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Article Excerpt
Discussed in this essay:
John Currin. Essays by Robert Rosenblum and Staci Boris. Interview by Rochelle Steiner. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Serpentine Gallery, London, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 2003. 124 pages. $35.
Every few years another new painter is heralded as a modern master on the level of Rembrandt or Velazquez, and he or she is passed the crown for "saving painting"--not only for saving painting but also for making it relevant again and up-to-date. Recent royalty has included the contemporary artists Eric Fischl, David Salle, Gerhard Richter, and Jenny Saville. John Currin, who, at forty-one, was graced with a raid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum last winter, is the reigning King du jour.
The press release for the Whitney's exhibition designates Currin "one of the most important and provocative artists of his generation," and he is constantly compared in the catalogue and the press to French, Italian, and Flemish masters. Reviewing the retrospective for The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl declares that Currin "has rehabilitated fallen practices of visual storytelling, restoring to painting its ancient functions of illustration and rhetorical persuasion." Arthur Danto, in The Nation, commends him for evolving "from the role of Bad Boy of the art world into what very few contemporary painters have the gift, let alone the taste, to aspire to--a master of high Mannerist aesthetics." Even before Currin's show could be seen in New York, The New York Times Magazine ran a profile of the artist, by Deborah Solomon, in which Currin's technical skill and virtuosity are given as proof that he "revives the grand manner of the past." And Mia Fineman, writing in Slate, affirms the consensus by assuring us that "everyone is unanimous about one thing: John Currin can paint."
Currin is a figurative artist who paints illustrative and distorted nudes, portraits, and contemporary genre scenes that are puzzled together from photographs, comic books, old-master reproductions, porn, and fashion magazines, and his surfaces can vary within a single canvas from slick to encrusted to leather-dry. Currin's handling of flesh--which is rendered as smooth and artificial as a mannequin's or as flimsy and thin as cellophane or as caked-on rough as a stucco wall--has been lauded as that of a master equal to Cranach, Baithus, and Courbet. And if you were to look at John Currin, the catalogue for his Whitney retrospective, in which Cranach's Judith with the Head of Holofernes (c. 1530) is reproduced together with Currin's pastiches of Cranach, the superficial similarities between the two would seem obvious. But it is only on the level of the superficial that any similarities between the old masters and Currin can be made.
The breathless claims made by critics and art historians on Currin's behalf betray a rather cursory way of looking at painting, one that mistakes technical flourishes for craftsmanship, any whiff of the old masters for the old masters themselves. Before his retrospective, I had seen very few of Currin's paintings in the flesh. One of the benefits of photographic reproduction for an artist, especially for a mediocre one, is that it fuses paintings that do not cohere and provides uniformity where uniformity is lacking. Problems great and small can disappear: color notes that jar and screech, brushstrokes too thick or thin, surfaces too oily or dry, all get lost in translation. And the leveling off imposed by photography also can rob great paintings of those very same subtleties--subtleties that set masterpieces apart.
In Cranach's Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Judith is surrounded by a field of black. Standing behind a narrow strip of table, she holds the upraised sword in her right hand and Holofernes's severed head, steadied on the table, in her left. Cranach's field of black--like smoke,...
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