Tate Britain | Turner Prize History | Issue: Has the prize undervalued the importance of painting?

Has the Turner Prize continually undervalued the importance of painting?

‘Yet again, the Turner shortlist spurns painting in favour of conceptualism.’
William Packer Financial Times 1998

William Packer’s complaint will be familiar to anyone who has taken even a passing interest in the Turner Prize over the last twenty years. The odd thing about his comment is that he said it in a year that a painter – Chris Ofili – won the prize. Ofili is as ardent an advocate of painting as one could wish for: ‘My work and the way I work comes out of experimentation, but it also comes out of a love of painting, a love affair with painting.’ This odd conjunction suggests that complaints about the Turner Prize judges’ contempt for painting may have little to do with the actual shape of the shortlists.

But a first glance at the statistics does seem to support Packer’s complaint. Although the first two winners of the prize were painters (Malcolm Morley in 1985 and Howard Hodgkin in 1985) after that no painter was successful until Ofili won in 1998. The only painter prize-winner after Ofili was Keith Tyson, and there won’t be one this year, with none on the shortlist. But the other half of Packer’s assumption – that it was favouritism towards the work of conceptual artists which caused the neglect of painters – seems more dubious. In fact, the majority of the winners who carried the day between Howard Hodgkin and Chris Ofili weren’t conceptual artists by any definition of the term: seven out of the eleven (there was no award in 1990 for those of you worried about the maths) winners in the intervening years were sculptors.

But perhaps it is fairer not to look just at the winners, but instead to take all the shortlisted artists into account, as it is their work which is seen at the annual exhibitions, and forms the views of most visitors. Counting the number of artists shortlisted for the prize is tricky, as several have been nominated more than once, and some artists are in fact two people (e.g. Jake and Dinos Chapman). But counting each nomination as a single artist, and trying, however baldly, to categorise each as either a painter, sculptor, filmmaker / photographer, or installation artist, produces these figures: between 1984 and 2003 there were eighty-seven artist nominated, of whom about twenty-two were painters, about seventeen were sculptors, sixteen were filmmakers/photographers, fourteen were installation artists, and eighteen belonged to none of these categories. Conceptual art is the most difficult to define, but of the eighty-seven perhaps twenty-three could be included under that heading. These categories are not cut and dried; artists have always been difficult to pigeon-hole into one type of work, and such classifications have become increasingly hard to maintain. But by any reckoning the traditional art forms of painting and sculpture do not seem to have been neglected.

So, the fact that Packer made his complaint the year that a painter won the prize, and the fact that, statistically, painters cannot really be said to have been under-represented in the Turner Prize exhibitions, seems to suggest that it is not the use of paint per se which is the issue, but how the artists use it. Any critic hankering after a more traditional style of painting was unlikely to approve either of Ofili’s technique or the material he used alongside his paint, including the balls of resin-coated elephant dung on which he propped up his paintings. As usual, Brian Sewell offered the most eloquent objections: ‘If anything is to be said for these pictures it is only that all the damned dots and spots are mind-numbing triumphs of idiot industry, and their concentrated tedium is in no way relieved by the random application of pachydermal turds … I am sick of shit in art: has no one in authority the courage to resist it and the infantilism that promotes it.’ But in spite – or perhaps because - of Sewell’s dismay, visitor numbers for the exhibition that year rose by almost fifty per cent, Ofili’s No Woman, No Cry was widely acclaimed in the press and is now one of the most popular works in the Tate Collection.

Maybe the number of paintings shown in Turner Prize exhibitions during the last twenty years bears no relation to the number of painters working in Britain today, but the idea that painting has been ousted by conceptual art is more dubious (unless you accept ‘art that I don’t like’ as a definition of conceptual art). But what this shows is that it is not painting in itself that is the issue. Many people feel that traditional approaches to the making of art remain valuable today, in spite of the introduction of new approaches and materials. The Turner Prize, with its emphasis on the new, appears to denigrate these older practices. The emphasis on the new has long been fundamental to the Turner Prize; Tate Director Nicholas Serota, who has chaired the judges' panel since 1989, made clear last year that the awarding of the Prize is not an objective process: he said its function is to champion the new, rather than to promote all aspects of contemporary art. But though this is not intended to devalue the ‘old’, which is still given prominence in the rest of Tate Britain, for many people the prize remains an affront to their ‘love affair with painting’.

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