6: The Cave-In of Contemporary History, with Rockwell
Norman Rockwell
Freedom from Want (part of 'Four Freedoms' series), 1942 (published 1943)Oil on canvas, w90 cm x h116.2 cm (35.5" x 45.75")
Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA USA
It's difficult to assess the place of history painting in the contemporary scene — mostly, it seems like its functions have been split up and eaten by illustration, animation/film, fantasy painting, religious painting, the 'genre' genre, contextual portraits and figurative art, graphic art, parody pieces, etc.
If this were the case, it maybe wouldn't be tremendously surprising. History painting has traditionally been about telling a grand, confident story in visuals — usually based on a monolithic narrative that everyone already knows. Except that we have fewer of those everyone-narratives at this point; Biblical stories, for instance, now fall under a more specific umbrella, and aren't just the assumed default. A 'classical' education (which would include Latin and Greek/Roman myths) has long not been the standard. We don't have national narratives neatly tied together by monarchical power. With the proliferation of information and perspectives, we aren't as confident about what our history was or what our future is going to/should look like (or hell, even what's going on with our present). FWIW, I actually think that's great, because more truthful.
To see the sort of work that caused history painting to hit an artistic dead-end, I think we can look at the example of Norman Rockwell. Rockwell had enormous reach as a frequent artist/illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post back when magazines were still a thing, so his works are still pretty well known; you probably recognize the piece at top, depicting an idyllic American Thanksgiving dinner, complete with suspiciously-uniform-in-happiness suburban white nuclear+extended family over pristine table linen1.
The context of this piece is not as well known, but is in keeping with 'confident monolithic narratives'. In 1941, just under a year before the US would join the Allies in WWII, FDR gave a State of the Union Address focusing on a vision of the future where everyone in the world would have 'Four Freedoms'. Inspired by this theme, Rockwell created a series of four paintings, one for each freedom (above is 'Freedom from Want'); they were completed after the US had declared war, were each published in the Saturday Evening Post along with a commissioned essay, were a huge hit, and went on to help the US government raise over $130 in war bond sales. But that is all to say that these paintings were, in effect, meant to be part of a grand national unifying force, in keeping with the President's leadership at a time of great duress. The interesting twist artistically is that paintings like the above actually collapse the theme and function of a history painting down into the 'genre' genre — in other words, the 'grand narrative' of a history painting is still present, but is no longer about big specific battles or political events, but rather about the very fashion in which normal individuals live their (our) lives.
After the war, two obvious consequences. One, there's no great uniform push for banding together anymore, and disagreement that already existed over the message of this painting rises to the surface. Two, a ton of people look at images like this and don't see themselves or their families reflected — as I've said before, history painting always lies, but it's easier to catch the lie when it's portraying something on your own level.
So again, the one-great-narrative breaks up and history painting dissolves even more completely, turning into other genres which give artists room to ask different questions and say different things. Pure examples of history painting still exist, of course...it's just that in the broader scope of things, we have less need of them in the overall culture, and more fertile ground appears to lie elsewhere.
NOTES:
1. Ma's apron is not even dirty! As both painter and baker/sloppy cook, why wear one if you're not going to trash it? And if it's to keep your fancy clothes clean just in case (because nice family Thanksgiving and all), then why wear it to the table? One suspects Ma is a show-off.
Anyway, you can read more about this painting here.