David Carbone reviews Timothy Hyman’s new book The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century, published by Thames & Hudson.

Carbone writes: “this [book] is not so much an ‘objective’ survey as a personal examination of specific works from the vastness of twentieth century achievements that Hyman believes can serve as a foundation for twenty-first century painters. In this, Hyman is something of an ideologue; he argues for complex pictures —pictorial worlds, really — that can convey our immersion in the reveries and ambiguities of everyday experience, in opposition to mere images of skill and good taste. He is especially interested in what he calls “first-person painting”, by which he means the exploration of the self, the personal confession, a self, fragmented or whole, narcissistic or selfless, and its possible transcendence or submergence through objectivity.”