Unruly Tools: Contemporary Artists and the Reinvention of Painting

Available January 2027

Pia Gottschaller

The first book to examine the role of unconventional tools in contemporary painting is required reading for anyone interested in painting’s recent past and future.

Painting, often regarded as the oldest of art forms, has been repeatedly declared “dead.” In this original and compelling study, technical art historian Pia Gottschaller thoroughly dismantles that notion, revealing how painters radically reimagined the medium in the years following World War II. No longer confined to the paintbrush, artists began to experiment with new methods, employing found, fabricated, and repurposed objects—as varied as an Afro comb, the human body, and a robotic airbrush—to create paintings unlike any seen before, revolutionizing the course of art history. 

• Begins in 1954 with Jackson Pollock and the Gutai Art Association in Japan and traces the transformation of painting across the globe from the postwar era to the present day.
• Explores the work of thirty-eight contemporary painters, including Amoako Boafo, Helen Frankenthaler, Yves Klein, Julie Mehretu, Beatriz Milhazes, Howardena Pindell, Kazuo Shiraga, and Andy Warhol.
• Richly illustrated with over 240 images of artists and their creations.

Unruly Tools is the first study of this kind and offers essential testimony to painting’s continued vitality and reinvention.

Pia Gottschaller is an expert in the technical art history of modern and contemporary art. She is a reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the author of Lucio Fontana (Getty, 2012).

“Unruly Tools’s premise—to consider the tools of contemporary painters ranging from squeegees to spray cans to computers—is deceptively simple yet profoundly original because it readily displaces two persistent misconceptions about painting: one being that the medium has remained more or less unchanged for centuries and to this day; the other that, in keeping with repeated proclamations across the 20th century, painting has been finished. To boot, Gottschaller’s technical expertise is never an end in and of itself but a path toward making sense of painters as thinkers. Lucid and engaging prose betrays the experience of a conservation scholar who has both taught and been a regular in artist’s studios for decades.”
—Christine Mehring, Mary L. Block Professor, University of Chicago

408 pages
7 x 9 inches
201 color and 48 b/w illustrations
ISBN 979-8-88712-034-8
hardcover

Getty Publications
Imprint: Getty Conservation Institute

2027