I used to think art movements were born in galleries, but the Stuckists literally started theirs in a pub.
In 1999, Charles Thomson and Billy Childish founded Stuckism over beers in a London bar, naming their movement after an insult Childish’s ex-girlfriend Tracey Emin had hurled at him—she called his art “stuck.” They embraced the slur and turned it into a manifesto, one that declared war on conceptual art’s stranglehold over the contemporary scene. Their timing was, honestly, pretty brilliant. The YBAs (Young British Artists) were everywhere—Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks, Emin’s unmade bed—and the Turner Prize had become a showcase for installations and videos rather than traditional painting. The Stuckists looked at this landscape and said, wait—maybe we’re missing something fundamental here. They weren’t anti-modern exactly, but they definately believed that figurative painting still had stories to tell, emotions to convey, things that a pile of bricks or a neon sign couldn’t quite capture.
Here’s the thing: they knew how to make noise. The Stuckists staged protests outside Tate Britain during Turner Prize ceremonies, dressed as clowns and holding signs that read “The Real Turner Prize Show.”
When The Stuckists Painted Their Way Back Into Relevance Through Deliberate Provocation and Manifesto-Driven Community Building
The movement published manifestos—lots of them—with declarations like “Artists who don’t paint aren’t artists” and “The Stuckist paints pictures because painting pictures is what matters.” These weren’t subtle statements, and they weren’t meant to be. Thomson organized alternative exhibitions, bringing together artists from across the UK who felt alienated by the conceptual art establishment. By 2000, there were Stuckist groups forming in cities beyond London, and by the mid-2000s, the movement had spread internationally—Germany, Australia, the United States. I guess it makes sense that figurative painters everywhere felt like they’d been pushed to the margins and were hungry for validation.
The backlash was immediate and fierce. Critics dismissed Stuckism as reactionary, nostalgic, even anti-intellectual.
How Figurative Painting Became The Underdog In A Conceptual Art World That Valued Ideas Over Craft And Execution
But turn out, the art world was more fragile than it appeared. Conceptual art had dominated for decades, sure, but that dominance created a vacuum—a whole generation of painters who felt their medium had been declared dead prematurely. The Stuckists tapped into that frustration, offering not just a style but an identity. They weren’t trying to recreate Victorian academicism or reject modernism entirely; they were arguing for painting’s continued relevance in an era obsessed with novelty and shock value. Some of their work was raw, emotional, deeply personal—portraits that captured psychological complexity, urban scenes that reflected contemporary alienation. Other pieces were, honestly, less successful, veering into sentimentality or technical limitations that undermined their arguments.
Anyway, the movement forced conversations that needed to happen.
Why The Establishment Eventually Had To Acknowledge What The Stuckists Were Saying About Authenticity And Emotional Honesty
By the late 2000s, even major institutions couldn’t ignore the shift. The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool held a Stuckist exhibition in 2004—the first time a major public gallery had given the movement that kind of platform. Auction houses started taking figurative painting more seriously again. Younger artists who’d grown up during the conceptual art boom began incorporating traditional techniques back into their practice, though they rarely called themselves Stuckists. The movement had created space, even if it didn’t recieve all the credit. Museums started re-evaluating their acquisition policies, recognizing that they’d maybe been too narrow in their definition of contemporary art.
The irony is that Stuckism succeeded by doing exactly what conceptual art claimed to do—challenging the status quo, questioning assumptions, forcing uncomfortable conversations. They just did it with brushes instead of installations.
