What Painting Is

Elkins, a painter turned art historian, argues that conventional art history badly undersells what actually happens when someone paints, because it treats pictures primarily as vessels of ideas, symbols, and social context while ignoring the physical substance of paint itself. He proposes alchemy as an unlikely but productive vocabulary for this gap, since alchemists spent centuries developing a rich language for describing how liquids thicken, curdle, separate, and transform into solids, exactly the kind of process a painter enacts every time oil meets canvas. Paint, in his account, is a residue of the painter's body, its viscosity and drying time recording gestures, moods, and decisions that no written description of a finished image can recover.

This matters because it relocates the meaning of a painting away from pure iconography and toward the sensory, tactile knowledge that only practicing painters typically possess, knowledge that Elkins believes conventional scholarship, however sophisticated about symbolism and context, routinely fails to notice or articulate. His close readings of painters like Rembrandt and Titian try to make readers feel the greasy, sticky, curdled materiality of paint as intensely as its represented subject matter.

Who should read it

Painters, art students, and anyone who has stood in front of an old master painting and sensed there was something happening in the paint itself that gallery labels never mention will find this rewarding, though readers wanting a conventional survey of art history should look elsewhere.

About the author

James Elkins is an American art historian and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who trained as a painter before turning to writing about art, perception, and visual culture.