The Rehumanism Prize · Our times

Paint what it is like to be alive now.

A hundred years from now, people will want to know what it felt like to live in the 2020s: the phones, the pandemic, the machines that learned to talk, the families that look different from their grandparents'. Paintings can tell them, if artists paint it. These are invitations, not assignments.

Each theme sets an older painting beside our own day. The old masters are a bridge, not a model: we are not asking anyone to recreate them, but to find today's equivalent moments and paint those.

In a crowded railway carriage, a nursing mother, an old woman with a basket and a sleeping boy sit together in the light — **Then** Daumier painted strangers sharing a crowded train in 1864, each alone with their thoughts.Honoré Daumier, *The Third-Class Carriage*, 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. See it at The Met

Now The crowded carriage is a feed: a full train car where nobody looks up.

Alone together

We carry the whole world in a pocket and see our friends less than any generation before us. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic. Paint the glow of the screen, and the moment someone looks up from it.

4 ideas to paint

A family at dinner, every face lit from below
A teenager awake at 2 a.m. with a phone
A grandmother waving at a video call
Someone finally putting the phone down

Couples with umbrellas cross a wide, wet Paris intersection under a grey sky — **Then** Caillebotte painted the new Paris the year the engineers finished it: a world remade, and people learning to live in it.Gustave Caillebotte, *Paris Street; Rainy Day*, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago. See it at the Art Institute of Chicago

Now The change is invisible: software remaking work, school and trust, and people learning to live beside it.

Machines that think

For the first time, machines write, talk and make pictures, feeds tell each of us a different story, and any face or voice can be faked. What is still ours is the hand, the face and the thing only you saw. Paint what it feels like to live beside them.

4 ideas to paint

A student and a glowing chatbot at midnight
An old craftsman's hands beside a robot arm
Two people trusting each other, in person
Telling a real face from a copy

A line of exhausted men in harness haul a barge along a sandy riverbank — **Then** Repin made a city audience look at labor it never saw.Ilya Repin, *Barge Haulers on the Volga*, 1870 to 1873. State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg. See it at the Russian Museum

Now The hidden labor is a warehouse at 3 a.m., a delivery rider in the rain, a care aide on the night shift.

Work, remade

Offices emptied into kitchens, warehouses run all night, and many people now work for an app instead of a boss. Others still do the hard physical jobs the rest of us forget: the nurse on a double shift, the line cook, the long-haul driver.

4 ideas to paint

A remote worker at the kitchen table at dawn
A delivery rider in the rain
A night-shift nurse on her break
A tradesman teaching an apprentice

By lamplight in a cottage, a doctor sits watching over a sick child laid across two chairs while the parents wait — **Then** Fildes painted a doctor keeping watch through the night, years after his own son died.Luke Fildes, *The Doctor*, 1891. Tate, London. See it at Tate

Now The watch is kept by the ICU nurse holding up a phone so a family can say goodbye, and by the caregivers who never stopped.

The pandemic years

In 2020 the world stopped. People died alone behind glass, children learned through screens, and nurses, grocery clerks, drivers and teachers kept going. Few paintings have yet tried to hold what we all went through.

4 ideas to paint

A goodbye through a hospital window
A nurse's face marked by her mask
A wedding of five people in a living room
The first hug after a long year

A mother holds her grown son's hands as he leaves home, while the family gathers in the farmhouse kitchen — **Then** Hovenden painted a son leaving the farm, when a generation was leaving for the cities.Thomas Hovenden, *Breaking Home Ties*, 1890. Philadelphia Museum of Art. See it at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Now The goodbye happens at an airport gate or a border, and carries on through a phone screen.

Leaving home

About 280 million people live outside the country they were born in. Every one of them has a story of a door closing and another opening, and most of those stories have never been painted.

4 ideas to paint

A first night in a new country
A child translating for her parents
A video call to a grandmother far away
A family photo carried across a border

Soldiers with bandaged eyes walk in a line, each with a hand on the shoulder of the man ahead — **Then** Sargent went to the front in 1918 and painted blinded soldiers guiding one another.John Singer Sargent, *Gassed*, 1919. Imperial War Museum, London. See it at the Imperial War Museum

Now The heroes rarely wear uniforms: the neighbor, the teacher, the firefighter, the caregiver who keeps showing up.

Ordinary heroes

Firefighters climbing the towers, a small girl walking past a crowd to school, the neighbor who checks on the old man downstairs. Heroism today rarely wears armor. Paint the courage you have actually seen.

4 ideas to paint

A firefighter after the fire
A teacher staying late with one student
A caregiver at 3 a.m.
A soldier home again, at the kitchen table

Made in our lifetime

Graydon Parrish, The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy, 2006 — **Graydon Parrish**, *The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy*, 2006New Britain Museum of American Art, ConnecticutTruthRead about it

By firelight, an old man guides a small boy's hands as the boy plays a banjo on his lap — **Then** Tanner painted a grandfather teaching a boy to play: a family as it really was.Henry Ossawa Tanner, *The Banjo Lesson*, 1893. Hampton University Museum, Virginia. See it at Hampton University Museum

Now The family may be a stepdad, a grandmother or a single father; the teaching hand is the same.

New shapes of family

Stepfathers and stepdaughters, grandparents raising grandchildren, single dads, couples who marry late, a child with Down syndrome at the center of a family's life. Families look different now. The love does not.

4 ideas to paint

A stepfather at a school play
A grandmother raising her grandson
A single dad braiding his daughter's hair
Three generations under one roof

Made in our lifetime

Matan Ben-Cnaan, Annabelle and Guy, 2014 — **Matan Ben-Cnaan**, *Annabelle and Guy*, 2014First prize, BP Portrait Award, 2015TruthSee it at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Villagers dance in pairs on a summer night beside a maypole and red farmhouses — **Then** Zorn painted a whole village dancing in the midnight light: common ground you can see.Anders Zorn, *Midsummer Dance*, 1897. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. See it at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Now Common ground is rarer and more precious: a block party, a shared table, a hand across the aisle.

Divided, and looking for common ground

Families split at the holiday table, neighbors who stopped speaking, friendships ended over a headline. Paint the gap, and if you can, the bridge.

3 ideas to paint

Two relatives on opposite sides of a table, one reaching
A reconciliation
Neighbors building something together

Made in our lifetime

Kerry James Marshall, Many Mansions, 1994 — **Kerry James Marshall**, *Many Mansions*, 1994Art Institute of ChicagoTruthSee it at the Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of ChicagoTruthSee it at the Art Institute of Chicago

The works shown here are examples chosen for commentary and education. We haven't sought permission for every image; in our judgment this is editorial fair use. If you have any concern about an image, please write to us and we'll gladly address it.

Overlooked

Things we should value, and rarely paint

Some of the best things in life are rarely painted. A father teaching a son to ride a bike is as worthy a subject as any battle. If you paint what is good and unglamorous, people will notice.

Fatherhood, and mothers too
Marriages that last
Caring for aging parents
Friendship between men, and between women
Ordinary work done well
Teachers, nurses, neighbors
Forgiveness
Old age, with dignity
Keeping a promise

Political work, and work that brings people together

An invitation to unite, not a ban

You may enter political work. Some of the most powerful paintings ever made protest injustice, from Goya's The Third of May 1808 to Picasso's Guernica. But a work does not have to fight something to matter.

We especially welcome work that a viewer of any party, faith or background could stand in front of and feel the same thing: grief, tenderness, gratitude, awe. Work that shows the humanity of the people you disagree with is rare and brave. Jurors judge craft and the power of the work, never which side it takes.

Friends talk, flirt and relax around a lunch table on a riverside balcony under a striped awning — Pierre-Auguste Renoir, *Luncheon of the Boating Party*, 1880 to 1881. The Phillips Collection, Washington. See it at the Phillips Collection

Why some paintings are loved forever

A moment of life, made timeless

Nothing happens in Luncheon of the Boating Party. Renoir's friends linger over lunch on a summer afternoon by the Seine in 1881, talking, flirting, leaning on the rail. He caught that ordinary hour of belonging so completely that, 140 years later, people still want to pull up a chair.

Paint an ordinary afternoon of the 2020s that well, the friends, the kitchen, the people you belong to, and someone in 2126 will know what it felt like to be alive today. People now will feel less alone in it.

What is Rehumanism

The Rehumanism Prize · Year one