perspective. In 1915, Casimir Malevich exhibited a black square on a white background. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp sent an industrial urinal to an exhibition entitled It Felt. The question that piece raises, what makes something art, will run through the entire century. In 1931, Salvador Dali painted A Few Melted Clocks in a Landscape of Cadaques. In less than 40 years, the pillars built over six centuries are, at least in part, deactivated, not by accident, but by decision. After the Second World War, the center of art moved from Paris to New York, and with the move came a change that is rarely told. Art began to function as a financial asset on a large scale. Jackson Pollock dripped paint onto canvases on the floor of a barn on Long Island. Declassified documents confirmed that the CIA financed, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, international exhibitions of abstract expressionism throughout the Cold War. Andy Warhol exhibited 32 identical canvases of Mark Rothko painted rectangles of color that occupied entire walls. The auction houses adapted their calendars to contemporary art. The modern era of the market had begun. Before looking at the final stretch of the journey, it is worth introducing a technical fact that rarely appears in catalogs. The public price of a work auctioned at Sotheby's, Christie's, or Phillips is not only what one buyer pays. It is also the value at which the rest of the same artist's works, kept in private warehouses, in patrimonial holding companies, or in free zones, are officially appraised. It is the certificate from which deductions for museum donations, guarantees against private banking, and declarable assets will be calculated. The four most important free zones in the world, Geneva, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Monaco, store, according to estimates compiled by the European Tax Observatory, more than $100 billion in art. Inside those compounds the works are legally in transit. They pay no customs duty, no VAT, and they can change hands without ever leaving the building. In the Geneva Freeport alone, almost half of the contents is art. When a collector donates one of those works to a museum, in exchange he receives a tax deduction calculated on the last public valuation. It is worth holding on to this framework. What follows is not a whim, nor a joke. It is the ultimate consequence of a system functioning exactly as it has been designed. It is also worth holding on to the fact that the craft of the 19th century has not disappeared. In London, Lucian Freud, grandson of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, spent between 1995 and 1996 many hours painting Sue Tilly, a supervisor at a British unemployment office. The painting is called Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, and the model appears naked, asleep on a worn-out sofa, without any idealization. In 2008, that work sold for $33,600,000, a record for a living artist at the time. Another from the same series would reach $56 million in 2015. In the same generation, Jenny Saville paints monumental female nudes. Her Propt, of 1992, was auctioned in 2018 for more than $12 million, a record for a living female artist at the time. And they are not the only ones. In recent decades, a new generation of figurative painters, in Spain, in Italy, in the United States, in Northern Europe, has begun to recover, in silence, everything that the academies of the 20th century had buried. Drawing from life, the study of anatomy, the matter of oil paint, the patience of the workshop. Those names deserve another journey, in another video. Here only fits, for now, the ellipsis. And, in the autumn of 2024, in the main hall of Sotheby's in New York, a work titled Comedian goes to auction, by the Italian artist Maurizio Catalin. It consists of a fresh banana fixed to the white wall of the room, with a strip of silver duct tape. What the buyer acquires is not the banana. The banana will be periodically replaced, but a certificate of authenticity signed by the author, together with precise instructions for fixing the fruit to the wall. The previous estimate was $1 to $1.5 million. The auction lasts 7 minutes. The final price, with commissions, comes to $6,240,000. The buyer is Justin Sun, a Chinese entrepreneur, founder of the cryptocurrency platform Tron. He pays in crypto. Two weeks later, in a hotel in Hong Kong, he peels the banana from the wall and eats it in front of the cameras. The act travels the world in 48 hours. Six centuries earlier, Jado was introducing the weight of the human body onto a wall in Padua. 400 years later, Caravaggio was lighting the face of a tax collector with the light coming through a Roman window. 200 years after that, Goya looked into the eyes of a man about to be shot. 100 years later, Courbet buried a peasant with the dignity reserved until then to kings. The question that closes this journey is not whether a recent work is art or not. That discussion will be settled by time, as it has settled so many others. The question is another. What happens to a craft when, for six centuries, an entire civilization builds it with patience, transmits it from workshop to workshop, perfects it down to the last detail of flesh and light, and then, in less than a hundred years, decides that it no longer needs it? And what happens to those who, at any point along the way, kept on, and still keep on, exercising it in silence? The answer is not here. It is, possibly, in what each of those who have reached this ending decide to look at the next time they walk into a museum.