David McDermott and the Hidden History of Painting as Performance

At the Vito Schnabel Gallery in St. Moritz, something incredible is about to unfold: painter David McDermott, possibly the greatest colorist working today, will be exhibiting his new series of Mountain Paintings from July 27 to September 15, 2024.

Due to McDermott’s painstaking technique deeply rooted in historical practices, the arrival of any new work by McDermott is an event in itself. But, as if that weren’t enough to draw crowds, in a high wire act only a true master would dare to undertake, McDermott will actually be completing some of the paintings during the exhibition for onlookers (and wise students) to observe. It’s painting as performance.

While seeming startlingly original in our contemporary context, McDermott’s daring ploy is ripped from the pages of obscure history going all the way back to at least the 15th century when Albrecht Dürer gave public demonstrations of his masterful techniques to astonished audiences. Leonardo would follow somewhat later in collecting crowds during his painting of the mural of The Last Supper.

Giorgio Vasari, in his essential oral history Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550) describes innumerable examples of painting as performance in the studios of Botticelli, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, among others. Similarly, the unsurpassable Renaissance pornographer Pietro Aretino (himself no stranger to crowds), described in countless letters the joy Titian took in opening his studio while at work to patrons and students alike.

The Romantic trope of a long suffering artist working in a garret’s lonesome solitude of public neglect is not only inaccurate, but perhaps more importantly, misses the largest purpose of any artist’s primal impulse: the defining nature of talent is to give.