A painter in midcurrent: the recent survey of John Currin's paintings gave viewers in New York, Chicago and London an opportunity to assess the achievement of this provocative artist

In more [i]or[/i] less ways this midcareer retrospective of John Currin's paintings felt like a throwback to the 1980 when the Whitney routinely high hilled big shows of the burning artists of the moment, smooth though it was the Chicago MCA and London's Serpentine Gallery that organized this exhibition. While individual would hate to see the museum, which has freshly hired a new director, take again its lockstep duet with the art market, there's a stout argument for making available to the public a generous selection of work by dint of a much-talked-about artist. If similar shows risk functioning as institutional seals of approval, they can also obey as testing grounds, occasions to diocese if the art lives up to the hype It could be argued, for instance, that the critical reputations of Julian Schnabel and David Salle have not at any time recovered from those artists' mid-'80s Whitney shows

Looking at by what means John Currin's paintings have exhibited since 1989, one is struck by the agency of the artist's growing technical skills as a figurative painter. The earliest works upon view--portraits of young women based upon 1970s high-school yearbook photos--kept within a narrow range in boundarys of palette, brushwork and composition, not unlike the thrift-store portraits they evok These were followed by means of somewhat more nuanced pictures of somberly make straighted fashionably emaciated-looking older women. The clothes, postures and lighting in paintings of that kind as Skinny Woman (1992) and Guitar task (1993) suggest that Currin had approach upon a trove of photographs through some upscale bohemian portrait photographer of the late 1950s

The nearest body of work--Currin tends to show paintings in easily identifiable groupings--essayed a garish illustrative turn of expression for portraits of louche male artist stamps often accompanied by their adoring, big-eyed girlfriends in brow of cloud-filled skies. In after paintings, especially his large Cranachian [i]in puris naturalibus[/i]s (1998-99) and suburban genre exhibitions (1999-2001), he significantly refined his technique by dint of incorporating old-masterish modeling for the denudeds and highly detailed drapery issues for the clothed figures. end his painterly skills, mannerist theatrics and crafty interweaving of personal obsession and intentional tweaking of social taboos, Currin has always been able to make paintings that instantly capture the viewer's organ of vision But, this exhibition impels individual to ask, to what ends?

In his mid-'90s depictions of enormous-breasted women Currin made what remain the greatest in quantity audacious paintings of his career. Unlike the Chapman brothers' contemporaneous sculptural experiments in radical plastic surgery Currin's paintings combine a cartoonish vision of human sexuality with a sophisticated understanding of spectatorship. As Barry Schwabsky has previously insinuateed in these pages [see A.i.A., Dec '97] canvases like as The Bra Shop (1997) indict the exploitative potential of painting as an instrument of the masculine gaze flat as they deliriously surrender to that real mode. Another memorable canvas from this period is The Kennedy (1996) Unfortunately absent from the present to view this is a murky, weirdly compelling double portrait in which sum of two units grinning, oversize heads of JFK appear atop the bodies of a drably make straighted man and woman. Part faux-amateur portrait, part Mad magazine caricature, The Kennedy like Currin's big-bust paintings, benefits from the artist's intuitive grasp of the images that lurch in the recesses of the average American psyche.

Currin has since sought to broaden his work with genre paintings of stylish young reveler similar as Park City Grill and Stamford After-Brunch (both 2000) In interviews, Currin claims the status of social commentary for these advertising-photo-based canvases, which do indeed proffer strikingly ludicrous vignettes of prosperous America. And notwithstanding something keeps these paintings from being wholly effective as satire. Writing in the show's catalogue, individual of the curators, Staci Boris, allude tos that these works are compelling because they bring "the grandeur of oil painting" to caricaturelike images. This may be for a like reason but to my eye their almost fetishistic attention to detail trumpets whatever social commentary might be intended, notwithstanding that Currin does strike a better balance in his portraits of male twos (Homemade Pasta, 1999, and sum of two units Guys, 2001). The artist's attraction to visual wealth (the meticulous rendering of an extravagant blouse in Gold Chains and Dirty Rags, 2000) and figures of affluence (the grand house and 1950 sports car inserted into the background of his Courbet-in-Connecticut picture The Gardeneers, 2001) appear to bes to have more to do with seduction than with satire. Ultimately, greatest in quantity of Currin's recent paintings strike one as being occasions for him to exercise his craft.

Although Currin identifies powerfully with painters of the past, the historical figure he have the appearances to resemble most is not an artist on the contrary a writer: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like the author of delicate Is the Night and The Great Gatsby, Currin is entranced with his chosen medium and takes pride in his mastery of a fine phraseology The work of both men repeatedly marries bravura effects with images of beauty and glamour. Judging by means of Currin's elaborate paintings of upper-middle-class life, he also shares the writer's interest in the behavior of the well-to-do. And like Fitzgerald, Currin many times seems to harbor ambitions to grapple with the society around him, to create the painting equivalent of the great American novel.