Painting is art to use pigments to trace on a surface of the images constituting a coherent unit carrying direction. Spots painted on rollers of site prehistoric of Farmhouse of Azil, where the pure sign is not indissociable stone which carries it, with works of the group Supports/Surfaces of the years 1970, during millenia, it is a whole pictorial language which is set up, then is closed again on itself not to be any more but one mirror of the only artistic step.

Pictorial space defines work, its contents, its direction. The supports and the techniques used are related to this space, and their employment is not always generating of evolution for the pictorial language. The practice of the oil-base paint allowed the sfumato (modelled intended to suggest nuances), but painting out of tube, if it supported the development of the painting of outdoor, therefore did not create it.

It is well rather the power of the images and the color and their bonds ambiguities with reality which constitute the history of painting. The field of painting knows a geographical and chronological extension which follows so to speak that of humanity. It includes practices with the techniques and the extremely various functions. Dyeing of rocou whose Oyampis of Guyana coat the body with paintings decorating the catacombs of Rome to I ^er century, of the painted silk banners of the marchioness of Dai in China of the VII ^E front century J. - C. with the frescos of the house of the Mysteries with Pompéi (I ^er front century J. - C.), of the faces of insane seized by Géricault with the Clarinet of Georges Braque (1913), the term of “painting” recovers a multiple reality of which it is not possible to return account in a homogeneous way. One can however define what the Occident called “painting” since Antiquity: which techniques were used, which speeches accompanied these techniques, which place granted each culture to him which followed one another.

Parallel to the mural fresco has and has secco developed a painting of small size, said rest, of which no specimen former to I ^er century apr. J. - C. did not reach us. These paintings, carried out with softening or the polish, generally on wood supports, sometimes covered with fabric, will be replaced little by little, during the course of the XVI ^E century, by the oil-base paints on fabric. Thus was born what one calls the table, i.e. a pictorial layer posed on a plane support via a preparation allowing the adherence of the pictorial layer the support.

Beside the ivory, glass, stone (marble, even slate, lapis lazuli) and copper - which requires a special preparation with garlic or oil -, bases most frequently used are wood and, especially, the fabric.

Before tracing on the bottom prepared the broad outlines of his composition to the coal of willow or the charcoal and to harden the drawing with ink and the brush, the painter in general lengthily worked his subject. The preparatory drawings of detail, then overall, sometimes the modello, are regarded as crucial steps.

The setting with the square on a paperboard with size is the most used process for the transfer of the drawing on the web. But the graduated rulers, the compasses, the plumb lines, and of the more complex processes as the tended wood framework of cross sons or the obscure room, will be used by all the painters, even largest, such Leonardo da Vinci or To last. Some artists, like Gainsborough, will not hesitate to model figurines for better seizing the plays of shade and light. Lastly, as of its invention, photography will be perceived and used by some like an invaluable auxiliary of work.

To the XVII ^E century, the saving in a stage - the direct passage of the preparatory drawing to the fabric - involves the multiplication of the “repentances”. The painter, changing idea, does not scrape what it does not like any more but is satisfied to superimpose pastings. Often, into growing old, the pictorial layer wearing or the transparency increasing, the first manner becomes again visible. It can also be highlighted in illuminant the table in low-angled light, which shows the reliefs of the pictorial layer.

It is on prepared wood or the fabric that is posed the coloured layer, which is composed of the pigments - which can be either mineral, or organic - and of the binders. Since the primitive ones until the end of the XVIIe century, the pallet of the pigments remains reduced. Beside the white (of lead, of zinc) and black (of coal, of smoke), one meets only blue, the green, the yellow and the red. It is only to the XVIII ^E and XIX ^E centuries that the chemical discoveries will enable him to grow rich.

The pictorial layer is protected by a varnish. To the XV ^E century, a simple layer of egg white passed on the surface. Then it is a mixture of oil and resin which will be used to protect the table and to intensify the reflection of the light.

But, in 1883, Huysmans rents the artists of the Living room of independent to have given up the use of varnish to adopt the “English system”, which consists to leave the flat and to cover it with glass. 

The brush, in hairs of squirrel, mongoose or marten, or out of silk, is the most important instrument. Certain painters, like Leonardo da Vinci, manufactured them themselves.

The brush is distinguished from the brush in what its hairs, stiffer and larger, are equal length, instead of being frayed at a peak; moreover, the brush is of form punt and widened. The palette spattle, or spatula, is used to mix the colors on the pallet before on the web extending them using the brush or from the brush, but it is sometimes employed to paint in full paste. 

If the fabric, prepared or not, remains of a very widespread use, any material is used today with the wire of research like support of painting: wood, paper, metal, the sheet, the veil of Nylon, concrete. One thinks of Raymond Hains with his notice boards (the Gipsy, 1960-1968), of Buraglio with his Settings squared (1974) or of Claude Viallat with his Covers (1977).

It is probably its rupture with the representation of reality, or at least its complex relation and between a new type and the reality, which gives to painting a new statute within arts.

From now on disinvested of a speech - policy, monk, social or esthetic -, it exists only in his report with the painter; image of itself, trace of the creative gesture, it does not speak any more an other thing but of its materiality. The meticulous care carried during centuries with the subtle mixtures and proportionings of the pigments and binders is forgotten. But the fundamental bond which linked the technical control and the creative power remains.

The agglomerated resins of Raoul Ubac (Ground, 1967), pasted papers and sands of Paul Rebeyrolle (Conditioning, 1977) or the spangles of Robert Malaval (Linda Velvet, 1980) are constitutive of the message.

Acrylic painting knows a particular favor for its multiple qualities: in addition to its low costs, it dries quickly, and thus allows the application of successive layers in a reduced time; it is preserved well and been able to be applied to many supports - the fabric, paper, the paperboard, wood, the coating, plywood. Also it advantageously replaces the gouache, oil or softening. Since its appearance, it was used as well by the representatives of the COp art as by the minimalists or holding them of the hard-edge painting. Pierre Alechinsky in his black Work (1969) employs the acrylic resin on paper strengthened on fabric, but this form of painting meets also the favor of a Robert Malaval, a Bernard Rancillac or Judit Reigl.

Pictorial space is closely related to the function reserved for painting. When this one is purely decorative, it forms with the space in which it fits a homogeneous unit which returns only to itself.

Narrative painting and symbolic system of the churches and the synagogs of the first centuries of our era take seat on their grounds, their walls and their vaults in a kind of meaning topography, but the internal organization of its space is based on a juxtaposition and a superposition of the scenes and reasons foreign with a true construction of pictorial space.

If the mural - in particular in Pompéi - knows a pictorial space generated by the subject and the composition making of each “table” a work in oneself, it is truly with the painting of rest that is born this constraining pictorial space which, while giving the illusion of a window open on the world, circumscribed the subject and cuts it of its environment. The framework consequently becomes the essential element of a correct reading of the table: of Chick with Van Gogh, pictorial space is defined by its edge. And Baudelaire will be able to say within “the framework”, a poem of Spleen and Idéal:

“As a beautiful framework adds to painting,

Although it is of a very praised brush,

I do not know what of strange and magic

By isolating it from immense nature.”

It is this same magic relation of reality and its representation that Magritte expresses, and less subtlety than the poet, in the Call of the summits (1942). The obliteration of the framework - whose limits remain sensitive by the rest - known as the complexity of pictorial space and announces its transgression. Indeed, as long as painting is a mimêsis - an imitation - world, it is the framework which guarantees and provides the reference marks separating reality and representation.

The trompe-l'oeil, which makes leave the reason and overflow the framework to give the illusion which the subject belongs to the space of the spectator, transgresses the limit generally imposed only for better affirming pictorial space.

This strictly limited space contains itself a production of the space which is reinforced by the local and temporal unit subject due to the composition traced since a single point of view: the linear prospect.

It is undoubtedly Degas which, by truncated plans, views from above, characters brutally cut by the framework, redefines pictorial space. The attention which it pays to the edges, far from being a simple concern of esthete, reveals a new design of the relation subject-reality.

Monet goes further with his Nymphea by representing in the usual format of the tables an unlimited extent. Perception that has some Felix Fénéon made of the Master of Giverny a precursor of contemporary research: “A landscape of Mr. Monet never develops completely a topic of nature and seems any of the twenty rectangles that one would cut in a panoramic fabric of one hundred square meters.”

If Bonnard is released from the prospect to turn over to the plan (Naked in the bath, 1937), these are the Cubist experiments - whose single concern is space - which lead to the rupture between reality and the table. When, in 1912, Picasso introduces a piece of oil-cloth to appear the cane-bottoming of a chair in a fabric, it inaugurates a design of pictorial space in total rupture with the figurative representation and naturalist of the Rebirth, based on the prospect. The joining, whose ultimate misadventure will be the assembly, makes burst the concept of table like plane surface.

Consequently, pictorial space can be redefined. “The fabric is not taken any more as projection screen, but as material”, writing Simon Hantaï in 1969 in connection with the drippings of Jackson Pollock. Pictorial space burst, it is open, affirming at the same time the pictorial fact like having an existence in oneself and either in reference to reality.

Since Antiquity, painting caused two types of literature: esthetic and philosophical considerations, whose heart is the problem of the mimêsis, i.e. the reproduction, the imitation of reality; and of the technical collections, mixing receipts and councils.

Until the Italian Rebirth, painting is thus plastered with the row of know-how. One readily opposes it to poetry, pure creation of the spirit.

If the work of Cennino Cennini, It libro LED' arte, appeared in 1398, is primarily a guide of the pictorial technique, Of will pictura of Alberti (1435) gives its first noble letters to painting. All this period is fertile in technical works: Valentine Boltz, Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo Fioravanti appear among the most famous authors. But, to the XVI ^E century, it is certainly the Florentin Giorgio Vasari, painter, architect and collector, which, with its Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects, written of 1542 to 1550, then altered in 1568, gives to the future generations the most important information source on the humanism and the art of its time.

To the XVII ^E century, they are the painters who speak publicly about their art, or who write and publish above. Thus, the Brown one and Chick feed by their judgments and their standpoint the academic quarrels.

The organization of the Living rooms and the development of a European cultural network contribute to the appearance of an artistic criticism in the mediums of amateurs. Meanwhile, Diderot invents truly a new literary kind, the criticism of painting, through its Living rooms.

Created in 1768, the English Academy becomes the place of a new speech on painting, up to that point diffuse. Beauty analyzes, published in 1753 by William Hogarth, is representative of the intellectual climate which reigns then in England. Reynolds, in the speeches whom he pronounces in front of the pupils of the Academy since 1769, pays there homage to his rival, Gainsborough. Its influence, still badly measured, will be very broad: its speeches, translated and published in Italian, French and German, probably contributed, with the work of the Anton Raphael Mengs Germans and of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, with the development of a certain design of the “traditional taste”.

The criticism, initiated by Diderot, develops largely to the XIX ^E century, which the literary kind of the “Living room” knows at Baudelaire its achievement. In parallel, journalistic artistic criticism is not remainder: artistic specialized magazines then headings accommodate more or less enlightened contributions writers or politicians, who feel that painting became a moral and political stake. The painters themselves are done more discrete, expressing themselves through their diary (Delacroix) or their correspondence (letters of Van Gogh to its Théo brother). The hour of proclamations did not sound yet.

Towards the end of the XIX ^E century, then to the XX ^E century, the pictorial innovation is accompanied by a theoretical and esthetic program: proclamations of symbolism, realism, Blaue Reiter, Bauhaus, of Stijl, movement Cobra or new realism.

In a radical inversion, whereas the subject disappears from painting - the fabric becoming itself the subject - in parallel developed the speech on painting - so much so that certain contemporary works, such those of Martin Barre, seem to be able to exist or take direction without a discursive accompaniment: the speech on painting became constitutive of painting itself.