John Currin at Gagosian Beverly Hills

February 19 to April 11, 2015
456 North Camden Drive (between S. Santa Monica Boulevard and Brighton Way)
Beverly Hills, 310 271 9400

John Currin’s current solo show at Gagosian Beverly Hills will not disappoint devotees of his signature style. The artist’s sensuous play between lush fabrics, fruit and the female form — while exceedingly literal — is nonetheless striking and seductive. Culling inspiration from Italian Mannerism and the art of the Northern Renaissance, Currin recasts the classical image of the female nude, limning and embracing its current cultural significance in tandem with its historical precedent. Gender and sexuality become the subjects of Currin’s paintings, and while his relationship to art of the 15^th century has been discussed at length, rarely is his work regarded in politically salient terms.

With the exception of three paintings executed in 2013, each work in the exhibition was painted within the last three months. The luscious 2015 work Maenads depicts an alabaster-skinned, auburn-haired sitter in Currin’s Mannerist style. A pink gossamer top traces her breasts and a silk scarf is draped listlessly over her lap. Two ripe apples placed at eye-level mirror her rounded breasts and belly, further emphasizing the figure’s sensuous form. In the background lie two additional women with similar coloring, one with legs splayed open and the other reaching over to touch her. However any contact between the two is obscured by the foreground sitter’s raised knee. The show’s earlier works exhibit slightly more explicit instances of sexuality, integrating what appears to be ‘70s-era pornography as background imagery. However, it serves to mention that the naughtiest bits are always concealed: no genitals and certainly no penetrative sex. So why, after having depicted explicit sex acts for years, does John Currin offer us these references to sexuality without the titillation?

The Storm (2013) similarly alludes to what appears to be an explicit sex act between a man and two women, but Currin’s languid golden-haired nude obscured our view. In this image, like the others in the show, paint is applied thinly and sparingly, the texture of the canvas visible behind his rendered satins and furs. Bust in a Convex Mirror and Nude in a Convex Mirror, both from 2015, present a refracted view of Currin’s female forms, allowing for the delectation of his figures’ breasts and buttocks without interference.

Lemons and Lace (2015) remained with me long after leaving the exhibition. A vaguely historical pastiche, the female figure bares a striking resemblance to Currin’s wife and frequent sitter, Rachel Feinstein. Posed as an odalisque, his subject is dressed in lingerie that refers in equal parts 17^th century vestments and to 1970s adult films, all the way down to her thigh-high stockings and shimmering gold mules. In the background, a snuffed-out candelabra and pieces of fruit beg to be analyzed in art-historical terms — do these props allude to fertility? Integrity? Death? Plays with translucence and opacity abound, a useful metaphor in understanding these new works.

The thread unifying these paintings is a deliberate attention to what’s exposed and what is concealed. The images are PG-13 alternatives to the artist’s previous X-rated works, and by adhering to socially prescribed limits of probity, Currin further demarcates those boundaries, naturalized for centuries via the art-historical canon.

I want to make very clear what I understand as a distinction between the operations of Currin’s nudes and those of other contemporary artists. Now perhaps cliché, Classical and Modern artists have portrayed the pliant and available female body for centuries. Understanding this cultural and historical signification as implicit in any image of a white female nude, artists of Currin’s epoch have subverted the classic trope as a means of illustrating the restrictive politics of gender and visuality. Take for instance the arresting and corpulent nude portraits of Jenny Saville, tellingly referred to as “grotesque” by art critics and historians. Or perhaps Rineke Dijkstra’s nude mothers, photographed shortly after giving birth, stretchmarks and bloated bellies proudly on display. Even pornography, as employed by Ghada Amer, serves to represent the female body as imbued with agency, deliberate and purposeful. Currin’s return to classical tropes then brings ideological markers of taste and class into sharp relief, naturalized for centuries and only very recently challenged by postmodern theory and feminist politics. And, as in the classical tradition, the sensuousness of Currin’s forms is heightened by their relative modesty.

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On the ground floor in the very narrow, five story Upper East Side townhouse of Luxembourg & Dayan is Glenn Brown’s Oscillate Wildly (After “Autumnal Cannibalism” by Salvador Dali) (1999). Up the steep stairs you come upon Willem van de Velde the Elder’s pen and ink drawing, A Dutch Harbor in Calm, with small vessels inshore and beached among fisherman, a Kaag at anchor and other ships (late 1640s); and then you view oil paintings by Alex Katz, (Provincetown, 1959) Christopher Wool (Jazz and AWOL, 2005) and Alberto Giacometti (Téte de Diego, 1958).  And still further upstairs, amid austere abstractions by Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Brice Marden and Robert Morris, Betty Tompkins’ large acrylic Fuck Painting #4 (1972) is something of a surprise.

All these works are in grisaille, which here is understood not just as another color but the non-color remaining when all other colors are eliminated. North Renaissance masters sometimes painted the outer wings of altarpieces in grisaille. Imitating the look of stone, these constrained images were generally visible only during Lent. Because grisaille is perceptually inert, that non-color is ideally suited to conceptual and minimal art.  Jasper Johns’ Screen Piece 5 (1968) feels withdrawn, and Daniel Buren’s Photo-souvenir: Peinture acrylique blance sur tassi rayé, blanc et gris anthracite (1966) looks sullen. We do, it is true, think of ‘a grey day’ as depressing, but in this gallery, set against intensely colored walls, this ensemble of grisaille works is oddly exhilarating.  When academic art historians have devoted so much bookish attention to identifying relationships between the old masters, the modernists and contemporary”artists, how exciting, how positively life-enhancing it is to see the way “grisaille’ relates American and European art from historically distant periods. The great modernist art writer Adrian Stokes argued that color allows pictorial “organization to be  . . .  intricate: a mutual evocation between forms must take place at all angles and at all distances and in all directions throughout a picture, so that each part will seem rooted in its place and working there.” By asking us to identify felt affinities between very diverse paintings and sculptures, savoring the connections between Jeff Koons’s Italian Woman (1986), Gerhard Richter’s Grau (1974), and John Currin’s L’intimité (2011), all installed in front of five lengths of Joesph Dufour et Cie’s panoramic wallpaper entitled Reconciliation of Venus and Psyche: Psyche Abandoned, Psyche Wafted by Zephyrs (1815), this grisaille ensemble functions as a total work of art.

Luxembourg & Dayan has generously supported this sensationally good exhibition, which was first seen in London last month, with a lavish catalogue containing tipped-in plates, like those found in Skira publications of a half-century ago, a nicely luxurious touch.

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1967 was the summer of love.  2009 – despite the weather – was the summer of flesh.  On the eastern seaboard of the United States, that is, and in selected art galleries.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston sported some of the most libidinally charged rooms of painting in recent art world memory in the exhibition, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice.  Sumptuous naked flesh was paraded before viewers rather in the way the three goddesses vied for Paris’s apple, with such glories as Titian’s Danaë from the Capodimonte, the same violated princess by Tintoretto from Lyon, and scrumptuous Venuses before the Mirror by Titian (National Gallery of Art) and Veronese (Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska.)

When Willem de Kooning famously quipped that “flesh was the reason that oil painting was invented,”  he was of course referring to the Northern tradition, and the mythic inventor of oils, Van Eyck.  But if the Flemish masters who pioneered the new material used it with exquisite skill in the depiction of pearly skin and attendant (contrastive) fabrics, it was thecolorito early-adopters on the Adriatic a century later who truly consummated the equation of painterliness and fleshiness, the voluptuous correspondence of visual and tactile satisfaction.

New York’s contribution to the skin fest of ’09 took the form of a Francis Bacon retrospective.  Bacon is the artist who spoke of wanting to create “rivers of flesh” in his paintings, and who dramatically reified that ambition through metaphorical gouging of faces and literal splurges of paint on otherwise fastidiously neat, dry surfaces.  Also in New York, no rival to the Venetian rivals but a scintillating summer treat nonetheless, was an eclectic orgy of an exhibition, Naked, organized by Adrian Dannatt and hung cheek by jowl at Paul Kasmin Gallery.

But for the apotheosis of this idea of equivalence we must turn further south, to the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, with Paint Made Flesh, an exhibition entirely premised upon de Kooning’s dictum.  This show surveys the postwar love affair between a material painters use and the material all of us are.

Curated by Marc W. Scala, Chief Curator at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn. where the exhibition originated, Paint Made Flesh kicks off with Picasso and proceeds, via assorted Americans, German Neo-Expressionists and three generations of School of London painting, inexorably in the direction of John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and the German Daniel Richter.  It was a stimulating show and surprisingly late in coming, considering how relevant the subject has been since at least the 1980s.  Of course, the major international surveys of that decade such as the New Spirit in Painting in London and Berlin (1981) laid the ground for the fleshly commonality between expressive realist groups and schools (and individuals) of markedly disparate intentions and politics.

Late Picasso is a perfect place to start because this period of his work is like a Janus face looking in two directions, back at his own career (and life) and forward to a resurgence in painterly, old master-obsessed, “bad” – as in late, indulgent, sloppy, nonchalant, near-impotent, desperate, and bravura – painting.  “The Artist and His Model” (1964) locates meditation on age and youth in the studio, a place where paint and nakedness cohabit.

De Kooning himself is represented by one of his classic “Woman” paintings of 1953-54 (Brooklyn Museum), a work in which the urge to engage with the body both subverts and consummates abstract expressionism.  A pair of tall, thin works in oil on paper mounted on canvas from 1966 and 1971 more forcefully get across the sensation that the actual matter on the canvas is flesh, rather than just being fleshlike.  The reds and whites and resultant, commingling pinks show De Kooning in joyful and ecstatic mode.

A somewhat ghoulish corner at the Phillips, a sideshow in the Carnival sense (carne valeindeed) has a Soutine-recalling dissection painting by Hyman Bloom, a mercilessly macabre self-portrait of Ivan Albright, and a coquettish pair of vaudeville performers by Jack Levine.  The main thrust, on the other hand, of the trajectory of De Kooning’s corporeality is taken up by Alice Neel and David Park in  paintings where emphatic impasto both works with and against the succulent smear of brushstroke, as in the flick of lighter paint on the dark forehead of “Randall in Extremis” (1960) by Neel, to depict and to express.   Philip Guston, in MoMA’s “Web” (1975) takes his cue from De Kooning in distending fleshtones across the composition, as if the tone cannot be contained by the body but bleeds all-over.  The tremulous, fidgety, awkward unease of little brushstrokes conveys angst about the human condition and alienation from the flesh. Guston’s touch, palette and attitude find direct reverberation in paintings by Susan Rothenberg that hang across the way in the show’s largest gallery, filled with German and American Neo-Expressionists.

In this central gallery the show’s curatorial thrust dissipates, as there seems almost to be some kind of obligation to include all and sundry member of the latter school regardless of whether the individuals, or the works selected, pull their bodily weight.  Sure, there are bodies in A.R. Penck’s grafitti stick figure monochrome “Sketch” (1983) or Markus Lüpertz’s Wilfredo Lam-ish personages in “Springtime (After Poussin)” (1989), but there isn’t much flesh on them.

Bacon and Freud, whose paintings share somber, dingy, studied interiority, appropriately get to share a closet of a small side gallery.  Freud, like Bacon and De Kooning, spoke words that pay his dues, so to speak, to the ethos of this show when he said: “I want my paint to work as flesh.”  In his tortuously slow (to make, to see, to sit for) figure studies, such as “Standing by the Rags” (1988-89), on loan from the Tate, the paint is mottled and encrusted at those places, such as the face or breasts, where the burden of perceptual truth exacted its (literally) heaviest toll.  Bacon, exploiting speed and chance, splatters glistening paint on otherwise dry, calculated surfaces to generate a visceral, heightened sensation of naked presence.

Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, with their extreme collisions of the haptic and optic dimensions of paint, get to share a room with two young (and more to the point female) Turks who extend the School of London aesthetic into funky, postmodern/neo-conceptual terrain: Cecily Brown and Jenny Saville.  Brown is given her perfect – you could say, her sink or swim – art historical context here, with the insolently agitational anti-aesthetic of Albert Oehlen ahead, and the expressionist forebears upon whom she habitually riffs behind.  With two choice pieces from 2001 and 2002, I’d say she swims.  Jenny Saville, however, whose “Hyphen” (1999), a self-portrait with her sister, is sported on the catalogue cover, dives.  Sure, it is an arresting image, in scale, intensity of gaze, and emotional ambivalence.  She too has said the right things to warrant inclusion: “paint mixed a flesh color suddenly became a kind of human paste;” her work uses “pots of liquid flesh.”  Conceptually, she probes relevant issues of fat as a feminist issue, of contested notions of balance and beauty in the female body.  But she presents an academic rendering of flesh in an art historically polite realist idiom that is too slick and formulaic to do more than illustrate her themes.  In a show that is all about fleshlooking like paint, and paint being like flesh, hers are simply paintings of flesh that look like painting.

The same criticism can be extended to some of the other young artists who conclude the show such as Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin and Michaël Borremans: their works are about style, technique, the power of images, the language of art; Currin’s “The Hobo” (1999) is delectable in its rendering of thin fabric over an arousingly taut, lithe body.  But each of these artists, in their painterly finesse, are, so to speak, skin deep.  In their actual handling of paint there is an absence of incarnation.

It is not that the paint has to be laid on thick to be somatic: after all, bodies are contained and smooth, like paintings, in their way.  The silken surface of Francesco Clemente’s “Self-Portrait with Two Heads” (2002) intimates the voluptuous sheen of flesh; Eric Fischl’s weirdly absent, ethereal “Frailty is a Moment of Self-Reflection” (1996) uses the slipperiness of paint to evoke a sense of imminent demise.

It is disappointing, though, that a show that opens with the radical fleshly abstraction of De Kooning becomes an apology, fairly quickly, for increasingly conservative figurative painting.  The rendering of skin is one way in which flesh can be made in paint.  But abstract painters can also be attuned to bodily sensation, the feel and smell of flesh, the distilled resonances of old master painting.  Sean Scully and Howard Hodgkin are painters who get right to the bare bones of flesh.  Either would have been a powerful way to conclude this show.

other exhibitions mentioned in this review:

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 15 to August 16, 2009, and at the Musee du Louvre, Paris, September 14, 2009 to January 4, 2010

Francis Bacon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 20 to August 16, 2009; previously at Tate Britain, London, and the Prado, Madrid

Naked at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, July 9 to September 19, 2009

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Wishing our readers a happy Thanksgiving.

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June 27 to August 31

Zwirner & Wirth’s “Old School” explores a tantalizing mega-generational gap: the divide between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings and our postmodernist counterparts. Nearly thirty landscapes, still lifes and figure paintings by old masters and contemporary artists make for a fascinating mix, telling us a little about traditions of art and a great deal about current uses for them.

The paintings have been paired according to theme and style, on walls painted a rich shade of red. A 1630 panel of a wedding procession by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (son of the great painter) depicts self-absorbed throngs with the same busyness of detail as Hilary Harkness’s “Flipwreck” (2004)—though the latter’s shipwrecked women, in sexually masochistic poses and clothes, set an entirely different tone. Anj Smith’s small canvas from 2007 boasts much thicker textures than the adjacent painting of Saint Anthony by Jacob van Swanenburgh (c. 1571-1638), but both feature fanciful monsters in compositions of torn, turbulent forms. Michael Borremans’ conventionally skillful likeness of a young man from 2006 hangs next to an impressive, if facile, portrait from c. 1664 by Caesar Boëtius van Everdingen.

It should be said that most of the old master paintings demonstrate fine technique, but not the inventive brilliance of the greatest artists of their times. The Brueghel is a pale echo of his father’s extraordinary “Harvesters” at the Metropolitan Museum, and the van Everdingen shows an artist who clearly valued technical cleverness over a gravity of form; no part of the body—sleeves, hands, torso—rhythmically supports the flourish of the face. The masters of “Old School,” consequently, largely come off as quaintly dated foils for the postmodernists; it’s their quirks of style and subject matter that spark across the centuries.

Many of the contemporary artists appropriate these quirks with gusto. Richard Wathen’s “Once Removed” (2006) amplifies the vulgarity of the van Everdingen with eerie primness, depicting a mother and children—dressed as if sitting for a Gainsborough—with an almost amphibian coldness of color and detail. A still life attributed to the school of Caravaggio contains, along with fruit and melons, a grasshopper as fiercely detailed as an armored vehicle; next to it, Glenn Brown’s painting of a stringy mass amounts to a collection of such obsessive, unsettling details—in his case orifices, shriveled blossoms, and human and animal faces.

The exhibition does include a true masterpiece, a madonna and child by Lucas Cranach (1472-1553). In this panel, the angle of Mary’s head and hair exquisitely counterbalance the infant’s compact verticals. Colors and contours continuously press upon one another, so that points of detail—like the grapes clutched by mother and infant, or the child’s intricate foot—appear at the end of poignantly unwinding limbs and garments. A second panel attributed to this master’s studio is hardly less remarkable.

The Cranach tends to make the other old masters look dawdling, and the aims of most of the postmodernists…well, enigmatic. Figure paintings by Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik, from 2001 and 2003 respectively, provoke thoughts about social perceptions, but both are so weak in their arrangements of color next to the Cranach that it’s unclear whether they are consciously parodying a genre or simply unaware of painting’s potentials. The DayGlo colors of Djordje Ozbolt’s 2007 landscape jangle nonsensically, reducing his panel to a kind of flip commentary. Mr. Brown’s previously mentioned work, somewhat tedious in its subject, becomes utterly so in its scaleless, measureless design.

John Currin, on the other hand, is represented by one of his stronger works; a certain discipline of rhythm animates the forms of his indulgently surreal still life from 2001, giving weight to the gestures of a violin and lobster. Notable, too, is Julie Heffernan’s “Self Portrait as Tender Mercenary” (2006), which, despite some indiscriminate amassing of detail, sturdily locates a figure in a strange scene.

Overall, though, “Old School” most consistently gives an impression of postmodernism’s peculiar love/hate relationship with the masters. While the presentation of these venerable painters—in ornate frames, on stately red walls—suggests reverence, neither the contemporary work nor the installation itself shows much inclination to discriminate between their greater and lesser efforts.

The cure for this ambivalence should be simple enough. Our huge expectations of art derive from the achievements of Giotto, Titian and Rembrandt, not their lesser peers. Getting to know these artists—as individuals rather than makers of quirky, generic artifacts—eliminates any doubt about the possibilities and demands of painting. Or so one might think, though it’s a challenge too seldom engaged by the young painters in “Old School.”

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John Currin’s new show draws a sharp distinction between sex and sexiness. There is more explicit erotic action on view than in any images hitherto by this avid courter of controversy, and there is sexy paintwork to boot. But, instructively, you don’t find both in the same places.

His hard-core images are delivered with a ho-hum perfunctoriness that often enervates his surfaces. But rare and felicitious glimpses into genuine painterly lust for life emerge in his rendering — of all subjects — of crockery. In terms of pictorial energy, his orgies are inert, while his still lifes are animate.

This is his first show with his new (since 2004) dealer, Gagosian, and while it doesn’t have the narrative thrust of some of his earlier shows at Andrea Rosen, it is as forcefully themed as his blue period. There are several scenes of group sex, coyly titled after Northern European cities: “Rotterdam,” “Copenhagen,” “Malmo.” These seem drawn from vintage 1970s porn, judging by the hairdos and ABBA-esque expressions of climax. They are relatively small pictures with a sketchy brushiness that signals urgency and fumble, but such sexiness is delivered in quotation marks, and does not offer actual painterly excitement.

It is hard not to draw a connection between the stereotypical Nordic attitude toward sex and Mr. Currin’s paintings. The liberal attitudes of sometime Calvinist countries toward sexuality has a kind of cool, sex-is-good-for-you efficiency, in which naughtiness is sanitized. In Mr. Currin’s new work, there is a similarly prescriptive sense that it is time for erotics — that it was the way for his mannerist figuration to go.

“Heritage Hall” (2003–06), a canvas of more than 3 by 4 feet, offers a crowded arrangement of china and glassware on a neutral brown ground. In contrast to his flaccid three-ways, the painting enjoys all the qualities you’d expect from a depiction of sexual frenzy: rippling, glistening surfaces; awkward abutments, and evidence of the painter’s greedy, fascinated observation.

What gives the work its charge, I suspect, is that these were objects the artist needed to observe and capture in his own way. There was no point in forcing the kinds of elongations and distortions he often favors in rendering the figure onto soup tureens, teapots, and gravy boats. There might be some kind of satire of bourgeois taste in his choosing these objects, appealing to the same rococo zeitgeist as Lisa Yuskavage, Karen Kilimnik, and Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette.” But once he is engaged in dealing with the roundness of the china, the way light catches its grooves, and the rendering of pictures within pictures in the plate decorations, his painting follows the dictates of seeing, not distorting.

A controlled, super-knowing nastiness used to typify Mr. Currin’s bodies — women with sagging, almost tumorinflicted posteriors, absurd basketball busts, and protruding, bony hip joints — and still comes across in pictures like “Patch and Pearl” (2006), which indicates pregnancy as a malformation in the artist’s worldview. But there is a different dynamic between Mr. Currin and chinaware. If anything, the elusive, recalcitrant objects inflict a certain cruelty on the artist trying to fix them to the canvas while getting across their homey American rococo.

As if the artist himself is unsure as to which is sexier, flesh or porcelain, there is one painting that offers both: In “Tolbrook” (2006), a skinny woman lowers her white briefs toward a set up of creamier-toned crockery on the floor as she smirks to herself. My libido votes for the china, with honorable mention to the cloth. Mr. Currin’s fleshtones can be creepily lifeless.

The distinction between sex as a motif and sexiness in delivery reflects a larger split within Mr. Currin’s modus operandi between image-making and the act of painting. He is an artist of strongly illustrational bent. Champions and detractors alike have compared him to Norman Rockwell, with whom he shares a genius for the telling anecdote. “2070” (2005) presumably imagines his now-infant son, portrayed elsewhere in the show, in 64 years’ time, as a tea-sipping gent in his dotage in a wicker rocker. This is pure Rockwell: that his dress is so Victorian, incidentally, prophesies conservatism triumphant.

The moral difference between Rockwell and Mr. Currin tells more about their respective times than individual preferences: Rockwell appealed to nostalgic, patriotic middle-class sentiment. Mr. Currin’s popularity, though very broad for an art-world artist, is for an audience hungry for racier, more sophisticated amusements. What unites the two is the trenchantly safe tastes to which they appeal. They both rely on received skills and traditional-looking techniques that impress by familiarity. While each strikes out with inventive, genuinely memorable images, Rockwell’s appeal was to humanism, Mr. Currin’s, to a low-octane sadism.

Mr. Currin likes to depict transgression, but he himself is not transgressive. The time in which using “old master” techniques was inherently subversive passed by before Mr. Currin was in short trousers. It is true that retardaire painting is one of those recurring avant-garde strategies that each generation thinks, or pretends, it is doing for the first time. But by the moment Mr. Currin emerged in the early 1990s, not only were Picabia’s tongue in cheek “bad”old master paintings of the 1940s firmly canonized, but the 1980s had been a golden age of wasmsbecome isms.

An artist shouldn’t be blamed for the excesses of his supporters — which are now fiscal as well as critical, with the whole show of 20 canvases selling out before opening, reportedly for more than half a million dollars each. But because Mr. Currin attracts such improbable plaudits for his technique, genuine aficionados of classical painting feel obliged to overreact. He is routinely compared to mannerist and baroque masters of the 16th and 17th centuries, whereas the more telling point of reference is to mid-20th-century how-to manuals. He is certainly skilled at painting superficially fresh, dutifully covered pictures. His vaginas are dispatched with the slippery bravura of Dutch masters tackling oysters.  But what can’t easily be pastiched is the awkward energy that comes from genuine painterly invention and curiosity.

A useful comparison can be drawn between Mr. Currin and the Neue-Sachlichkeit painters on view at the Metropolitan Museum’s “Glitter and Doom” exhibition.  For artists like Otto Dix and Christian Schad, a revival of German styles at a time of national crisis and renewal had very specific purpose.  And the medieval meticulousness of their renderings of flesh were means both to excoriate what they saw as a corrupt society and make people more conscious of bodily vitality in the wake of war.   There is no such purpose for Mr. Currin in either his painterliness or his historicism.  He deploys technique to impress, and needs paint, with its elasticity and ambiguity, to distort in ways that aren’t possible (or easy- Hans Bellmer shows it is possible) in photography.

Dix, even more than Rockwell, offers an instructive career comparison with Mr. Currin. After the Nazis took over, the sometime social castigator retreated to fastidious pastoral fantasies, religious allegories, and loving realist family portraits. In Mr. Currin’s new work, luridly mannerist bodily distortion is on the retreat. There is still cruel caricature in many of the nameless faces, but increasingly Mr. Currin is drawn to subjects like his wife, his son, and friends whom he probably doesn’t feel licensed or inspired to make grotesque. These subjects, lovingly observed, are worked with genuine, unironic emphathy. But unlike Dix, conservatism in Mr. Currin’s case might be a braver, better way to go.

If you didn’t know the track record of the artist and came across one of his tender, invested paintings of his son in a contemporary realist gallery like Henoch in Chelsea, you’d stop and admire it for an unproblematically traditionalist moment. It is hard to believe that his market lies in such a direction, but unaffected observational realism is Mr. Currin’s area of painterly and spiritual growth.

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John Goodrich, Stephen Maine, and Deborah Solomon joined David Cohen to review John Currin at Gagosian, Lucian Freud at Acquavella, Maureen Gallace at 303, Marilyn Minter at 94 and Fiona Rae at PaceWildenstein

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AUGUSTIN FERNANDEZ
Mitchell Algus until July 16
511 W. 25th Street, 212-242-6242

GOOD VIBRATIONS
McKenzie until July 30
511 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-989-5467

The Pre-Raphaelites still have a lot to answer for. The cult of wan Ophelias, Madonna-vampires, and socialite sirens that began with Rossetti and Millais reached its apogee in Munch and Klimt, only surviving at this stage in history as a kitsch parody of itself. But a new show at Bellwether suggests the reign of sultry and sinister lovelies continues unabated. “Idols of Perversity” is a portrait gallery packed cheek-by-jowl with killer damsels.

If dead critics could be resurrected for the purpose of reviewing contemporary art, this show might be the occasion to disturb the slumber of Max Nordau, as it is an almost willful vindication of the vituperative anathemas expressed in his notorious 1892 polemic, “Degeneration.” The title of the show comes from Bram Dijkstra’s illuminating, level-headed analysis of fin-de-siècle artistic misogyny; ironically, Amazon’s “customers also bought” list for Dijkstra’s book is topped by Nordau.

John Currin, the best-known artist in the show, is by no means the sickest or silliest — a sure indication of the general level here. His fusion of schlock taste and appeal to tested academic technique does set a standard tactic, however, which others in this show follow or aspire to. His “Chewy,” a bald-headed rococo dame at her morning toilette, about to choose her wig for the day, has a tame finesse out of keeping with the company it keeps (or the artist’s own norm).

More in line with the standards of curators Thomas Woodruff and Becky Smith is Christoph Steinmeyer’s high-artifice, greased-up “Dryade” (2003), which derives its mild, nerdish intensity from a relentless symmetry. The contribution of Graham Little (an artist paired with Mr. Currin in a shared room at MoMA’s 2003 drawing exhibition, “Eight Propositions”), a portrait on gesso of a supermodel in suede boots and brown jacket, seated against a vaguely Old Masterish neutral brown ground, is brought to life by an exquisitely rendered face and gaudily Klimtian Lycra leggings.

This show brings together artists of different intentions and skill levels. Many make obvious and familiar jests about art and kitsch. A vulgar pastoral of a nymph and a spaniel by Catherine Howe, a Currin wannabe, falls between the stools of Rococo and Dada. A double portrait in contrastingly smooth and impastoed finish by Pieter Schoolwerth is essentially an academic warm-up exercise. Others look like genuine strays from tattoo parlors (June Kim, Mel Odom), prison art programs (Sas Christian), or the art departments of publishers of sci-fi books and heavy-metal albums (Ted Mineo, Lori Earley).

Yet there are also displays of genuine artistry. Ben Blatt, Ray Caesar, and Mr. Woodruff himself have the formidably obsessive and inventive skills of 16th-century Mannerists. Julie Heffernen could have been drafted to keep them company.

The emphasis in this show is on the idols, not the perversity. With the exception of a tattooed, moderately hirsute gent in a leather jacket, one or two extremely convincing transvestites, and a smattering of prepubescent schoolgirls, every other model on display, even the ones with horns and tails, could get a job at a Playboy Club. Most of the artists, in other words, may be ironic about style but are earnest about their — and our — libidos. The mild porn-quotient ensures a work’s status as kitsch, thus making it respectable as an iconoclastic gesture. The problem–as Dada fast approaches its centennial–is that such a gesture is no longer in the least perverse. Idolatry is an orthodox article of avant-garde faith.

The fault line in this show isn’t between irony and earnestness: The best kind of mannerism of necessity has both. The redoubtable Duncan Hannah, represented by four works scattered around the show, makes works steeped in enigmatic, fey awkwardness. His trademark Balthusian languor, knowing amateurishness, and wistful, obsessive heroine worship remind us that, long before Degeneration came along, there was good, wholesome Melancholia.

Viewers with a real taste for the painterly perverse should check out Agustín Fernández at Mitchell Algus. Mr. Algus is renowned as the champion of older artists battling artworld indifference or memory loss, a brief amply met by the valiant Mr. Fernández.  Born in Havana in 1928, trained at New York’s Art Students League and the subject of some success in Paris Surrealist circles in the 1960s, the artist has lived in New York since 1972 without staging a single solo exhibition prior to this one.

He did enjoyed some exposure, though, when a canvas from 1961 was used as a prop in Brian de Palma’s 1980 movie, “Dressed to Kill” (the still graced his announcement card).  The painting in question, “Développement d’Un Délire,” (above left) is actually a tour de force of fantasty and invention.  Rendered with a luscious painterly containment that looks like a cross between Yves Tanguy and Carravagio, its ambiguous personages are at once erotic and menacing, compelling and otherworldly.

This tastefully installed  historic overview demonstrates stylistic and iconographical diversity but consistent aesthetic concerns: like Matta, Bacon and Balthus, Mr. Fernández’s imagery does service to the kinky without giving way to the kitsch.  He has ways to convey an idealised sensation of bound flesh and penetrated orifice without being anatomically explicit.  At the same time, he has a private vocabulary of armor and heraldry that achieves high artifice without being camp.  A memorable set of square canvases of abstracted but teasing finesse (the three canvases stacked at the center of the right image) consist of fleshlike forms which pucker to expose a hole at their center, over which hover suggestively an object Mr. Fernández’s background encourages one to read as Havana cigar.

“Good Vibrations” at McKenzie Fine Art surveys the recent, widespread revival of Op Art, the abstract style from the 1960s that played psychological games with image cognition— close-knit lines, repeating sequences, and jarring chromas that serate your vision. Like Seurat’s pointillism, Op Art leaves the final mixing of forms and colors to the viewer’s brain.

This show focuses insistently on contemporary work in the Op Art field. The only veteran of the original “perceptual abstraction,” as Peter Selz named the tendency in a famous Museum of Modern Art exhibition, is Julian Stanczak. The younger artists tap the “retro” appeal of the scientific optimism of the original movement but bring fresh and disparate influences: mysticism, primitivism, acid trips, screensavers.

Susie Rosemarin’s technique is redolent of Mr. Stanczak’s: slight variations on a strict lattice to induce a blurry sensation of movement. Only she uses the technique to induce the illusion of a Cross of St. Andrew pulsating against a white Iron Cross, a sort of visual pun on “visionary.” Sara Sosnowy’s intense, obsessive drawings, combining Op Art and Australian Aboriginal painting, recall James Siena. Tom Martinelli induces a familiar buzz from the simple misregistration of one colored ball superimposed upon another. And Barbara Takenaga plumbs exquisite depths in her mind-numbingly fastidious concentric arrangement of little blobs of diminishing scale, inducing the mystical sensation of being sucked into a vortex.

The cheery palette and compositional fizz of “Good Vibrations” might seem a perfect palate-cleanser after the fetid decadence of “Idols,” but in a funny way it is a chip off the same block. Bellwether’s idols and McKenzie’s vibrations both trade in the frisson of revival, after all, require fastidious skill, and make appeal to basic bodily experiences, whether libidinal or retinal.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 7, 2005

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Yale professors are telling their students that John Currin paints as well as Botticelli. I heard this yesterday from a young painter who was sent my way for career advice. Yale has probably the most illustrious art school in America. Its alumni litter the firmament; Currin (who was born in 1962 and is the hottest ticket this season) is only the most recent ascendant star.

What does it portend if instructors at prestigious Ivy League Schools, and not a few cognoscenti elsewhere, genuinely extol the painterly technique of so disingenuous and meretricious a hack as John Currin? Recently, a solo exhibition of his work was staged at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. The exhibition coincided with a blockbuster at the Guggenheim of Norman Rockwell, a more likely peer than Botticelli (or Dürer, Tiepolo, or Breughel, artists obliquely referenced in his smorgsbord of styles). *

Like Rockwell, Currin has facility in rendering and a propensity to please. His target audience, however, is not the mass consumer but the artworld insider. For Rockwell, vulgarity is merely a side effect of his hackneyed strategies, whereas for Currin, it is the strategy itself. “Bad Painting”, of course, is as well-worn within the (modernist as surely as postmodernist) avantgarde as illustrational exploitation of academic tropes is within Norman Rockwell’s unchallenging aesthetic. While Rockwell sought to console the million, Currin would probably be content to rake one in.

Disingenuous, I say? Am I not committing the classic critical blunder of confusing intentions with results (the Tolstoyan fallacy)? Is not the road to Paint Heaven paved with bad intentions? So what, one might ask, if the artist has confused or corrupted ideals, if at least on occasion – as in fact Currin does – he comes up trumps? Amidst the schlock horrors and gratuitous sillinesses at Rosen, Currin was able to offer a few roses among the many thorns. There were about three small pictures on show – unlikely to end up in museums (unlikely, in other words, to influence future Yalees and arbiters of taste) and more a sop to conservative taste among private collectors than public strategy art – and this handful included such throw-away gems as a little Tieopoloesque putto-head, compellingly sweet from thirty feet, and a couple of John Singer Sargent cum Adolf Menzel interiors. But the vast majority were Rockwellian romps of phoney narrative, rehashes of big busted illustration-book beauties, more Reginald Marsh than Rubens, and gaudily-framed beaux-art parades of dexterous caricature, in no wit superior to the dashed-off efforts of street portraitists at London’s Leicester Square or New York’s Central Park.

The late theorist and painter (and Yale professor) Louis Finkelstein developed an interesting concept of “split intentionality”. It was proferred as an educational tool rather than a critical one: to help explain to painters where they were going awry. Naturally, Finkelstein, despite flirting rampantly with many styles in his own painting, was a modernist: reconcilliation and wholeness were his goals. Current artists are entitled to want to orchestrate more complex projections of self and intention, to allow for artistic multi-personality. It seems to me, however, that Currin is not in the least bit schizophrenic. He veers, on the contrary, towards mono-mania. There is no dualism in his art, as there is in many of the greatest artists. His desire to have his cake and eat it, to exhibit painterly facility but all the while subscribe to fashionable anti-aesthetic postures, is not a split intention so much as one that is nauseatingly over-focused – on success.

For Currin is quite simply on a no-lose ticket (a good hiding to everything): Bad Painting with quality technique. Keep the theorists chattering and the buyers salivating. Conceptually, he adds nothing to near-century old Dadaism. He is a fashionable footnote to Picabia. And technically? It is here that one has to despair, because of what the warped prevailing taste for Currin says about actual sensibility for painting of the past. If sub-Rockwellism actually looks to taste makers and key educators to be on some kind of parity with the art from the raided image-bank of history, if old-master technique is merely an abstraction to be referenced, like a brand or celebrity’s name knowingly dropped, then we are in trouble. If you think this sounds like Tory hysteria, that the old masters can stand their own, that a bit of lighthearted iconophobic misreading won’t do them any lasting harm, just stand back and think through the practical consequences of such bad taste. Where are future picture conservators coming from? Museum curators? Art dealers? What degrees of nuance and sensibility are going to inform the people who decide what to put in national collections, and how to clean them, and what to hang them next to? Sure, past geniuses are robust plants, but they need a forest to live in, not a desert.

This student, meanwhile, wants advice. Should she do an MFA? Is there a future for figurative art? She has sent me jpegs of her work. She looks pretty talented. Most of her paintings are done from photographs. It transpires this is not from a Degas-Sickert-Warholian fascination with the implications of artifice, but for the above-mentioned prosaic reasons (no space or dollars for a model). Shoulders above these in quality are a couple of canvases done from life and a self-portrait. At least this appears so from her reproductions. Facility is seen giving way to freshness of vision. The right kind of ambiguity and awkwardness is creeping in, exactly the kind, in fact, that Sickert and Degas got from photography. It is not a matter of “Use photos or don’t”. Rather, it’s the magic of unlearning versus the conjury of knowingness.

Anyhow, this young Yalee wants to paint like the old masters, she says, but to do so as a feminist in the early twenty first century. And – oh, yes – without irony! If Lisa Yuskavage, Currin’s peer (sidekick would be unkind) who renders vintage soft-porn big busted girlie illustrations in lurid slippery paint in mammoth canvases doesn’t quite do it for her, where and how and with whom should she study, she wants to know.

Without irony, eh? Maybe we could substitute irony for just a little attitude, and then some possibilities open up. In fact, there are possibilites for figurative painting of the kind she is struggling to define for herself among contemporaries worth looking to who are remarkably close to the Currin camp. A painter most Currinists quite like, and who I really like, is Elizabeth Peyton. I withheld my thoughts on Currin from readers of my column at artcritical.com, but allow me to repeat what I said there about Peyton. One reason I do so, incidentally, is to discourage any suspicion that I am anti-Mannerism per se. I like authentic mannerism (please permit the oxymoron) as much as any po-mo in town. Thinking about Peyton here should have the same effect as citing the shade of Sickert (who of course was a great ironist and synthesist). The following is quoted from an article entitled “Thank Heaven for Little Pictures” which lead with a review of the Whitney’s exhibition, Alex Katz: Small Paintings:

There is a similar [to Katz] “authentic despite” quality to Elizabeth Peyton, the Watteau of Blah. Katz and Hockney are her most conspicuous contemporary artistic heroes, choices, when they were made a decade or so ago, that were almost poignantly retro in themselves. I mention Watteau because of an insouciant whimsicality underpinned by psychological substance. Another old master she recalls in this respect is Forain. It’s in drawing technique, specifically, that she resembles Hockney, whereas the kinship with Katz mostly has to do with brinkmanship. She constantly bids high in her wagers against naffness. In her case, the traffic between the synthetic and the perceptual runs in the opposite direction from Katz. With Peyton, falsity and mediation are the sine qua non alike of source and style: she starts with media images of pop stars and House of Windsor princelings, or with snapshots of downtown boho friends posing so nonchalantly they might as well be minor celebrities. Her painterly style proceeds to flirt rampantly with the fashion plate, as Katz seems to with the billboard and the cartoon. What makes her highly wrought images so tantalizing, in my opinion, is the exquisite correlation between emotional attitude and painterly investment. In Katz, a twist of poignancy gives edge to his high jinks with style. In Peyton, where sloppiness and feyness characterize so perfectly an alienated, narcissistic longing, it’s not a twist but the whole fruit that is thrown in.

And then, after quibbling about details in her technique and comparing her with Katz for a bit, I concluded:

But perhaps such technical issues come down to time as much as talent. Peyton gives us cause for great hope. As Bad Painting goes, she is as good as it gets.

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* Of course, we are way beyond the point of bewailing the fact that an institution like the Guggenheim, and a reputed scholar like Robert Rosenblum, the curator of the Rockwell show, should commit themselves to anachronistic kitsch in so savvy a fusion of avantgardist posture and gate-swelling populism. Concurrent, incidentally, with the Currin and Rockwell exhibits was a retrospective of the modern academic painter John Koch (at the New York Historical Society) whose success ratio – painterly success that is, and to my eye – was about the same as Currin’s. But in terms of actual technique and honorable intentions the younger, artworld star cannot compete with this sedate old-world socialite.

This article was first published in Blunt Edge, the “underground” annual edited by Roy Oxlade in Great Britain, in December 2001 and was first posted at artcritical in January 2003.

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