The renegade art school proving that painting is not dead

As conceptual art becomes the academic orthodoxy, the new Turps art school is fighting for the place of painting in contemporary art

I thought painting was supposed to be dead. It seems impossible to nail into its casket. Wherever I look this autumn, paint is being splashed about. From Turner and Constable to Rembrandt, Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter, great painters are strutting their stuff.

Even Marcel Duchamp, inventor of the readymade and, some would say, the artist who knocked painting off its pedestal, is examined in a less familiar light as a painter by the Centre Georges Pompidou this autumn. Duchamp proves its an empty cliche to think painting is irreconcilable with the multiform art of today. Painting has such a diverse history encompassing such varied phenomena as Chinese landscapes on silk, medieval frescoes and Jackson Pollock that it obviously has the capacity to evolve in infinite ways as the world changes.

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