Through most of the twentieth century, film posters and cinema-front billboards were painted by hand at enormous scale — nowhere more than in India, where Bombay studios employed crews to repaint hoardings weekly, and where a young M. F. Husain, later India's most famous modern painter, started out painting cinema billboards for a few annas per square foot. Digital flex printing killed the trade almost everywhere within a decade of the mid-1990s.
Cinema hoarding painter no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1839 – 1945
Photography and the great rupture
When Daguerre's process was announced in 1839, the painter Paul Delaroche is reported to have declared that from that day painting was dead. What actually died was painting's monopoly on likeness — and the trades built on it, from miniature portraits to topographic views. Freed and cornered at once, painters went where the camera could not: fleeting light with the Impressionists, structure with Cézanne and the Cubists, and by the 1910s pure abstraction, with Hilma af Klint in Sweden painting abstract cycles from 1906, years before Kandinsky's better-publicized claims.
What else was happening then
1907
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
In his Montmartre studio, the 25-year-old Pablo Picasso paints five fractured figures drawing on Iberian sculpture and African masks. Even his allies are appalled — Matisse and Braque among them — and the canvas stays largely unexhibited until 1916. It becomes the hinge into Cubism and the license for a century in which painting no longer had to describe what eyes see.
1949
Life magazine anoints Pollock
Life magazine asks, over photographs of Jackson Pollock dripping industrial paint onto canvas rolled flat on a barn floor, whether he is the greatest living painter in the United States. The article marks the moment the center of ambitious painting is seen to have moved from Paris to New York — and the moment the mass media began making painters famous the way it made film stars.
2018
An AI-made portrait sells at Christie's
"Portrait of Edmond de Belamy", generated by the French collective Obvious using a generative adversarial network trained on 15,000 historical portraits, sells at Christie's New York for $432,500 against a $7,000–10,000 estimate. The sale forces the profession's oldest question — what exactly is being paid for in a painting — into its newest form.
Where that work lives now
The oldest image-making trade on record — from 45,000-year-old cave walls to the contemporary studio, still practiced one brushstroke at a time.
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