Projects 60 : John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans : the Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 24- September 8, 1997 Date 1997 Publisher The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/254 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history—from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art 0 w1/1 u a; 0 a john currin elizabeth peyton luc tuymans The Museum of Modern Art New York June 24— September 8, 1997 ArchiV ho Ma Xh« Museum oi modern Art Library I. Figurative Art in the Nineties or Love and in execution and intention, the paintings of John Currin, the Act of Painting Elizabeth Peyton, and Luc Tuymansare emblematic of that change,one that has to do with the meaningfulnessof the practiceof painting itself aswell as how it conveysits meaning. Sincethe introductionof modernistabstraction, figurative painting, particularly the kind that is illusionistic and Gerhard Richter, the German painter whose stylistic narrative, has been considered a rear-guard holding experiments since the sixties have ranged encyclopedically action in the avant-garde march above and beyond from expressionistabstraction to photographic realism, has mere representation. Like a tourist in the big city, observedthat "one of the great dilemmas in the twentieth illusionistic realism has returned periodically over the century [is] this seeming conflict or antagonism between past century, most notably between the wars with 2 painting's representationalfunction and its self-reflection." European neo-classicismand American regionalism, in The work of Currin, Peyton, and Tuymans acknowledges the sixties with Pop art and photorealism, and in the 3 this "fallacy of painting." Like the eighties painters, they eighties with the photography-based paintings of rarelypaint from life, preferring insteadto use photographs, artists like David Salle, Robert Longo, and Eric Fischl, advertisements, film and video stills, and other media among others. In the eighties, figuration's re-emergence sourcesas models.But unlike their predecessors,these artists occurred at a moment when painting had become, in are lessinterested in painting's inability to tell the truth than the art historian Thomas Crow's words, "a shorthand in its ability to lie convincingly. Although there is irony code for an entire edifice of institutional domination presentin the impossiblysinuous body of Peyton'sPiotr, the exerted through the collector's marketplace and the S-curveof the emaciated frame of John Currin's Ms. Omni, 1 modern museum." Eightiesrealism was self-conscious or the deadpan colors of Tuymans'sFlag, there is none in the and removed, constructed from vignettes appropriated useof the medium itself. Figurativepainting for these artists from photographs, advertisements, and Western art 4 is more than an act of conceptual art. It is also an act of history. Wielding their medium with an irony suited to love. It is this passionthat makes their work seem so direct its aura of obsolescence,Salle and Longo in particular 5 and so shameless, and what ultimately sets their produc painted representations of representions—realist tion apart from that of their forerunners and their less paintings that were considered commentaries on the adventurouscontemporaries. impossibility of capturing an authentic image. As a number of critics commented at the time, this kind of II. The Extreme Image: Sex, Horror, and Visual painting was lessan affirmation of the medium than an Indulgence extended wake to mark its demise. Stendhal, die-hard supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte and After a decade-long hiatus, during which a hybrid form echt romantic author of The Red and the Black, theorized of narrative conceptualism has held sway among a that nobility was a state of mind rather than of blood or generation of European and American artists who breeding. By a process he dubbed crystallization, he have come to maturity in the nineties, some artists avowed, passionalone—"an act of madnessin which love who choose to paint have returned to figuration, but begins, and which consistsof covering with all conceivable with a significantly changed attitude from those who perfectionsthe image one has made for oneself of the being immediately precededthem. However much they differ one is going to love"—could transform the Corsicansoldier Napoleon into the Gallic colossus Hegel called "the world soul on horseback." For Currin, Peyton, and Tuymans, painting itself is undertaken as "an act of madness," and their choice of figuration at its most extreme—aestheticized pop icons, tainted visions of femininity and masculinity, ghostly banalities—is both a test of their passion for the medium and a bid to spread that passion,the necessityof luring the viewer justifying the use of any means available, 6 whether it be visual seduction, nostalgia, sex, or horror. The transformative results of passionate painting are illustrated in Elizabeth Peyton'swillfully idealized portraits of royalty, pop stars, and artists. A painting like that of a JohnCurrin.Ms. Omni. fresh-faced, sparkly-eyed Kurt Cobain, a musician known 1993. Oil on canvas, for his premature death by suicide, has the fervent idealiza 48 x 38" (122 x 96.5 cm). Privatecollection. tion of an homage—not to Cobain himself but to his image Photo courtesyAndrea as a tragic poet. John Lydon, a small full-length portrait of a Rosen Gallery, New wispy youth, hips thrust forward, shoulders slouched with York the unmistakable air of a late-nineteenth-century dandy, is Socialism. "One regrets them, naturally. But there they similarly romanticized. Modeling a cherry-red pullover, are." As the critic Dave Hickey perceptivelyobserved in which plays fetchingly off his shock of yellow hair and his a discussionof Robert Mapplethorpe's sexually explicit bee-stung lips, the figure is everywhereaccented by washes photographs, what often makesus uneasyabout a lurid of red, giving the whole a rosy, nostalgic glow. That this image is not that it might be familiar, but that it might adorable figure is Johnny Rotten, the infamously snarly lead be celebrated. In the past, hackles have been raised singer of the Sex Pistols, might seem startling at first, so because of a perception that Currin's work betrays a convincingly has his punk bellicosity been translated into hostility toward his female subjects, but this criticism is 7 foppishnessvia whorls of delicatelytinted oil glazes.Yet this the result of only the most cursory visual investigation. work is neither a willful historical revision nor a parody, A more complex reading focuseson Currin'sfascination though elements of both are at play. Drawn with a concen with and compassion for them. Laboring to find the tration that reflects an utter seriousnessand trembling saddestyellow for the somnambulant Pelletiereand the emotion, John Lydon is not so much a portrait of a most bruised-looking blue for that aging soldier of particular individual as it is a wildly idealistic celebration of fashion, Ms. Omni, Currin is more empathic than an individual image, embodied, in this instance, by Lydon. disdainful. Vicious irony gives way to sincerity in his 8 Lydon the man never looked like this. Lydon seen through work. "Ultimately, I think what I do is find a cliche and Peyton'sadulatory eyesalways did. try to believe in it, try to get to where I don't laugh 9 at it," Currin has said. If Currin's paintings recall the crassnessof debased tastes, they look at it not with cruelty but with tenderness and a sense of shared culpability. This makes his work more difficult to assim ilate than that of artists who appropriate already degraded mass-culture bric-a-brac simply in order to mock it. In the final analysis,Currin's criticism is directed toward himself and, equally importantly, toward us as the viewers for whom these paintings offer the challenge of looking until we see their sincerity. Elizabeth Peyton. John Lydon. 1996. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16" (50.7 x 40.7 cm). Private If celebratorydepictions of taboo subject matter simulta collection. Photo courtesy Gavin Brown's neouslyattract and repel us, neutral representationscan Enterprise,New York sometimes be equally destabilizing, and seductive. In 1986, Luc Tuymanspainted a series of eight canvases For Peyton, figuration is the vehicle by which she depicting concentration camps. Devoid of human compounds the visual seduction already at play in her figures, these modest-sizedpictures conjured gas cham glittering and juicily colored surfaces.John Currin'spaintings, bers and barrackswith a handful of dark brush strokes often individual images of fictitious women rendered with on somber, monochromatic backgrounds. Understated great attention to detail, also give us the visual satisfaction and almost tasteful, these works reveal the horrific of an expertly painted surface, the virtuosity of his paint nature of their subject matter in their mute, abstract ren- handling clashing merrily with the pin-ups and ads that are his inspiration. Going eye-to-eye with a Currin picture, however, is frequently uncomfortable in a way akin to a confrontation with someone we know intimately and wish we could ignore but can't. Like Peyton'squaintly anachro nistic dandies, Currin's figures, like the blow-dried Ann-Charlotte seductively parting her polyester jumpsuit, strike a chord of collective memory but recall a past that is too recent to have lost that embarrassingsense of the passe. This excruciating familiarity is further enhanced by their almost pornographic intimacy. Embedded in surfaces as airless as Naugahyde and as solid as a Donald Judd cube, figures like Ms. Omni or the Moved-OverLady stare brightly at us, unaware that their clothes, their bodies, their haircuts reveal every detail of their sordid stories as surely as if they Luc Tuymans. Diagnostic were recounting them on a television talk show. View IV.