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For all his operatic grandiosity, Longo generates a chill. A terror of death haunts Schnabel's exuberance, too. David Salle, who became the other star of the Mary Boone Gallery, placed death at an art-historical remove. Since Duchamp's time, avant-gardists have announced that painting is dead. To put the matter that way made it too public for Salle, too much a question addressed to all artists—painters, would-be painters, enemies of painting. He preferred the issues of painting to be private, like his moods. He wrote in 1979 not that painting is dead but that "the paintings are dead"—meaning his own. "The way this art works," he added, "is to make you want it to disappear so that you can mourn its loss and love it more completely." Further notes suggested that what was at stake was "a kind of premonition of death" stirred up by doubts about who one is or ought to be. Salle evoked these doubts with paintings that looked awkward, embarrassed, obsessively introverted.