An exhibition will explore the radical ways three decades of artists attacked the canvas — and believed they had left painting for dead.
But Tate Modern’s examination of the work of artists from the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies suggested they had done nothing of the sort, according to curator Catherine Wood.
Starting with Jackson Pollock, who famously dribbled paint onto canvases on the floor, the movement even saw feminist artists use make-up as their medium as boundaries were exploded in the wake of the Second World War.
Niki de Saint Phalle shot paint at canvases using a rifle while Yves St Klein worked with models who used their bodies as brushes as artists “did everything they could do to debase” conventional painting.
Ms Wood said: “The exhibition is essentially about all the ways that artists tried to attack painting through performance.
“Many of these artists thought it was the end of painting. But rather than killing the medium off, it energised it for the next generation. It gave it a new energy and new tools and a new language.”
The exhibition takes its title and starting point from A Bigger Splash, the 1967 David Hockney painting — because Hockney deliberately shunned the trend for performance, suggesting an alternative route to the art of today.
Ms Wood said the splash of water in Hockney’s famous California swimming pool painting was not created with a dramatic flick of the brush as might have been expected.
She said: “He did consider splashing it but he faked it. It took him two weeks to paint it, painstakingly.”
The show closes with contemporary artists who explore new ways of using painting, such as Lucy McKenzie.
A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, opens at Tate Modern tomorrow and runs until April 1, 2013.
