JOHN CURRIN
Whitney Museum of American
Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
November 20, 2003 – February 22, 2004
By JOHN
GOODRICH
John
Currin Fishermen 2002
oil on canvas, dimensions to follow
Photographs by Geoffrey Clements; courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New
York
How would Titian
have painted if he had lived in the age of Britney Spears? Sociologists
and cultural anthropologists could bat the question about for hours,
but we'll never really know, and for the most intractable of reasons:
no one in our era seems capable of committing shapes and colors to a
surface with anything like Titian's authority. Artists who currently
paint in an Old Masterly fashion mostly receive the official condescension
of art world-and often deservingly, since as a whole they capture the
mannerisms but not the energy of their long-dead role models. The controversial
exhibition of John Currin's paintings at the Whitney, however, presents
something a little different. The 42-year old Currin has a formidable
combination of gifts: as an artist, he lacks only the most crucial talents
of a master, and as a person, he breathes with natural ease the emotionally
rarified air of Postmodernism, with all its ironies, automatic appropriations
and ambivalent self-regard. As such, he continues to produce some of
the most irritating but intriguing work around.
Currin's notoriety
of course stems from his facile, indulgent images of women with tortuously
enlarged breasts, but his nearly fifty paintings at the Whitney also
poke fun at straight men, gay men, urban sophisticates, country hayseeds,
and even the handicapped (though "The Cripple," with unexpected
tact, hides the details of infirmity.) Or, as the publicity materials
for the exhibition no doubt claim somewhere, these paintings may be
poking fun at our attitudes towards these subjects. Currin's most potent
images in fact have bite partly because he seems blissfully unconcerned
about whether he's exposing his subjects' physicality or his own psyche.
This mixture of unconsciousness and technical brilliance can be unsettling,
but his clichés, for all their unmentionable dimensions, often
ring true-they're keenly drawn stereotypes of stereotypes, if you will.
In many ways this frat-boy temperament, operating within an extravagant
talent, turns out to be the perfect measure of a culture of endemic
self-awareness.
The images would
be forgettable were it not for their genuine, if selective, virtuosity.
More completely than almost any other contemporary artist, Currin has
mastered the tonal rendering of volumes-the layering and positioning
of shadows, highlights, half-shadows and reflecting light, so that he
can-when he wants to-fashion not just a head but even the buoyancy of
its expression, be it winsome, distracted, or mildly engaged. Currin
doesn't shy from the most difficult modeling tasks; the evocation of
hands and the air around them in paintings like "Honeymoon Nude"
and "The Producer" can be exquisite.
No self-respecting
Postmodernist would be caught dead simply ennobling a subject, and Currin's
humor turns leaden when he tries too hard. The rib-nudging intimations
about physical exams in "The Dream of the Doctor" and the
breast-echoing lemons in "Nude on a Table" are simply juvenile.
But when the satirizing is more offhand it can be truly touching-consider
the image of the weathered, gangly elegance of a socialite in "Skinny
Woman," or, in "Park City Grill," the hanging grins that
capture superbly (and not totally unsympathetically) the awkward eagerness
of a desperate twosome. At times one detects actual affection. One startles
to see Currin's precocity so unjaded in "Heartless," a three-quarter
length portrait of a clothed, rationally-proportioned young woman, in
which modulations of color limpidly locate the expanse of forehead and
the twist of a shyly confident smile. The figure's gesture, with the
arm closely doubled to place the hand ever so lightly beneath the shoulder,
is one of the high points of the exhibition.
Not many living
painters can paint so fully in the manner of Sargent, and the comparison
is useful because Currin shows a similar comfort with his own huge facility,
with his fashionableness (in regard to both his motifs and career),
as well as with a certain irresolution about what it finally all means.
And this leads
to the ultimate disappointment of the work. By historical standards
Currin is a first-rate caricaturist, but a second-string painter. When
his images call upon only his virtuosic tonal rendering, the results
can be impressive. In "Honeymoon Nude" or "The Old Fence"
the impeccably modeled faces fit smoothly into overall rhythms of contours
that curl and unfold with the energy (if not quite the gathering impetus)
of Cranach. But the rigor of Currin's color falls far short of masters
like Courbet, from whom he quotes time and time again in his images
and titles. Currin's hues have the decorative luminosity of an Alma-Tadema
rather than the tremendous weighting and pacing of color one finds in
Courbet (or Botticelli or Mantegna, or any of the other masters whose
styles he lifts.) The two figures in Currin's "Fishermen"
feel like wandering wisps of paper, the weightless color imparting neither
volume to their masses nor meaning to their location on the edge of
a boat. Currin does a little better with Dressmaker, in which his hues
lend liveliness to the modeling of the head (though the evenly paced
color throughout the painting make the face oddly anticlimactic), and
the insistent colors and diagonals of "Minerva" propel each
other vividly through the image, so that the squared shoulders and twisting,
angular face have a real presence. More typical, however, is Currin's
homage to Courbet (or is it intended as a parody?), "The Gardeners,"
an almost gruesome patchwork of knees, hats, gloves, a house, and a
car, that holds together through the illustration of its parts rather
than the momentum of its whole. At such moments one suspects that Currin
is clueless about who's exposing whom, and against the heavyweights
even his wit can't provide enough cover.
Jean-Désiré-Gustave
Courbet Woman with a Parrot 1866
Metropolitan Museum of Art
(Just in case you want to see the real thing, make the ten-minute walk
to the Met's "Woman with a Parrot," painted by Courbet in
1866. This master's exuberance vitalizes a scene that would have been
only hackneyed in the hands of an illustrator. Here, the lengthening
arc of the female form-a splash of tawny ochres, modulated to establish
the distance of the far-flung feet, yet coherent enough to preserve
the figure's pictorial weight-flows into the abrupt lifting of an arm-its
contours and intervals of shadow deliberately ticking out its height-and
climaxes in the pert flip of a hand-a small, dark island of complications
that contains in miniature the rhythm of the forking limbs below. Here
we have movement, timing, scale, gravity-the visual re-incarnation of
life. It's a memorable demonstration of the power of artifice in paint,
and it makes Currin's brand of artificiality painfully thin. The real
conundrum of the Whitney exhibition is that an artist as gifted as Currin,
in a time of unsurpassed access to the great art of every age, might
content himself with just witty bravura.)
An artist acquaintance
I ran into at the Whitney had an interesting take on the show. For her
its most disturbing aspect was actually the response to it. The exhibition
wall texts, sprinkled with artist's own bon-mots and emphasizing the
development of his style over twelve tender years (omitting the single
earliest work), practically suggest the coming of a prophet. Reviewers
have disparaged the artist for making slick, exploitative painting (no
kidding), and praised him as a modern day Botticelli (please say you're
kidding) and both reactions miss the mark. More on target are the tart
words of an old teacher of mine: talent is common but character is rare,
and if your talent develops ahead of your character, you're done for.
But he spoke these words three decades ago, and there's no doubting
the fact that Currin has measured the pulse of our times.
Still, there's
much to be said for "The Lobster," especially when one mentally
blocks out its lower half-not to eliminate the surrealism of a sideways
face, but because the bottom portion diffuses the formal vividness of
the rest, that is, of the violin neck stretching tangibly into space,
the lobster's articulated curve grappling towards us, the glass vase
looming, moon-like, behind…
For those of
us who think there are other antidotes for academic painting (and apathy
to great painting) besides Duchamp and his descendants, and that one
of these antidotes is good painting, there remains a forlorn hope. Some
day, we'll walk into a gallery and see a painting whose breathtaking
facility serves the modest goal of making something surpassingly real
in the language of paint-that "modern day equivalent to Giotto"
that the 77-year-old Matisse lamented would take more than one lifetime
to achieve. And we'll wonder, could this be John Currin, working under
an alias, having shunned the art scene for something truly new: love
of painting?
see also
Maureen Mullarkey also on the Whitney show
David Cohen's 2001 article on Currin
