ABSTRACT
The notion that quality in painting is principally dependent on the painter's skill (or talent, if it is considered innate) is the most widespread of all models in the past hundred years. It is a cliché in the popular press: “Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art,” as Tom Stoppard put it. 1 The voices of academic art history are faint beside the many writers who base their sense of history and quality on the painter's technical ability. Few people outside academia could make much, I think, of T.J. Clark's rejoinder that “technique in modernism is a kind of shame: something that asserts itself as the truth of picturing, but always against picturing's best and most desperate efforts.” 2
