The first part of The Triumph of Painting - there will be two more - is at the Saatchi Gallery in County Hall until 5 June. It isn't exactly a triumph. Resignation is in the air, as though the force behind twenty years of Saatchi exhibitions is on the wane. In those exhibitions things became famous without necessarily being seen. People felt they knew the tent, the bed, the shark, the fly-infested cow's head, whether they made it to the gallery or not. The concept was more telling than the reality. When you saw the pieces in an exhibition (and very large numbers of us did) they turned out to be more banal than you expected. It was like being drawn by curiosity to the site of a train crash or the scene of a murder and finding the reality more melancholy and less dramatic than imagination had promised, a bit icky but not mind-blowing. The opposite is generally true of painting; if you haven't seen it in the flesh you will miss a lot of what it is about.

LRB 17 February 2005 | PDF Download