To paint en plein air would, in any case, would have been nearly impossible, with tear gas wafting over the hazy streets, while the vantage from an upper balcony would have only afforded a greater sense of distance. Though for this figure to be on the front lines would have appeared merely ridiculous. Where painted ephemera was concerned, perhaps piled upon the barricades, it may have served at least some purpose to the battle at hand. The un-painter of modern life arrived, in a perverse coincidence, when that original task might have been revived, rather than remaining to be seen as yet another bourgeois relic. Too young to have passed, though perhaps not soon enough. Writing now, in the first week of May, the announcement of this death is made with neither regret nor any irony intended, nearly 45 years to the day. Taking 1968 as both a historical and poetical-political reference point, we identify this as the charged moment in which the un-painter of modern life was born. In many ways the wall had been dispensed with almost entirely. By the end of the 1960s, with conceptual, process and immaterial art, with earthworks, performance, film and video being practiced by nomadic and post-studio artists, the writing, and not painting, was on the wall. In less than a century’s time this formulation-the painter of modern life-would have been set aside, or at least seemingly so, supplanted at first by abstraction and the camera, and eventually by all things un-painted. As Baudelaire well knew, language is not alone as a symbolic realm, for so too is its painted counterpart. Such reflection, the fixing of an image in time, would not always be welcome, for realism could easily serve the ends of allegory. The notion of an artist who serves as « the painter of modern life, » a figure upon whom befalls the task of representing, or even mirroring, our ephemeral passage in the world comes to us from Charles Baudelaire in the 1860s. The Un-Painter of Modern Life, Age 45, Has Died
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