The Jerwood Prize for painting is now in its fourth year, and it ought to be a celebration Britain is full of good painters, and money isn’t lacking. The winner of the Jerwood gets pounds 30,000, so there’s little wonder that this year more than 300 artists sent in more than thousand works. Nine people were shortlisted and there’s an exhibition of their work at the Lethaby Gallery in the Central School of Art Surprisingly, the display is lacklustre. Perhaps this is because the gallery is hard to hang and reeks of higher education.

I doubt, though, if the show would have looked much better elsewhere What has gone wrong?
Two or three things are possible. Painting as an art form might have failed completely in recent years – but I know this not to be true. A lot of leading artists won’t put in for a competition if they think the prize has previously gone to the wrong picture, as with the Jerwood last year. And they won’t enter if they don’t like the composition of the jury. Well, this year the jury wasn’t bad at all, and its two leading members are popular in the art world. Iwona Blazwick used to be at the ICA and has recently been made curator of the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art at Bankside. Bryan Robertson is a natural radical with a wonderfully sharp eye, and has organised dozens of innovative exhibitions.

If the Jerwood Foundation had sent Blazwick and Robertson round the country with a brief to make an exciting painting show, the results could have been terrific. But it hasn’t happened that way; and the send-in system, with selection from slides, has failed.With the exception of Rose Wylie, nobody looks proud, shows off or displays much emotion. The prize might have been taken by Rose Wylie or Madeleine Strindberg, but has gone to Gary Hume. This has been a successful year for Hume, for he is also in the “Sensation” exhibition at the Royal Academy. Writing about “Sensation” three weeks ago, I remarked that Hume was one of the few artists to have improved after they were first purchased by Charles Saatchi. Hume’s Jerwood-winning pictures show that improvement to have come to a halt.

There’s not much more he can do with either his attitude or his chosen medium He uses household enamel paints applied to aluminium. The technique makes him look shiny, brash and contemptuous of fine-art approaches to painting. The superior and joking stance of Monkey comes from the way its silhouettes mimic and mock classic abstract art, in this case the stained painting of Morris Louis. It’s cool and amusing, for the moment – but only for the moment. Hume would benefit from doing some printmaking, preferably with a bullying printer who could teach him how to clarify and emphasise his outlines. Since at least the Sixties, all sorts of new British painters have been helped by doing prints.