From Cennini to Elkins: Rethinking Painting Pedagogy Beyond the Atelier and the Art School
Rose, Christopher Le Brun PRA. The studio becomes a place not of recipes or of rhetoric, but of cultivated judgment in response to a living material partner.
Painting pedagogy has long oscillated between the transmission of technical skill and the cultivation of conceptual positioning, yet neither fully reflects how painters actually work. This essay suggests that painting may be better understood as a practice of decisions made in response to material conditions, where knowledge emerges through the negotiation between intention and matter.
Painting as a Practice of Decisions
Painting is frequently taught and theorised through two dominant approaches: either as the acquisition of correct skills, framed in technical or imitative terms, or as the development of conceptual positioning within contemporary discourse. Both approaches prove limiting. Skill-based models risk reducing painting to the reproduction of styles, suppressing ambiguity and innovation, while concept-driven models can detach painting from its material ground, leaving students unable to reconcile theory with practice. The history of painting pedagogy may thus be read as an oscillation between these poles. From Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte in the early fifteenth century to James Elkins’ Why Art Cannot Be Taught at the beginning of the twenty-first, the dilemma persists: is painting something that can be codified and transmitted, or something that resists codification, slipping into irreducibility and personal discovery?
Cennini’s text is often regarded as the foundation stone of systematic instruction in painting. Written around 1400, it presents the discipline as a sequence of recipes, exercises, and technical rules. Apprenticeship was not a matter of invention but of submission to process: one repeated what was demonstrated, copied masters, and acquired habits of preparation and execution. Pigments were to be ground in prescribed ways, tempera mixed according to ratio, drapery shaded through established progression. To modern readers the text can appear mechanical, yet it served a crucial purpose. Painting was framed as a craft discipline, transmissible and reliable, where progress could be measured against fidelity to known methods.
For centuries the workshop, and later the academy, formalised this model. To become a painter was to acquire mastery over a stable body of procedural knowledge. The French Académie royale, with its hierarchy of drawing, copying, and history painting, and the nineteenth-century ateliers of Gérôme and Bouguereau represent a direct inheritance from Cennini’s systematised craft, an inheritance that continues in revivalist atelier movements today. The virtues of this approach are clear: technical assurance, continuity of knowledge, and respect for material intelligence.
Yet its limits are equally apparent. When skill is defined as adherence to precedent, innovation is easily mistaken for error. Repetition of canonical forms produces competence but can suppress agency and experiment. It is no accident that the avant-garde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries defined themselves against precisely this orthodoxy. The Impressionists’ refusal of academic finish, Cézanne’s reconstruction of form through shifting colour, and Picasso’s dismantling of perspective each signal a moment at which inherited grammar became insufficient. If Cennini offered painting a syntax, modernism demanded something closer to poetry.
The twentieth-century art school represents the opposing pole of this pedagogical arc. Where ateliers were intimate and hierarchical, art schools emerged as democratic institutions shaped by modernist and post-war educational reform. The Bauhaus provides a paradigmatic moment: teaching shifted from copying masters toward experimentation with form, colour, and material. Foundational courses posed problems rather than prescribing solutions, positioning the artist as constructor and investigator of visual experience.
From this lineage grew an educational model that prioritised critique, theoretical framing, and conceptual awareness. Particularly under the influence of conceptual art, instruction increasingly moved away from questions of how paint behaves toward questions of how practice is positioned within discourse. Painting was often tolerated as a vehicle for theory rather than foregrounded as a stubbornly material activity. The result was a new imbalance: students became fluent in semiotics, politics, and philosophy, yet were frequently under-equipped to wrestle with the recalcitrance of paint itself.
If the danger of the atelier is the production of technicians without imagination, the danger of the art school is the production of thinkers without craft. Many painters experience their education as a movement between these conditions, seeking technical confidence outside the university or theoretical validation beyond the atelier. The persistence of this divide is not merely institutional but epistemological. The atelier inherits the logic of codified knowledge; the art school inherits the logic of exploratory indeterminacy. Both grasp partial truths. The atelier demonstrates that skill can be transmitted; the art school that skill without thought is inert. Neither, however, fully accounts for painting as it is practiced within a contemporary field that demands both material competence and conceptual awareness.
It is within this context that James Elkins emerged as a pivotal voice. What Painting Is (1999) rejected the treatment of painting as a purely representational language, likening it instead to alchemy: unstable, physical, transformative. In Why Art Cannot Be Taught (2001), Elkins advanced a deeper paradox. Art resists codification; no universal curriculum guarantees the making of an artist. Students may be inducted into practices and exposed to discourse, yet the core act remains elusive. Painting is at once materially grounded and pedagogically opaque.
Other scholars attempted resolution. Elliot Eisner proposed a discipline-based approach centred on the cultivation of perceptual and imaginative capacities, while Graeme Sullivan argued that studio practice constitutes a legitimate mode of research inquiry. Both sought to secure academic legitimacy for art education, positioning art as a way of knowing. Yet the polarity remained. Eisner emphasised transferable perception; Sullivan conceptual investigation. Between them stands Elkins, whose scepticism exposes the difficulty of reconciling the transmissible with the irreducible.
What is required, therefore, is not a choice between these models but a reframing of the problem itself. Painting is neither a set of correct procedures nor a purely conceptual enterprise. It is better understood as a practice defined by decisions made in response to material conditions. Painters do not simply execute ideas or follow recipes; they negotiate continuously between intention, perception, and the behaviour of paint. Each brushstroke becomes a moment of interpretation in which resistance and intention meet.
Consider the pedagogical problem of overworking. A painting may begin with energy and openness yet gradually stiffen under excessive attention. Technical instruction might advise stopping earlier or preserving freshness; theoretical critique might recommend reframing the conceptual ground. Both responses are partial. The deeper pedagogical task is to cultivate recognition: to see when vitality is being lost, when certainty is closing possibilities, when continued labour diminishes rather than extends the work. Such judgment cannot be transmitted as rule or discourse alone. It must be learned as attentive negotiation within a living material process.
If Cennini and Elkins mark the extremes of a long historical arc, the present demands another orientation. Cennini assures us that painting can be taught through codified procedure; Elkins insists that it cannot because procedure fails to capture its essence. Both are persuasive yet incomplete. What is needed is a pedagogy that acknowledges painting’s irreducibility without surrendering to mystification, that respects skill without collapsing into rote mimesis, and that honours concept without abandoning craft. This is less a compromise than a reframing: painting education as the cultivation of decisions within material practice.
To understand painting in this way is to recognise it as a field of agency. Knowledge does not precede making but emerges through it. The grain of a surface, the viscosity of medium, the drag of a loaded brush each present conditions to which the painter must respond. Decision becomes the site at which thought materialises. Painting is thus neither wholly teachable nor wholly ineffable, but situated in the disciplined exercise of judgment.
Beyond the opposition of atelier and art school lies a richer pedagogical horizon. Their partial truths need not be discarded but integrated. Painting demands both the intelligence of the hand and the intelligence of reflection; both procedural memory and conceptual awareness. When education attends to this reciprocity, it moves beyond the transmission of skills or the rehearsal of discourse toward something more fundamental: the formation of painters capable of thinking through matter itself.
Painting education as the cultivation of decisions within material practice. The RCA 2025. (Works from my Entropic Pull of Memory series).
References
Cennino Cennini, Il Libro dell’Arte, c. 1400.
James Elkins, What Painting Is (New York: Routledge, 1999).
James Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
Elliot Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
Graeme Sullivan, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts (London: Sage, 2005).
Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
Isabelle Graw, The Love of Painting (Berlin: Sternberg, 2018).
Joseph Masheck, Formalism and Greenberg’s Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).