Currin, His Time and Evolution
When John Currin rose quickly to prominence in New York during the middle 1990's, his early works of large breasted crudely painted women created a storm of outrage among many critics. Along with Lisa Yuskavage and Elizabeth Peyton, Currin shot to the forefront of a movement inspired in part by Hockney and Alex Katz. Yet unlike his contemporaries, Currin has taken a series of steps towards proclaiming himself as both a serious and thoughtful artist of his day.
To understand Currin fully, you must start with a couple of artists practicing a generation before him. In many ways both Hockney and Katz typified the high art of "bad painting1." Both artists were very young on the eve of postmodernism. The art world had for years previously been concerned with the Greenburg/Duchampian ideals that championed forms of abstraction or a progressive lineage. The figurative style that these two artists grappled with were at the time seen as taboo, or against the grain. Painters were more concerned with splattering paint onto the canvas and talking about how this represented their souls malcontent or an intellectual belief.
In the 1960's, Hockney created a vast number of quick drawings and paintings based themselves perhaps on outsider art and Mattise to some extent. These works thrived on childish techniques that contained the raw essentials of a definable narrative. Hockney's responsive drawings in many ways show the terrible pressure put onto young artists to conform with their times. The quick loose jagged mark making that you can find in a Hockney work is very representative of De Kooning. Only Hockney was bringing these drawings back from pure abstraction, the opposite direction De Kooning had traveled in.
As part of a young group of artists emerging out of London grappling with the figure, these artists sought not realism, but an emotional raw effusion of tactility. The punk movement of the 1970's, the pared down chords and hard driving messy style of the Ramones would be a good analogy to what these artists were attempting to capture, only it was with pen and a paint brush instead of a guitar.
Hockney's career has had its ups and downs, but now as we find ourselves with over forty years of work to look back upon, we can start to judge his importance as an artist. The cruder work of Hockney eventually straddled many different ideas, and become known as a man obsessed with historical roots of painting. He has studied perspective and how the eye sees. Hockney authored a definitive book that explored the draftsmanship of old masters, attempting to explain how such realistic masterpieces were produced using mechanical tools. Mostly Hockney is loved for his minimalist style. His paintings speak of moments, or places as a poem, editing out extraneous subject matter. If you take a look at 'Two Men in a Shower," you will see exactly that and nothing else. Two men posed behind a shower curtain, the water falling down upon them. And in the background a pastel orange/pink wash across the rest of the canvas. There is almost no depth to the composition, the tiles of the bathroom, or whatever else may have been in this space is taken away. We are left with a meditative moment, serene with the actions taking place on the canvas.
Just as Hockney pared down everything to a minimal degree, Katz did so but with an eye not towards telling any story, but instead in the direction of capturing an almost plastic representation of the figure. These two artists have enjoyed a remarkable run of success, and Katz has had his share of iconic paintings. But Katz pretty much stayed with a tried and true recipe he knew the public clamored for. Katz never looks back in history for inspiration or examines his contemporaries for new ideas. A Katz from 1965 is pretty much the same as a Katz from 2000.
What sets Currin apart from his contemporaries is a searching quality found in any great artist. From one work to the next a viewer can see an evolution in his thought process. In his earliest works Currin did primarily concern himself with painting in a youthful style that if taken as a whole would leave any viewer lacking. But, like Hockney, Currin became immersed in the history of painting as well as the manner in which the eye sees.
Part of what makes comparing artists and styles interesting to the observer is in tracking influences of one artist upon another. Discerning how one artist takes what he or she desires from another and then in turn influences yet another group is part of what makes the art world so terribly interesting. Anyone working today has all of history to feed upon. You might hear someone say "Vermeer was the greatest artist who ever lived," and in one sense, this could be construed as a truth. In his day, Vermeer's lush interiors and breathtaking painting techniques were in his time startling achievements. Vermeer still commands respect not only because his paintings are still quite good by today's standards, but even more because of his place in history. Vermeer influenced his contemporaries through his realist portrayals of figures, his palate that so elegantly captured light, and his finely crafted compositions. Altogether his work was revolutionary during his period, artists came from across Europe to study his work and incorporate its ideas into their own paintings. Today hundreds or thousands of people can and do paint just as well, if not better than Vermeer, but we don't cherish their paintings with the same relish. Academically figures merely lolling in sun drenched rooms going about a daily routine, or just sitting while reading a book have lost their charm primarily because they have been portrayed again and again. Their uniqueness has been lost.
While Currin developed as an artist, moving from the portrayal of large breasted pin up girls towards a more serious investigation of composition, he obviously looked closely at Vermeer or those artists the old master influenced. What is exceptional in what Currin is up to is that instead of pushing away from the past, he is taking the art of today and forcing it onto the past. "Whereas Manet modernized Titian, Currin antiquates his figures, projecting them out of an art history textbook. Its what the sexual fantasy of a man aroused by the Louvre would look like.2"
In Hockney's book, 'Secret Knowledge,' he attempts unearth the process in which old masters so carefully captured the likenesses of those who would pose for him. When an artist is drawing or painting the figure without aid of a device, he or she is constantly shifting their eyes. Looking up at the model and then focusing upon an exact spot on the canvas to make a mark or correction. In the act of shifting the gaze back and forth, one can create a close likeness to the figure posing. But even the most competent portrait painter or draftsman will create slight alterations that just don't exactly feel like the person they are painting. While using an aid such as an overhead projector and a photograph, an artist can churn out an exact likeness of his subject quickly. The difference is that when not using an aid, the artist is struggling to find the exact curves of the body, shadows of the eye sockets, and foreshortening of the limbs. While using an aid, the artist is free to concentrate on mark making, the thickness of a line, or in matching the color correctly to his/her subject. Vermeer had at his disposal a Camera Obscura, a large box, like a portable closet, in which the artists can place themselves. Inside this dark space, an image is projected upside down like a slide being projected onto a wall. Vermeer could then sketch out the portrait in exact detail, thus attaining the near Photorealist quality found in his paintings. During the early and middle 20th century, most artists strove for imaginative likenesses of the human figure. Even while painting a figure in the studio, artists would encourage themselves to find the differences between what they were seeing and what they were creating and elaborate upon this. The eye focuses on such a narrow point of the figure or canvas at any one time. If you look at the Matisse on the right, you will see a figure that on first glance might seem acceptable to your eye. What your eyes are doing is looking at dozens of very small points a second, piecing them together, and creating an image that seems to feel just fine. This occurs because Matisse was a master in finding the exact curve of the torso, the fold of a leg, and the interaction between the woman and her surroundings. These hundreds of points of reference that our eye focuses upon, when pieced together, seems to be working just fine. It is however an illusion, if the figure in the painting were to stand and walk around the room, it would become immediately apparent that something is amiss. Even if every portion of the figure matches up snugly with the next, it becomes noticeable that the thigh will not hold up as well against her left hand as it does with its immediate surroundings. Diebenkorn and his figures created with fewer lines and only using black ink washes, is a little easier to decipher than Matisse. Try and see where your eye is focusing as your gaze wanders around the drawing. If you look at her right eye, are you also concentrating on the left? Or is your area of focus so detailed that it is only picking up fractions of percentage points at a glance?
Currin is working most likely from photographic images, sketching the figures in the pose he desires from a found image and into a sketchbook. He captures a close but exaggerated likeness and probably screened by the composition. He then transfers the image onto his canvas using projection. The act of doing this incorporates the 20th century expressionist ideal into Vermeer's 17th century camera obscura realism. It is not just that Currins models are soufully manipulated before our eyes, it is also the pallate he uses. In areas, Currin will slop on hearty portions of thick oil paint to his canvas, in others layer upon layer of transparant glazes suffice. The old masters were limited to the tools of their times.
If you compare a classic Vermeer, such as 'Young Woman with a Water Pitcher,' to a contemporary Currin 'Thanksgiving,' you will be immediately struck by several similarities. First of all, Currin is basing the composition partly upon the motif Vermeer used in about half of his canvases. Vermeer constantly returned to a corner of one of his rooms (perhaps this is where he could easily set up his Camera Obscura?). His composition always portrayed a corner of the room on the left side where a window would be casting light onto the primary focal point of the picture situated on the right side (in this picture, it is the girl and the table with a pitcher). Secondly Currin is capturing a moment in time, a family gathered around a morbid Thanksgiving feast. Vermeer always caught daily occurrences as well, such as with a girl opening a window. Thirdly, Both artists are concerned with capturing in a highly realistic manner, not only the folds in the cloth, or shadows cast by light sources, but a true pallet of colors that richly contain the image.
Vermeer created an image that was for its time startling, but today easily produced. Currin, in 'Thanksgiving,' uses all of art history to and the leniency of our Post Modern culture to produce something fully new for our age. First of all we have the figures of the three ladies that are cleverly misshapen. They're necks are too long, their heads are too large, these are figures that could not exist in reality. But Currin is pulling it off thanks in a large part to the old masters techniques of accurate depiction being subjugated by the more nuanced and searching quality of the abstract expressionists; the steps they have taken to devolve and reconstruct the figure. Besides the Expressionist influence, Currin is taking the absurdities from Surrealism and incorporating this into his canvas. The raw turkey, is this family about to carve into the beast uncooked? What is being fed to the girl in the middle, exaggerated in her pose like a young chick waiting to find nourishment from her mother. The darkened interior lends a Kafkaesque intrigue almost opposite to the light that is radiating into the Vermeer. Primarily what differentiates the two paintings is strictly the period of time in which they are painted. If these paintings were both contemporary, Currin's would be arguably the more competent of the two on almost every count.
Alex Katz was a man of his times, and Pop art was huge during the 1960's. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein led the vanguard and mandated a slick commercial style that reverberated loudly. Katz perfected a unique style all of his own, his images were crisp and sparse, almost as if he were interpreting the loose quality of billboards and commercial advertisements, using what he found as guidelines in his picture creations. He turned himself into a later-day Fairfield Porter with out obvious brush marks or transparent layers showing labored under-painting. Katz's style quickly became synonymous with the artist and as the years went by he rarely explored the limits of his confines, content to produce images that were highly sought after, but in the end ideas that he had mined so repeatedly, most of the life was sucked out of his hand.
Over the last few years, as he enters the twilight of his career, Katz has been attempting to expand his legacy by manufacturing works that will broaden his oeuvre. Perhaps he has forgotten what it is to be an artist, or it might just be that he was nothing more than a crass manipulator from the beginning, but the paintings he has created are less than astounding and in many regards are nothing other than a slight whimper to the end of what was at first a promising career. His paintings do not expand his legacy; instead they are expansive works on par with a most thoughtless child's scribbling. Somewhere he seems to have gotten the notion that a larger painting is better than a small for no other reason than the spectacle of size alone. Upon entering a retrospective of his recent work you will be surrounded by paintings the size of billboards, and with little more than a few dabs of paint, creating a mockery of everything except for the greed of collectors driving the whole endeavor. Through some creed, the financial engine driving the gallery system in New York states for the most part that a large painting is worth multiple amounts more than a smaller work. Maybe Katz got it in his head that because some collector was willing to pay ten times more for a billboard sized painting, this work was all the better than his smaller work. Well its not so, people are still purchasing his work on a potential that has long since faded, and the anticipation of his works value to continue to be thought of as a wise investment. After his death, Katz will be remembered for a couple dozen great works, but his career will be more strongly remembered as so many other artists of our capitalistic time, as one who did not meet expectations.
Like Alex Katz, Yuskavage and Peyton have not grown as artists overly much since they initially found success. Yuskavage is slowly expanding her repertoire of images, experimenting with light and color, but like a skipping record she is painting large breasted Barbie dolls in a large gambit of titillating poses. It is almost remarkable how only a few years ago Yuskavage and Currin were commonly spoken of together in the same sentence. Today she is still admired by most of those on the high-minded world art scene as a woman brave enough to push the male gaze back into the face of men.
But is this enough? Compositionally her paintings are about as invigorating as a bad Norman Rockwell. Her stylistic approach is almost on par with an airbrush. And her paintings stand out only because of the luminous though overused monochromatic color scheme of her pallet. Some critics are becoming bold enough to criticize her openly, "her imagery seems to embody the conceit, and common enough today, that painting amounts to little more than onanistic indulgence.3" But these quips are often hedged inside of an otherwise glowing preponderance of hypocrisy. Most amazing of all is the fact that where Currin was and still is exorcised for painting the female in the manner he did during his large breasted years, Yuskavage is held up as a shining light of feminism. Unless she undertakes a major retooling of her oeuvre, in time Yuskavage will come to the end of her popularity and go the way of so many of the unheralded Abstract Expressionists of the 1950's. It is inconceivable that if she were to leave behind only what she has thus far produced, her legacy will be remembered as nothing other than a two bit Vargas emulator.
Elizabeth Peyton is not growing very quickly either; just like Yuskavich she has found an enormous amount of critical acclaim. Her watercolors and paintings are quick and small, thus producing an enormous cash flow. This might have something to do with her stunted development. The fact that she was immediately appreciated and showered with accolades might have blinded her to need of continuous growth. Beyond that, she does have one thing going for her, and that is the paintings she does pull off have an aura of perfection surrounding them.
Peytons's inspiration regarding image matter includes the weekly tabloids and snap shots of either her friends in various poses or celebrities in repose. These pictures are then faithfully transcribed onto a canvas or sheet of paper... not exactly, but through the observational Matisse method. Thus, the composition feels a little jerky and somewhat out of whack. Thick and transparent layers of paint are applied in a manner that produces great drips and accidents, which are incorporated into her work. "Peyton's style is a kind of sloppy translucence. She prefers wide swaths of color on her small paintings., in thin layers that reveal her process of adding paint. Peyton slathers on paint in a general way, as if replicating a washed-out Polorid.4" The end result is a study of paint. The image becomes in many ways an afterthought to the brush marks and various means of paint application.
Peyton is not a lost cause yet by any means. It seems doubtful that she will pin a legacy on the high handed feminist compliments that glorify her as turning the objectification of females on its head. Many of her works so far have been of young androgynous males. On the other hand, she is growing as an artist with goals similar to Chuck Close (an artist concerned primarily with the beauty of process). Though she still has yet to make more than a few tentative steps in any direction of her own, the promise of her future still looms large.
Jenny Saville is in many ways outside of the artists I have talked about before in this article. Instead of owing a major allegiance to Hockney and Katz, she follows along the lines of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Her work is large in scale, often measuring more than twenty feet in breadth. Her work also deals with largeness in another sense. These paintings are almost all self-portraits. They deal with her self perceptions surrounding the female figure via the gaze of the male. That is she is confronting the ideas surrounding that of being female long propagated by the other sex. In many ways she is also dealing with the plain everyday horror of being alive. Her work is amazing in its profusion of different applications of paint, and is troubling in the confrontational attitude it aspires towards via subject matter.
Britain has celebrated its figurative painters over the last century while the USA has triumphed its ground breaking abstract expressionists. These artists aspired towards capturing the very essence of living flesh on a canvas. Much in the manner that DeKooning mastered the process of paint manipulation in his almost abstract 'Woman' pieces, Freud attained and unprecedented level of realism with his thick brushwork over the course of his career. Saville, along with other artists of her generation such as Peyton and Currin, are the culmination of the merging lines of art; abstract expressionism and British figurative painting.
Saville has taken from the pages of both DeKooning and Freud along with the over the top massive wall paintings of the 1980's New York art scene. She has taken from the Abstract Expressionist ilk and combined it with the postmodern practice of Photorealism used by Currin, Yuskavage, and Peyton. Saville's work is much in line with Peyton's, only Saville has let go of many of her hesitations and misgivings. Both artists are exploring the manipulation of paint on opposite scales of size. But whereas Peyton is content thus far to produce iconic images of mass culture, Saville is striving to become the very best 'artist' her abilities will allow for and in the very truest meaning of the word. Every work Saville has produced thus far is a risk on her part.