There is not the space here properly to comprehend a millennium that has brought us from the glories of the Romanesque to, well, our present postmodern glories. But one can make the general point that the progression, from Domesday to Domesday, has proceeded at an uneven and erratic pace, straying now this way, now that, with spectacular bursts of energy and the highest accomplishment interspersed with longueurs of apparent stasis, stagnation even, and many necessary periods of recuperation, assimilation and more gradual shift and change. And what is true of these past 1,000 years may indeed be said of the past 100.

To look back now to 1900, with Queen Victoria still on the throne, to a steam-driven horse-drawn age, is not in fact to look back so very far. I was born significantly closer to that beginning than to this end of the century, with Monet dead but barely 14 years, and Picasso not yet 60. It is just such reflections that should give us pause - 1900, and not just the Old Queen but Cezanne, Degas, Monet, Gauguin all still alive and working, Matisse at the belated outset of his career as artist, and the young Picasso, who would live on into the 1970s, so soon to be on his way to Paris. To speak of such a time is still to speak of living memory.

It is also to speak of the second great age of the modernism, the modern movement, or whatever we care to call it, that had its complex roots deep in the 19th century. Yet there are those who still have difficulty with "modern art", as though Cubism, which Picasso and Braque worked out together in the year or two before 1910, were still a threat after 90 years, or the Fauves still incomprehensible after 95. The Fauve exhibition now on in Paris is quite as remarkable for its sheer physical beauty and excitement as for any art-historical exegesis it might sustain. Is the proto-abstract Expressionism of Kandinsky of the early 1910s still so very revolutionary and challenging to the educated, civilized mind and eye? Is the proto-minimalism of Malevich and Mondrian, again established well before 1920, still a matter of controversy and debate, even as to its actual quality as true art? Does the Expressionism of Kirchner, Munch or Beckmann still shock? Should the conceptual irony of Duchamp's "bottle-rack" and "bicycle wheel" still disconcert so?

For me, that such achievement - wrought in more or less our own times and of such accomplishment, intellectual authority and power - should still be at all a matter of question, is merely depressing. What is shocking rather, from this later vantage-point, is not the quality or vitality, the beauty, originality or importance of such art, but the concentration of the achievement within comparatively so short a span. I used to think of the modern movement as a linear succession of avant-garde "isms" - fauvism, expressionism, cubism, constructivism, dadaism, surrealism, minimalism, conceptualism - that finally ran out of steam at some point in the early 1970s; I now think that moment came much, much earlier. For, just as there are those of us who would say that "The Sixties", whatever they were, were over in any case by 1964, so it is at least arguable that significant modernism in the 20th century was over and done with in all its essentials by the mid-1920s - at least so far as painting was concerned - with a surrealist coda or epilogue lasting until the war.

Thereafter we would live through an extended period, not so much of continuing experimentation or advance, but of consolidation, ramification, elegant variation. That is not to say that many beautiful and important things would not be done - Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism in the 1940s: Francis Bacon and his surreal, visceral expressionism before 1960; the Pop-Art of the 1950s and 1960s; the post-painterly minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s - but only that context, framework, platform, were already there.

Sculpture is different only in that its formal and technical development continued for rather longer and at a slower pace, taking it from the expressionist modelling of Rodin through the direct carving principles of Gill, Moore and Hepworth, the improvisations of Picasso and Gonzalez, to the welding and assembling of Caro, Smith and Paolozzi, and so to the landscape interventions of Long and the monumental simplicities of Serra, the installations of Hirst, the body-casting of Gormley, the object-casting of Whiteread and all the rest of it in our own time.

The only real puzzle is the belief in the continuing vitality and relevance of an avant-garde which has been artificially sustained by market and institutional interests. This in turn explains the eternal obsession with young artists barely out of the play-pen at the expense of more sustained development and experience. Of course we should always be on the look out for Bright Young Things. But it has always seemed to me that artists in mid-career are likely to be at least as interesting, and their seniors even more so, if only for having continued so long - often in deep, even deserved obscurity, but at least under their own steam. It is, after all, no more of a nonsense to take seniority, than it is to take youth, as a virtue of itself. Yet sponsors and prize-givers still queue up to "do something to help young artists, who, poor things, have such a hard time." More often than not it is generosity misplaced.

A real way in which to help young artists would be to return to an insistence in our art schools upon the technical and practical disciplines, including objective drawing from life, as a substantial part of every course. That was the baby that went out with the bath-water in the educational reforms of the 1960s, and the loss perhaps is now irrecoverable - for who can pass on skills and disciplines they never themselves acquired?

There is no reason why any one generation should be more or less talented than another, but it is by no mere chance that the last third of our century - which has seen the rise of conceptual expression at the expense of practical, realized increasingly in installation, video, photography, the computer, commercial manufacturing and the dead hand of the life-cast - should also have been an age in which the talented and ambitious young artist was no longer taught to draw, paint and model from the life figure.

Which brings us back to this question of the avant-garde and its decline. The first thing to say is that no crisis is imputed in saying as much, for there is no reason at all why it should continue helter-skelter for ever. A young river runs fast and steep, to slow down and diverge in its maturity, ever broadening and meandering more widely in old age. Just so with art, and in a postmodern maturity there is no reason why one artist should not do one thing, another something quite else, across the broadest front of activity, with no less a sense of modernity or contemporaneity. Yet it is the exclusive institutional concentration in recent years upon the narrowest sector of activity - video; performance; conceptual installation, none of it necessarily unworthy in itself - that, with all the talk in justification of "innovation" and "cutting edge", has created the new academicism. Again it is no accident that all such work - which celebrates the primacy of idea over practice and the appropriation the material world into the work of art - should derive from the remarkable rehabilitation of the works and principles of Marcel Duchamp. This was begun by Richard Hamilton in the 1960s (neither he nor Duchamp could draw very well), and their subsequent universal diffusion through the 1970s and 1980s by that remarkable apostle, Joseph Beuys - who, when he so chose, could draw like an angel.

So, to look back now over the century is to do so in a mixed mood of gloom, puzzlement and admiration - and puzzlement chiefly at the strange fact that the greatest artists should have left so few, if any, apparent heirs, and that the deceptive, easy, comforting blandishments of Duchamp and Beuys should hold such universal sway. One can only hope that all is not lost. For those greater artists essentially of this century - Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard above all, but also Beckmann and Mondrian, Soutine, old Monet and young Kandinsky, Malevich and Chagall, Pollock and Bacon (I could go on) - were artists whose greatness grew out of what they did, and then did next, rather than was imposed upon it by intellect and idea. Their work was not "about something" other than itself and its truth to experience of the real and visible world. It is a quality of the human spirit that informs it all - inquiring, of course, but intuitive and instinctive too, as various and responsive, and as unselfconscious, as nature itself. And so, to look forward is not necessarily to be so gloomy, for that human spirit just might survive the millennial cusp more or less in a healthy state. Some things will never change. It is always, we must remember, the work, as work, that counts.

I wish I had been there...

The visual arts present a problem - not so much by any lack of excitement, but only in that the excitements tend by their nature to be somewhat extended and diffuse.

One might wish to have been at Venice for a year or two around 1500, along with Bellini, Giorgione, Cima, Mantegna, Carpaccio and all, and Leonardo and Drer exotic birds of passage; or in Rome around 1510, with Michelangelo and Raphael hard at it in the Vatican; or again in Venice in the 1570s, with Veronese, Tintoretto and old Titian in their pomp. One might have hoped, perhaps, to help poor Vincent, at Auvers, in the fatal summer of 1890: or stand at Picasso's shoulder in 1906, to puzzle with him over "les Demoiselles".

But for me the greater coup would have been to be with Velasquez in Madrid in 1656, while the Maids of Honour fussed over the little Infanta Margarita in his studio. With its formal and spatial complexities, its shifts of interest and attention from self-portrait to magisterial conversation-piece, and all overlaid with narrative ambiguity, "Las Meninas" remains the most mysterious and compelling of masterpieces. Who is it before whom the tiny princess parades so proudly? Are we all, too, Kings and Queens? If only one had been assistant to the master, preparing his colours, cleaning his brushes, keeping out of the way in the far corner behind that huge canvas, watching everything. If only I'd been there.

‘Modern to postmodern maturity,’ FT 11 February 2000.

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