Techniques: Plastic on the Palette

Ars longa, vita brevis to the contrary, most “immortal” paintings are all too perishable. Oil paintings in particular suffer from uneven temperatures, direct sunlight, or smog. Some of the finest works of Rembrandt, a meticulous craftsman, have darkened and yellowed after three centuries; several Van Gogh canvases are in danger of disintegration after only 75 or 80 years. As for abstract expressionist paintings, which are characteristically encrusted with heavy, hastily applied impastos—often by artists who are relatively untutored in the complexities of oil technique—museums find that they should be periodically turned upside down so that errant paint will ooze back into place.

Now at last chemists have come to the artists’ rescue. Synthetic paints, developed over the past 15 years, have proved so satisfactory that oils in time may seem as archaic as buono fresco. One in three U.S. artists has already switched to the new medium.* The converts range from Romantic Realist Thomas Hart Benton to Pop’s Andy Warhol, from Collagist Alfonso Ossorio to Boris Artzybasheff, who used synthetic paint on the portrait of Lady Bird Johnson that appeared on TIME’s cover, Aug. 28.

“Plastic” paint, as many artists call it, is made from acrylic and vinyl resins consisting of emulsion polymers, long strands of molecules floating in water. Wound into these strands, like prickles on barbed wire, are standard pigments. When the water evaporates, polymers and pigments bind into a film that is actually waterproof and can be scrubbed with soap and water.

The practical advantages over oils are legion. Synthetic paint is cut with ordinary tap water instead of turpentine, thus has little or no smell and is nontoxic. Unlike oils, it dries in minutes and does not change color in the process. When dry, synthetic paint up to three-quarters of an inch thick bends readily without buckling or cracking, so that tomorrow’s test-tube Titians may safely be rolled up for shipment.

Manufacturers make synthetics in various thicknesses equivalent to those of watercolors, gouache and oils. Matte and gloss media are available to impart every kind of surface finish, from chalky pastels and flat tempera to buttery oil glazes. Plastics can be thickened to print graphics or molded into free-standing sculpture. Moreover, under laboratory tests equivalent to 45 years of direct sunlight, the new paints have proved virtually fadeproof. Indeed, like every other technical innovation in the history of painting, the synthetics may well lead artists to explore, experiment and discover new forms and techniques as enduring as the paints themselves.

*Jackson Pollock used synthetic Duco lacquers in the late ’40s and early ’50s. One of the first celebrated artists to rely wholly on synthetics was Holland’s Hans van Meegeren, who used them to paint equally synthetic Vermeers in the 1930s. Since new oil paint can be distinguished from old in a simple laboratory test, the forger used a heat-setting resin to avoid detection.