As I’ve followed John Currin’s career ever since his first one-person exhibit at Andrea Rosen Gallery in 1992, I’ve been equally provoked and perplexed, yet always fascinated and compelled by his vision of non-conformity. John is both a painter and a connoisseur who seems to treasure and thrive on the pleasure of absorbing countless methods, materials, and techniques from the painting culture as a highly personal practice and meditation. Since his mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum in 2003, John has undertaken various explorations of the human figure in unexpected terrains where, whatever lies in between things of perpetual discordance, the perceptible and the hidden, the issues of proportion and scale in his thinking of form and fiction has always stayed illusive to reductive interpretations. On the occasion of his upcoming exhibit Memorial at Gagosian, I paid a visit to his studio on Mount Desert Island, Maine, to talk about this new group of paintings during the last few days of their completion. The following is an edited version of our four hour conversation in the course of two days for your reading pleasure.
Currin:
I thought of putting some crisp drapery behind, on her right shoulder. I’ll
work on the incisions on the leg, then adding an Indian jewelry around her
neck. In fact, I was looking at that nude figure (Truth) on the left of an old
woman, dressed in black (Repentance) in Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles (ca.
1494–45), one of his later Savonarola paintings. I just love Truth, being this
odd, unsexy nude so I made quite a few drawings of her, readjusting her face
and body from my imagination onto the painting in various stages, which can be
very treacherous since everything begins with extreme distortions.
Rail:
Therefore, it requires constant revisions!
Currin:
Definitely, partly because of making subtle adjustments that relies on the
difference between sizes and scales of the images, and partly because due to
how different color pigment dries differently, for example burnt umber, which
dries fast and matte, and is easy to draw on with charcoal on top, as opposed
to yellow, orange, alizarin crimson, and so on which dries slow and at times
glossy so I have to scrape it off with a knife, even sand it down entirely, in
order to create a new tooth! And since I don't really make finished drawings, I
prefer instead making super quick drawings on sketchpad before drawing directly
on the painting.
Rail: I
know. Can you share the impulse that drove you in creating these new seven
paintings while shifting your interest to monochromatic palette in gray,
otherwise known as grisaille, and grisaille comes from the French word for
gray: gris?
Currin:
First of all, I had found these pornographic comics from the ’80s and ’90s, and
the sexuality of them had this odd extremeness. They’re not sexy by any means,
but personally, they were exciting to me. They were this weird combination of
’50s pin-up art like Alberto Vargas but with just very strange proportions.
They also had these creepy fixations on people’s faces. Again, a lot of the
oddness of this new group of paintings, the strange skinny legs, the flat,
pointed shoes, the gigantic breasts, nobody’s really having sex, they’re just
displaying, among other outlandish features, etc., etc., are results of many
quick drawings that turned their cartoonish appearances into various gothic
sensibilities.
Take the left figure in Limbo (2021), for example, her face and
gesture were inspired after the left figure of Saint Margaret in one of my
favorite paintings at the Met, Cornelis Engelbrechtsz’s The Crucifixion with
Donors and Saint Peter and Margaret (ca. 1525–27). Even though its format is
horizontal as a rectangle, the painting was painted with different treatments
of verticals of the figures. It’s simply a great and strange painting. The
mannerism is his own, and it has this echo to the Byzantines, Gothic, as well
as to the modern. Anyway, I made this 30-second drawing off the cuff, but it
stuck with me, so I decided to turn the drawing verbatim into a big painting,
80 inches high. I worked on it forever, I couldn’t figure out what my color
attitude was going to be, and it went all kinds of different places that it
probably shouldn’t have gone. At one point, it became quite colorful,
Florentine in flavor, and I did something foolish by mixing a paint that dried
funny and ended up as a very shiny yellow, which meant that I couldn’t really
paint on it unless I sanded the whole thing down. It had at least six beautiful
things in it that didn’t belong in the same painting. It was a completely
incoherent painting that was far too big for its subject. The subject matter
was so rude, the asshole was too big, too public, too colorful. I finally let
that painting die, sanded the whole thing down, decided to remake it as a
grisaille, inspired by Bruegel’s small painting The Three Soldiers (1568) at
the Frick. I wanted to make it somber, like they’re ghosts, with no color. I
decided to make it very funerary, and about halfway into it I added a frame
around it, like van Eyck’s Annunciation Diptych. Also, I had been using faces
from advertising for years and years, and now I realized that these faces could
be portraits of real people, so I hired models to come in, and I could paint
their faces as sensitively and accurately as I could, and then turn them into
stone. It was pretty intense, as I’d started that painting in January of 2020,
and I finished it like the day we had to leave for the shutdown. We ran out to
Long Island until when we ended up in Maine for the summer of the totally
insane suicide of our society. You probably notice some of these Gothic heads I
cribbed from various art books in the studio here or there, and I put some of
Rachel [Feinstein]’s features on it, despite them looking so grotesque and
strange. [Laughs]
Rail:
They do indeed. [Laughter] At any rate, as we spoke of de Kooning’s Pink Angels,
and other paintings of the mid 40s, there’s no doubt he was looking at
Picasso’s Large Nude on a Red Armchair from 1929.
Currin:
Definitely! It’s a masterpiece and a great parody of Matisse, with the empty
frames in the background. Also, in addition to the stretching figure, the red
chair and drapery in the frontal plane, I love the head in profile with a smile
as an expression of pain. Over the last ten years I tried to make elegant,
peaceful odalisques, with varying degrees of success but never entirely
successful, but the idea of painting a stressed-out odalisque is appealing and
is where I am right now.
Rail:
I’d add it’s both a stressed out and a stretched-out odalisque. Do you think
while the former is perhaps your own response to our current social, political
situation, the latter is your excitement with a new pictorial invention?
Currin:
To which degree on one or the other, it’s hard to tell, but I should mention
the painting by Jean Cousin the Elder Eva Prima Pandora (ca. 1550) has been on
my mind a lot, the menacing female nude with strange proportions, despite
having been influenced by Parmigianino’s exaggerated Mannerist style. These
grisaille pictures, framed by all the edges, sculptural and funerary, present
as monuments, yet showing no shame. I couldn’t help but think of what’s going
on in our country, all the monuments being taken down, driven by the idea that
people are threatened by these emblems of power that they don’t have. People,
acting with teenage rage, vandalized everything, statues of Lincoln in Spokane,
the elk statue in Portland and so on.
Rail:
That’s one of the reasons why we must counter speed and snap judgements on
social media platforms with the “slowness” of culture. Just to continue with
your acute observation and love for art history: in reference to Climber, were
you thinking of late de Chirico’s gladiator paintings, which evoke strange
homoerotic treatments of male anatomy, compression of space, and so on?
Rail: You’re right, especially at the time of the “Women” paintings, the early to mid-50s, de Kooning was trying to paint the frozen glimpse as he told David Sylvester in an interview (1960). Famously, after having worked on Woman I for nearly two years, de Kooning took it off the stretcher and was about to throw it away. A few days later, he ran into the great art historian Meyer Schapiro on the street, and he told Schapiro how he’d been working like a dog on this one painting for two years, and how much he was dissatisfied with his inability to finish it. When Schapiro came to see the painting, in his typically Schapiro-esque way, looked super carefully for a good twenty minutes in silence, then said “It’s the best painting you’ve ever done.”
Currin: Which I’m sure Rachel would say she’s more masculine than me at times! [Laughs]
Rail:
T.S. Eliot argued beautifully how important older writers are to contemporary
writers. Homer, Dante, for example, are considered contemporaries of Eliot’s
because they inform his work as much as his contemporaries like Ezra Pound,
James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and so on. I love how Eliot
responded to someone who said something along the lines of “Dead writers are
remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” He said “Precisely,
and they are that which we know.”
Currin:
We can also look at tradition with the lens of nostalgia, which implies kind of
a sorrowful concession to mortality, as much as it is about the unretrievable
past. Just as you can’t Make Arcadia Great Again, you can’t Make America Great
Again, you realize at a certain age your childhood memories are not even
memories, they are just a sensation of memories that fled us, irretrievably
gone. I think the basis of my conservatism is that I feel this constant pain of
losing time, losing things. What I’ve recently discovered in Poussin is that I
don’t think nostalgia is really a comfort for him. I really feel he was longing
through pain, not through anesthesia and living in a dream world, even though
he knew such longings are revealed to be false and you get the sick feeling
that he’s even unsatisfied with revealing his longing. What I’m getting at is
the irony of that is intentional. People associate irony with cynicism, or a
deadened emotional state. For me, I think it’s quite the opposite, irony is
experiencing joy by observing pain rather than feeling it.
Rail:
You’re fortunate to have arrived at this clarity. At any rate, in Poussin’s
case, he had one foot in France, where the Cartesian logic was in his DNA, a
natural composer of classicism, yet his other foot was in Italy, where he spent
40 years longing for Arcadia, which was impossible for him as you mentioned
before.
Currin:
The sensation of longing is so intense. Just like what we talked about with the
difference between hair in Italian painting, where you know the hair follows a
sine wave as it leaves the center of the head and body of the central figure, everything
is still protected by God because it’s a rational world, even the breeze is
rational, therefore you’re protected by God. Whereas the German paintings, the
further anything gets from its center, it becomes grotesque, chaotic, and
satanic. The hair goes nuts, the anatomy gets crazy at the end of the limbs,
the hands are weird, so are the trees and everything else in nature. My feeling
with Poussin is that he’s making an algorithm that will do what Italian
paintings do in his French painting, but if you look long enough, you will see
that it is unnatural. Yet it’s utterly intentional.
Rail:
Without Poussin, it’d be hard to imagine the neoclassicism of David, Ingres,
Antonio Canova, and others would be possible!
Currin:
True, it all started with Poussin and then all the French began to look at and
worship Raphael, from there onward we can see the intense French discipline and
rage for order, which makes the discipline of Impressionism possible. And
there’s a link of selflessness between them. I always hated what Ingres said
“drawing is the probity of art.” Maybe I hated the concept of “probity” because
I lack it. The kind of drawing I do is an ongoing patchwork, you might say. Any
specific drawing I made for a particular painting is anything but for display.
It’s not the probity of art. It’s rather a self-procrastination, masturbation
session of art. [Laughs] I recently saw a lawn sign that said “HONEST,
INTEGRITY, SCIENCE,” and I wanted to put a sign on mine that says “LIES,
CORRUPTION, MAGIC.”
Rail: Perhaps
it’s the American Puritanism that we all rebel against. Rudy Burckhardt, a
friend of de Kooning’s, once told me a story in the late ’50s, early ’60s, when
de Kooning was very famous: they were walking on the street and a young painter
came up to him and said “How do you like it, when everyone paints like you Mr.
de Kooning?” and he said “It’s not my problem, you know why? Because they all
know how to paint the good de Kooning, but they will never know how to make the
bad ones.”
Currin:
That’s because they’re looking in the wrong direction. I’ve always thought you
should look at the master’s students, instead of the master himself, where you
can see their mistakes. At the heart of de Kooning, at least at the very
beginning, he really wanted to make drawings like Ingres, but at a certain
point, he just gets up, kicks over the table, and says “Fuck this, I don’t want
to draw this way.” He’s realizing he can’t reverse engineer what he loves, and
the only way forward is to work with his inability to be what he always wanted
to be, or what he thought he ought to have been.
Rail:
One can say the stress and stretch of de Kooning’s figure is his own way to
overcome the anxiety of influence or of being influenced. In any case, as you
told James Cuno in one interview, it’d be super hard for any young painter to
look at a master like Rembrandt, I’m paraphrasing here, which can be so
intimidating, so stressful, but they can learn a whole lot from Rembrandt’s
students like Karel van der Pluym, Carel Fabritius, or say Ferdinand Bol.
Currin:
It’s like what we’d talked before about a bad de Kooning versus a good de
Kooning, I always hated the idea when everyone makes similar paintings. Many,
especially when they get taught how to paint certain ways in the academy, would
aspire to emulate the look of the final product instead of going through their
own suffering or struggle to really question what they really wanted to paint,
in spite of what they make may not be popular or even get attacked by negative
criticism. Perhaps I was lucky, after having given up abstract painting a few
years after graduate school (1986), I was making figurative paintings under the
spell of everything Picabia and Magritte, especially his 1947–48 Vache period.
I just love this non-conformist “fuck-it” attitudes. I remember my jaw dropped
when I saw those Magritte Vache paintings. It was like probity had been thrown
out the window. I also remember Wyndham Lewis’s amazing novel called Tarr,
assigned in the class by David Carrier.
Rail:
Who is one of the Rail’s most beloved Editors-at-Large.
Currin:
He was an amazing teacher, and I’m grateful to him because I could relate to
Tarr as a character who had intense disdain for the so-called
“bourgeois-bohemians” all around him. And Tarr thrived on dark humor. This
really blew my mind because I realized there was a whole side of modernism that
just basically wanted to look down on the history of the past. There was this
whole right-wing fascist strain, right alongside the progressive left, social,
or whatever that I learned from that book. This whole idea of irony ran so deep
that it’d take at least two pages, for example, to describe someone crossing
their legs like a machine. There was a description like “the grandfather clock
of his chin started ringing,” for example. Lewis then launched into these
endless descriptions of weird hallucinations of machines. The novel was filled
with hateful characters who had this hostile view of the world. Even though I
didn’t at all like any of the characters in the book, it was totally
fascinating to me, partly because it offered opposing views, or any kind of
non-conformist view, like let’s not go along, get along kind of attitude.
Rail:
Amen!
Currin:
What I’d learned in my case was there were these amazing realizations, or recognition,
which is as much about joy as about pain in terms of how it forces you to
reflect.
Rail:
Only if you surrender to the experience emotionally.
Currin:
Right! I’d learned that it was more useful to look at Hans Baldung to
understand Durer, Balthus to get to Courbet, or looking at Courbet to see what
the Le Nain brothers (Antoine, Louis, and Mathieu) were doing. You can detect
these streams in history where there’s a kind of vulgarization of what came
before, and then goes by it ages, then it becomes classic, and this goes on and
on by contemporary artists looking at paintings of the past with their own eyes
and emotional responses. I love Goya’s etching A False Bacchus Crowning
Drunkards (1778) after Velazquez’s masterpiece The Triumph of Bacchus (1628–29),
partly because there’s that “we don’t need no stinking badges” fellow right in
the center grinning at you with such menacing expression. Whereas in
Velazquez’s painting, we see this social-burlesque happening, in Goya it
becomes its own timber, majestic classical setting. Then later you see Manet
making his parodies The Balcony (1868–1869) of Goya’s Majas on a Balcony
(1800–10). By the same token, in the one late Rembrandt Self-Portrait (1668),
you know the one of himself laughing, painting before he died in 1669, where
there was an incredible accumulation of paint on his face and forehead, you can
see Van Gogh did the same in his several late self-portraits also a year before
his death in 1889. This goes on with Picasso’s early self-portrait (Yo Picasso,
1901), and so on and so forth. One parody after the other, and they each become
classical in their turn as they age. All my paintings start out funny, but they
often end up very somber. I think things get learned, things get forgotten.
Meanwhile, I have the same sensation about artists who have been dead for
four-hundred years or more as they themselves had felt similarly with others
before them, and they all are as present in my life as anyone else. And this
sensation is as relevant as anything else.
Rail:
Yes, Jesus Buddha! I remember having a similar conversation with Lisa Yuskavage
when she went through her personal crisis early on, how after her first show at
Pamela Auchincloss in 1990, she quit painting for one whole year. And in
reading Patricia Bosworth’s unauthorized biography of Diane Arbus, from which
at the beginning of her mature work, Arbus said “I really believe there are
things that nobody would see unless I photograph them.” Lisa wanted her work to
have a sense of urgency, which may require being vulnerable, and so on. How
would you describe your own sense of urgency?
Currin:
I’d say it’s a personal urgency that is so personally urgent to each artist.
It’s not so much that I have a strong urge to make these new paintings, for
example, it’s an uncontrollable urge that pulls me in and tells me what to do.
I don’t think I’m revealing anything about the world to anybody, but I know I’m
revealing something to myself about myself, especially trying to recover the
inculpability from childhood at will. I have an urgent desire to possess lost
time and mortality. (R.W) Fassbinder famously said “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” —
he took speed, cocaine, and made a billion films before he died at the age of
37, and that was it.
Rail:
Just like Van Gogh, died at the age of 37. I do believe that in order to be
sensitive one must be aware of one’s own mortality. All the 27 club luminaries,
including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kurt Cobain, and
Amy Winehouse for example, were definitely aware of their own mortalities
indeed. Making art is a productive postponement of death period.
Currin:
I couldn’t agree more. I’m glad I’m addicted to my painting rather than
shooting heroin though. [Laughs]
Rail: In
looking at these paintings now, Pinup, Sunflower, Caryatid, Climber, and Limbo,
everything that has been associated with your work, issues of humor, irony,
parody, caricature, satire, etc., etc. as most of would recognize as means to
stress and stretch the nature of absurdity so present even more in these
paintings—I mean the contradiction that lies between substance and form, which
can be easily misread as offensive to the “probity” of art, especially the
wildly popular culture of political correctness we’re living through at the
moment. What are your thoughts on these issues?
Currin:
Take sex as a subject for example! In Europe, they would show on government TV
channel, like PBS here, films as sex education. I remember one episode of a
young, good looking couple, an apple cheeked girl and a handsome boy of 16 or
17, riding bikes then they make a little picnic. And then they start taking off
their clothes. He puts a condom on his penis, and they begin their intercourse.
And I was like what the fuck is this? It was really startling and hilarious at
the same time. So the idea of the American—or me—being a Puritan or uptight
about sex? Yeah, I gotta say, if that’s not being uptight, I’d rather be
uptight. I’m not so sure why I should like the idea of a government showing you
how to practice safe sex with such explicit sexual act and the whole family has
to experience it together! Why would I or anyone of us feel comfortable
watching this with our family, especially with grandmother or grandfather? When
I started making pornographic paintings, part of it was a parody of this idea
of European libertinism, part of it was my own insecurity being an American
painter, feeling that Europeans just know how to do it better. I was so excited
by the idea that I can make a European painting only if I can paint Europeans
having sex, as an autopsy of sex, a demonstration of sex, and so on.
Rail:
It’s super interesting to think of how the Americans deal with their
inferiority complex towards the Europeans. It’s worthwhile to begin with the
term “the American Century,” coined by Henry Luce in an editorial in Life
magazine (February, 1941), preceding the USA to be the successor of the British
Empire once WWII ends—what has been referred to as the golden age of American
history. While at home, endless publicities on the ideal middle-class life were
just as aggressively mobilized as McCarthyism, yet overseas, European cultures,
from Paris, London, Rome to Madrid, and so on were being promoted heavily,
including art, literature, and above all fashion, etc., etc.!
Currin:
We needed to be taught how to be proper imperialists. And I can say a few
things from an artist’s perspective, now that we have spoken about Picabia, and
de Kooning for example. I never forget how I was a little crestfallen after
seeing a big show of Picabia at Galerie Ronny Van De Velde in Antwerp in 1993,
right in the middle of my total love affair with Picabia, partly because
however hard he tried to be vulgar, trying to be American, he just simply
couldn’t get there. He couldn’t shape this given European arabesque and
elegance in his DNA. I remember at my wedding in Miami, I made all the
groomsmen wear these cheap, polyester, the most hideous, silliest white tuxedos
that I could find. Rudy Stingel, being one of the groomsmen, looked as
graceful, aristocratic, and elegant as David Niven. It's just this je ne sais quoi
that Rudy could in no way look like a dopey American. So, on the one hand, it
was upsetting for me to see Picabia fail in denouncing his European roots as I
am trying and failing to be like him. On the other hand, it was reassuring that
he was trying to be an American like me. As for de Kooning, when he came to the
US, he lived briefly in Hoboken, where I lived with Matvey and Lisa for a year
(1987–88), de Kooning told one of the first experiences he had in America was
at a coffee shop, opened at six o’clock in the morning, the barista lines up 15
coffee cups in one row, then he takes a coffee pot and pours out the coffee all
at once in one gesture. Coming from a culture where you steam the coffee, and
milk to make a little cappuccino, de Kooning said “I love this country. I knew
this was the country I wanted to be in.” That is the thing at the heart of his
paintings: a shattered Europeanness. It wasn’t just the freedom of Abstract
Expressionism, it was the rage at Europe, but it was his to break. I am still
trying to figure out where I am standing between these two extremes. It’s at
times very fragile emotionally, other times extremely ecstatic.
Art in
Conversation, John Currin with Phong H. Bui. The Brooklyn Rail, September 2021.
“When
I try to make up a face, Rachel ends up in it. It starts to become Rachel,”
says the artist John Currin in his Gramercy studio, staring at one of his own
unfinished works. Currin’s wife, the artist Rachel Feinstein, has never minded
this, he insists. In fact, he continually checks in with her to see if she has
changed her mind, depending on what type of body her face ends up on. He is
quick to point out, though, that these aren’t portraits. None of his paintings
are, really. “I’ve never considered myself a portraitist in the sense that I
don’t capture a person’s pain, or her memories, or her aspiration,” he says.
“It’s never entered into my work, that anything is being shown about the actual
person who sat there. When I make Rachel, she’s both the default ideal and also
the most specific thing I could possibly do. So it seems right as the anchor to
a kind of obscenity. It’s jarring to me, and I find that interesting.”
Currin
started working on this new series of paintings, the first he has shown in New
York since 2010, in January of 2020. In some ways they represent a departure
and in others a return to form. The realistic renditions of what he calls
“monoliths” are almost colorless, drained of the glowing flesh tones that bring
his best-known paintings to life. Stone figures are set in niches, effecting
trompe l’oeil versions of bas-relief carvings. “The irony is that they’re
pictures of Rachel and big breasts. My same shtick,” he laughs.
“There’s
been this thing going on between the face and the body.” Currin is pointing to
one figure’s stoic gaze and then her nippleless, water-balloon-like breasts,
which hover impossibly over a birdlike body, which in turn is piled atop a
similarly shaped nude that appears to be bent in half. Each figure’s face is
recognizably Feinstein’s. When Currin started painting “the enormous breasts,
the looming breasts,” as he says, over twenty years ago, he negotiated their
cartoonish quality by going the opposite route with faces. Painted with a
palette knife from the neck up, figures in The Magnificent Bosom and The Bra
Shop (both 1997) hold two erotic ideals in one hand: that of the inflated sex
doll and that of the tortured painter’s muse, or, more simply, the unnatural and
the natural. “When I put Rachel’s face on these,” he says, “it’s a little bit
like that, like opening a yawning gap between the two realities of the body and
the mind or the face.” Also, “When you paint someone’s face, you are both
knowing it intimately and turning it into something that you can never know.”
For a
long time, critics didn’t know what to do with Currin’s work, which baldly
referenced 1980s catalogue poses and Mad-magazine illustrations, but also the
brushwork and subject matter of the old masters. His sensitivity to the
similarities between so-called low and high styles often found a middle ground
in a recognizable emotion, the real feelings, say, that a catalogue model might
not intend to express but are there all the same as she smiles, looks straight
ahead, and appears slightly pained or oblivious. One type of feminist critique
questioned the motivation behind creating such characters. If these paintings
could talk, would they pass the Bechdel test? Of course not, but that’s
because, as Currin reminds me, none of the people are real. “Their actions are
not their own. They’re mine.”
He goes
on, “These are all dolls being played with. Everything you’re doing is a big
lie. This whole thing is not really happening. It’s like that argument about
when you look at Olympia, she’s looking right at you, messing up the male gaze.
I’m not saying [Édouard Manet] didn’t intend to defeat the male gaze as he
understood it, but if he did, he’s doing that because he likes to defeat the
male gaze. He’s not doing it because it’s a good thing for society. He likes to
do it, just like other people like to dunk a basketball. They’re not doing that
to defeat people who side with the hoop.” He laughs again. “Sorry, that’s a
stupid metaphor.”
For a
long time, Currin underlined this idea of “dolls” or otherwise agencyless
characters by only using faces he found in playbooks and magazines. “They were
sort of a contemporary version of having a Boucher face, where it’s always the
same, a face that you don’t have a connection to.” Painting the face of his
wife of twenty-four years comes more naturally, though, it being the face he
sees most often, but also, “That’s my wife and so it makes me feel more what
I’m doing. Whatever misogyny or humiliation or sexism or negative things are in
these images, it’s more interesting that I’m doing it to her, to somebody I
love.”
In one
painting, a pointed foot transcends the niche’s frame, a move typical of the
type of display depicted, as well as of comic book frames. It’s meant to
further the illusion of dimensionality but also, Currin suggests, to act as an
olive branch from artist to viewer. “When you look at Van Eyck’s statues,
they’ll have a little bit come over the frame and cast a shadow. It’s these
delightful little illusions that matter.” These “acts of generosity,” he says,
are especially important when a painting is this “cold,” which isn’t how it
started out, by the way. He’s pulling out an earlier canvas to explain how he
got here: similarly pornographic poses in color felt too overt, but in
alabaster they’re less assuming. Stone is appropriate for public viewing, he
adds, since it is the historical medium of public art. Plus, “your physicality is
not invoked. It’s not made out of flesh.”
These
are the considerations of an artist at work, which are necessarily affected by
time and context, and the statues’ white eyes and frozen poses do capture
something like the general mood of 2020. First, it was the “mounting horror” of
the pandemic and subsequent quarantine mandates. Then, coming back to Manhattan
after a summer of familial isolation, Currin was confronted by another type of
existential dread, brought on by a boarded-up New York. “This insane shutdown
of the whole world,” he says, pouring me coffee from a thermos on one of the
first chilly days of October, “pushed me toward the idea of these being
melancholy. Closed. There’s no color. There’s all this really explicit nudity
but it’s defeated, in a kind of comedic way.”
Each of
the images I’m looking at shows a configuration of women whose thighs taper
into tiny, splayed feet in pumps that have no beginning or end. Vaginas and
anuses are dashes and exes, as if in some bachelorette version of
pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. The women appear uncomfortable, bloated even, as
they attempt a sexy display, fingers on privates. The triangular shape of each
formation, Currin says, helps the monolith theme along. “They’re pyramidal.
It’s like a parody of monumental composition. It’s like what’s-his-name in
Close Encounters making mountains out of mashed potatoes.” He laughs, but adds,
“They’re not meant to be glib, like, an old master painting of porn—which is
the glib description of a lot of my work, I suppose—but it’s the inappropriate
solemnity that I’m interested in. And also, I can’t help but mention, because I
can’t help but think about all the anger directed at statues in the last six
months.”
At
fifty-eight, Currin is firmly a part of the canon, taught in schools and shown
in major museums. His paintings often make news by selling at auction for
millions. Still, in conversation he often reverts to the language of a
self-doubting student. “I had some vague idea that over time my work would get
sort of classical,” he says, almost wistfully. “But it never did. It still has
all the same awkwardness that it had when I was starting out.” When he was
starting out, Currin wanted his art to be impenetrable, like that of his Ab-Ex
idols of the time. His early works show a frustration with their own genre,
smudging color palettes that seem to be taken from other eras, blur-censored
versions of other people’s paintings. Eventually, Currin had what he calls a
breakthrough when he realized that the doodles he did outside of his studio
work could become conceptual studies—paintings of women with anatomically
impossible features, commercial poses in classical styles, and other
experiments that poked at the implied neutrality of portraiture.
He had
his first solo show at White Columns, New York, in 1989. As soon as the 1990s
started, Currin’s paintings of women of all ages, made uncanny by cartoon
characteristics and childlike expressions, were considered controversial. They
were seen by some as mocking, or at least at odds with the more politically minded
art of the day. Not only were these paintings explicitly figurative, they did
not attempt to neatly parallel art and commerce, like an Andreas Gursky, or
skewer identity objectification, like an Adrian Piper. Currin let criticism
roll off him, happy he was at least getting noticed. “When you’re young and
you’re trying to get attention, it’s good to not imagine in too much detail
what the attention’s going to be,” he tells me. “If I think the water’s going
to be cold no matter what, it’s a way to not worry about how cold the water’s
going to be.”
The
accusation of misogyny left the artist an open target for other kinds of ire,
and there is much of that to go around in the art world, especially after
something sells for seven figures. Reducing Currin’s success in 2004 to a
“sodden heap of gimmicks,” a 5,000-word takedown in the New Republic admittedly
got the artist’s attention. Elsewhere, his work was repeatedly described as
anachronistic or nostalgic, words that sometimes house passive aggression. As a
defense mechanism, Currin absorbed the critique, leaning into the expectations
that detractors set out for him. “I wanted to do what I’d been accused of
doing,” Currin has said of a painting of three women, each with the face of
Feinstein (Thanksgiving, 2003). “That’s why I included the old-fashioned mirror
and the Corinthian columns.”
The
paintings I am looking at could be called pornographic anachronistic nostalgia
on paper: women in lingerie are piled onto one another, spread-eagled or
smothered by genitalia, affecting Greco-Roman statuary or Chandela-dynasty
stone carvings of the positions of the Kama Sutra. But there is a solemnity
here that needs to be accounted for. The offenders in these works are more
frozen than posed, perhaps stunned by the gaze of a Medusa-eyed critic. They’re
“monuments to lust,” Currin says.
John
Currin is best known for painting women, and he has spent his summer on Mount
Desert Island, Maine, doing just that: laying the groundwork for a new series
of portraits of female subjects whose smiles are stretched by lines of anxiety,
whose eyes blaze with to-do lists. He based the faces on models from Sears
catalogs and stock photos, but calls the type a “Redbook Juggler,” after the
supermarket glossy that advises women on how to cook, shop and dress. While
Currin’s exaggerated compositions blow his figures up to kewpie-doll proportions
or deflate them into a jumble of jutting elbows and toothy smiles, he renders
each inch of flesh in laborious, glowing brushwork that has earned him
comparisons to Dutch masters. He was, in fact, exhibited alongside the
celebrated Golden Age Dutch painter Cornelis van Haarlem, at the Frans Hals
Museum in the Netherlands in 2011, just two decades after his first solo show
at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in 1992 (where his provocative portraits of bold
older women elicited accusations of sexism but nevertheless sold out). Currin’s
works still draw that criticism on occasion, but not much that he depicts
emerges solely from his own imagination. His subjects wash in from the flotsam
of American life — kitschy souvenirs and cringey ads, screenshots and
centerfolds — and it’s by polishing this lowbrow commerical imagery with a
high-art sheen that he manages to make obvious what others might be happy to
ignore about our culture.
Currin’s summer studio emerged from a similar process. From the outside, the wooden, Swiss-chalet-style lodge with twin peaked roofs and a wraparound porch is a replica in miniature of the midcentury lake house down the hill that Currin and the artist Rachel Feinstein bought in 2015. Currin built the studio in 2016 and has worked here every summer since (for the rest of the year he is based in New York). Inside, it is spare and white, a reworked, glossy, art-world version of the main house.
Currin and Feinstein first came to Mount Desert Island — a large outcropping of rock that has drawn lobster boats and wealthy vacationers since the Gilded Age — in 1996, as guests of the Acadia Summer Arts Program. Later, they got engaged on a hike here, and it’s where their children — now 10, 14 and 16 — go to camp. When the couple bought their house overlooking Long Pond directly from its original owner, they also purchased everything that was inside: the Knoll dining set, the space-agey Wendell Lovett hearth, the hand-embroidered pillows and dog-eared sci-fi novels. “For people who have to make aesthetic decisions every day,” says Feinstein, the idea of redecorating is “exhausting.”
Currin’s latest retrospective, opening this month at the Dallas Contemporary, offers its own kind of respite. “My Life as a Man” brings together just over 100 images of men made by an artist known for depicting women. “I would get kind of tired of the constant, you know — my constant fixation on women, and paint men as a kind of relief or as a kind of discipline, as a kind of fast,” he says.
The works in the show range from a 1984 ink self-portrait of a ponderous 22-year-old Currin, to his 2016 oil “Newspaper Couple,” in which an elderly man and woman smile at each other serenely despite a jumble of bric-a-brac balanced surreally on their heads. The exhibition also includes raw sketches and ink drawings that show Currin working through ideas: A series of sexualized male doctors culminates in “The Dream of the Doctor” (1997), a full-scale oil depicting a man, stethoscope unfurled, leaning in toward a screened-off patient; a troop of sad-eyed men land as “Old Guy” (1994), a glowing oil painting of a man in a sweater-vest who holds a limp, pink tea towel as if it’s his only offering.
Currin’s men are not macho. Some were based on the faces of women and cloaked with beards; his assistant Suzanne Bennett modeled the legs in “Hot Pants” (2010); and other subjects are based on the artist himself, in wigs. They appear dressed in furs, cravats and braces. “It’s almost like this kind of nightmare of different men,” he says.
This exhibition will be his first museum show in 15 years, and it seems designed for the post-Weinstein era. Its mockery of masculinity may give the artist some relief from the accusations of sexism. And though Currin didn’t time it deliberately — he credits the curator Alison Gingeras for conceiving the show, whose title takes its name from a Philip Roth novel — the timing has worked out. “The older I get, the less joy or thrill I get out of offending people,” he says. “I used to relish that.” This may be why he is now drawn to his “Redbook Jugglers,” women whose cloaked pain he obsessively draws to the surface and magnifies for the world to see. Across the room from their watching eyes, Currin took a seat on a Chesterfield sofa, upholstered in buttery cornflower-blue leather, and answered T’s Artist’s Questionnaire.
What is your day like? How much do you sleep, and what’s your work schedule?
I go to bed probably around 12, 12:30. I’ve always been a stay-up-late person. One of the things I like about Maine is I have much more of a routine up here than I do in New York. The kids go to the camp up at the top of the hill. Usually, Rachel and I take them up there. We get up at 8:30 and take them up there at 8:50. Rachel’s been doing yoga. Sometimes I do yoga. All right, I don’t do yoga but I go with her to do yoga. And we usually swim almost every day. We did this morning. And that’s the most beautiful thing there is. Then I have a long breakfast on the porch, and drift up here around 12 or 12:30 and work here until about 8.
How many hours of creative work do you think you do in a day?
Maybe seven or eight.
What’s the first piece of art you ever made?
The first thing that I remember making was a drawing of a Tyrannosaurus. There might have been airplanes fighting it. It was a big battle scene. I remember even then, you know, I wasn’t satisfied. I just remember the pencil — thin, textural pencil — and it didn’t look right. I just remember being unhappy.
What’s the worst studio you ever had?
I rented a place in New Haven. I’d just gone to Yale for grad school. It was a crappy sort of two-story building, and there was a pizza place downstairs. It might have been $50 a month. It had a feeling of like a ’40s low-budget crime office, like a Raymond Chandler kind of office. It smelled like burned crust the entire time.
What’s
the first work you ever sold? For how much?
I painted signs in a restaurant but that doesn’t count. I do remember one in particular I sold after college, a painting, a kind of colorful fake de Kooning to — I think it was the aunt of my girlfriend — for $450.
When you start a new piece, where do you begin?
I’ll make drawings. I literally will grid that onto the canvas. I have a lot of anxiety about composition, so a lot of times I work from just very, very quick drawings. And I don’t want to change it a lot, because I just think it gets worse.
How do you know when you’re done?
I don’t know how to finish a painting. All I can tell you is how it feels for the painting to be finished. I don’t want to make a gross or inappropriate analogy, but it’s a little bit like when you first remember being in high school or college or whatever and it’s going to be your first kiss. It’s scary. You don’t know what to do. But then it just happens. And in retrospect it seems like, “Oh yeah, of course. It was natural.” Something a little bit like that happens in the painting where you’re nervous and nothing’s happening and it’s like you’re thinking it through and talking, and talking, and talking. And then, if you’re lucky, something physically happens in the painting; physical logic takes over, rather than the idea. My role diminishes, and I’m more of a craftsman. I just work here. I’ve been sent to fix a few things. I’m just cleaning up now. I’m picking up my tools.
How many assistants do you have?
There’s Chrissy Lloyd. She’s an old friend of ours. She worked with Rachel at a nightclub. Chrissy was a bartender at that place, and she’s a fashion stylist, so she comes over once or twice a week to my studio after she gets done with shoots. She’s sourcing objects, delivering objects, putting them together. She also arranges models for me. I have an assistant in another sense: Suzanne Bennett does bookkeeping for us and is the general manager of our household. She started as my studio assistant.
What music do you play when you’re making art?
It’s
going to be bad. It’s going to be embarrassing. I last listened to a playlist
on Spotify: ’80s Metal was the name of it. Black Sabbath, Zeppelin. One classy
thing I did listen to when I was making the “garbage paintings” was all the
Wagner operas. My mom was a piano teacher, my father was a big enthusiast of
classical music, and I just listened to it constantly in my house. It doesn’t
work in my studio because it’s just like I’m a kid and I’m home.
When did you first feel comfortable saying you’re a professional artist?
When I didn’t have to go paint houses or plaster walls. When I realized that I was waking up and I was going to go to my studio.
Is there a meal you eat on repeat when you’re working?
I don’t eat when I’m working.
Are you bingeing on any shows right now?
We did “I, Claudius” this summer. I tried to get the kids interested in “The Wire” and it didn’t work. The last one was “Game of Thrones,” like everybody else, which I never totally got on board with. But Rachel loves it. I didn’t like it at all when it first started. I would look at my iPad while she watched. But then, that scene where Daenerys stands up naked out of the ashes with the dragons, the baby dragons — that’s what sold me on it, like everybody else.
How often do you talk to other artists?
I mean, they’re my friends so quite a bit. Not daily, but certainly every weekend. We go out to Orient Point in Long Island and we have friends there, a lot of artist friends there, so it’s always social. I’m not counting Rachel.
What do you do when you’re procrastinating?
Look at my phone. That’s the worst one of all. I used to make billions of drawings because my hand was free. You feel like doing something with your thumbs, and I would just doodle. Now when I draw, it’s to figure something out. Before, I was all day drawing: naked ladies, cartoons — and sometimes making a nice drawing. I don’t really do that so much anymore. That’s a big loss. The phone just sucks up all your hand-motor-eye stuff.
What do you usually wear when you work?
I wear Carhartt pants and a Carhartt shirt. I do get a little bit weird about lucky shirts and lucky pants. I like to wear work boots when I paint for some reason, even though I don’t have to. My work pants have a little pocket here. [Indicates thigh.] I’ve gotten in the habit of having a knife always on hand. You never knew how much you needed a knife.
If you have windows, what do they look out on?
I intentionally didn’t want to look out on anything here because it’s just distracting, and I also don’t want people walking up and looking at me work. This is west, so if it’s sunny and I’m working, I usually close these curtains because of the glare.
What’s your worst habit?
Vodka tonics and Words With Friends, buttered bread, Twitter. I don’t post on it, but I do like to look at it. There’s a few people that I check every day. Iowa Hawk. He’s a guy who’s into cars. He’s very, very funny.
What embarrasses you?
For whatever reason, I am attracted to embarrassing situations in painting. I think I seek it out. But I think I also fear it, so I’m not sure. I would say that I’m embarrassed by my body. As Rumsfeld would say, “You go to war with the army you have,” or whatever. And the army I have is plagued by embarrassment and insecurity.
What are
you reading?
I don’t really read. I mean, I used to. That’s another thing I think iPads have destroyed in my life. I read constantly, but I don’t read books. The New York Times, Drudge Report, headline news type of stuff, articles, links. Wikipedia I like a lot.
What’s your favorite artwork by someone else?
I have to sort of balance my urge to lie, and my urge to tell the truth. I need to lie to figure it out. I know it was “Hunters in the Snow” by Bruegel, or “The Peasant Dance” — the one where the people are running in from the right side of the painting. And then Botticelli, I guess. “The Primavera.” But you know, I feel like it’s a little dishonest of me to name an Italian artist.
Courbet is kind of the trashy one that I always come back to when I’m feeling like I’ve got to figure out something. WWCD: What Would Courbet Do? I saw “The Origin of the World” in Brooklyn when I was 19. I’d seen 900,000 photographic images of women spreading their legs but I’d never seen a painting. It was the weirdest feeling. It was much more real than a photograph. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. It completely knocked me over. And in a way that’s one of my favorite paintings. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t.
I don’t really read. I mean, I used to. That’s another thing I think iPads have destroyed in my life. I read constantly, but I don’t read books. The New York Times, Drudge Report, headline news type of stuff, articles, links. Wikipedia I like a lot.
What’s your favorite artwork by someone else?
I have to sort of balance my urge to lie, and my urge to tell the truth. I need to lie to figure it out. I know it was “Hunters in the Snow” by Bruegel, or “The Peasant Dance” — the one where the people are running in from the right side of the painting. And then Botticelli, I guess. “The Primavera.” But you know, I feel like it’s a little dishonest of me to name an Italian artist.
Courbet is kind of the trashy one that I always come back to when I’m feeling like I’ve got to figure out something. WWCD: What Would Courbet Do? I saw “The Origin of the World” in Brooklyn when I was 19. I’d seen 900,000 photographic images of women spreading their legs but I’d never seen a painting. It was the weirdest feeling. It was much more real than a photograph. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. It completely knocked me over. And in a way that’s one of my favorite paintings. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t.
For His First Museum Show in 15 Years, John Currin Turns His Gaze to Men. By Adriane Quinlan. The New York Times, September 13, 2019
In the
long, sensationalist history of first-strike art reviews, there’s a special
place reserved for John Currin’s debut show in New York in 1992. There, the
young Colorado-born, Yale-trained artist presented what would become his
signature brand of clownish, ribald, highly academic figurative paintings of
women. Famously (and not without good feminist intentions), the critic Kim
Levin encouraged readers to “boycott this show” in the pages of The Village
Voice. Outrage is not a new invention—it has always played a part in the circus
of the art world. Over the many decades of Currin’s provocative and
groundbreaking career, he has received his fair share of attacks, defenses,
reconsiderations, huzzahs, and more attacks for his portrayal of the female
form—from the attenuated late-middle-aged dames to his rambunctious,
hilariously crass, candy-colored oil paintings based on 1970s Danish porn.
Currin is so identified with his women (red-cheeked, huge-breasted, in disturbing or delightful pulchritudinous poses like modern-day rococo-meets-Mannerism) that it’s easy to forget that the 57-year-old artist also paints men. Thanks to the Dallas Contemporary (and the curator Alison Gingeras), Currin’s study of men, masculinity, and the sometimes sweet, sometimes vicious male form is finally getting its own retrospective this month. Fittingly entitled My Life as a Man, the exhibition covers everything from tender watercolors of adolescent boys filched from Currin’s own high-school yearbook, to the wicked redesign of Playboy ads in his Jackass series, for which the artist changed the faces of all the fawners around the ultimate playboy to one of frank disgust. There are also plenty of paintings of men fondling women’s breasts, men decked in florals or fashion, and even men camping it up with each other. Currin is an equal-opportunity transgressor, letting out the air on the overinflated notion of manhood. He lives in New York, on the North Fork of Long Island, and in Maine with his wife, the artist Rachel Feinstein, and his three children (portraits of his two sons are also included in the show). He was in Maine over the summer when the designer Marc Jacobs called him up to discuss creativity in the age of the #MeToo movement, the difference between painting men and women, and why the muscled male superheroes in comic books weirded him out as a kid.
———
MARC JACOBS: Where in the world are you right now?
JOHN CURRIN: I’m on Mount Desert Island, off of Maine.
JACOBS: How are things in Maine these days?
CURRIN: Just perfect. It’s 69 degrees and I’m in a fast car talking to you.
JACOBS: Are you in your Porsche?
CURRIN: Yeah. I never miss the chance to drive it.
JACOBS: Charly [Defrancesco, Jacobs’s husband] just got a Mercedes truck, and you know, I’ve never learned to drive. I keep telling him that I want to learn to drive just so I can get my midlife-crisis car. Just like John.
CURRIN: You can’t do better than this one, let me tell you.
JACOBS: I went through the catalog for your new show, and it’s all images of men. That’s unusual for you, isn’t it?
CURRIN: Well, men have always been a refuge in my work. I don’t often go there. But every couple of years, I take a break from women and make some men paintings. Either it’s a stand-in for a self-portrait or it’s some kind of rumination—I don’t know. Eighty percent of the great paintings in the world are bearded guys or muscle men fighting or something like that, so after I do all these Venuses, it becomes a temptation to do a few Marses.
JACOBS: Does the decision to do this show now have anything to do with what’s happening in the culture at large?
CURRIN: It is a fraught moment for men in general and maybe for me in particular. It’s been on my mind with my paintings, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I suppose I feel some inhibitions as a result of it.
JACOBS: You mean that you feel inhibitions about painting women?
CURRIN: About my imagery, yeah, but I always have. I’ve felt those inhibitions before the #MeToo movement. But right now, when the entire culture is paying attention to the same thing, I feel like I’m painting in public or something.
Currin is so identified with his women (red-cheeked, huge-breasted, in disturbing or delightful pulchritudinous poses like modern-day rococo-meets-Mannerism) that it’s easy to forget that the 57-year-old artist also paints men. Thanks to the Dallas Contemporary (and the curator Alison Gingeras), Currin’s study of men, masculinity, and the sometimes sweet, sometimes vicious male form is finally getting its own retrospective this month. Fittingly entitled My Life as a Man, the exhibition covers everything from tender watercolors of adolescent boys filched from Currin’s own high-school yearbook, to the wicked redesign of Playboy ads in his Jackass series, for which the artist changed the faces of all the fawners around the ultimate playboy to one of frank disgust. There are also plenty of paintings of men fondling women’s breasts, men decked in florals or fashion, and even men camping it up with each other. Currin is an equal-opportunity transgressor, letting out the air on the overinflated notion of manhood. He lives in New York, on the North Fork of Long Island, and in Maine with his wife, the artist Rachel Feinstein, and his three children (portraits of his two sons are also included in the show). He was in Maine over the summer when the designer Marc Jacobs called him up to discuss creativity in the age of the #MeToo movement, the difference between painting men and women, and why the muscled male superheroes in comic books weirded him out as a kid.
———
MARC JACOBS: Where in the world are you right now?
JOHN CURRIN: I’m on Mount Desert Island, off of Maine.
JACOBS: How are things in Maine these days?
CURRIN: Just perfect. It’s 69 degrees and I’m in a fast car talking to you.
JACOBS: Are you in your Porsche?
CURRIN: Yeah. I never miss the chance to drive it.
JACOBS: Charly [Defrancesco, Jacobs’s husband] just got a Mercedes truck, and you know, I’ve never learned to drive. I keep telling him that I want to learn to drive just so I can get my midlife-crisis car. Just like John.
CURRIN: You can’t do better than this one, let me tell you.
JACOBS: I went through the catalog for your new show, and it’s all images of men. That’s unusual for you, isn’t it?
CURRIN: Well, men have always been a refuge in my work. I don’t often go there. But every couple of years, I take a break from women and make some men paintings. Either it’s a stand-in for a self-portrait or it’s some kind of rumination—I don’t know. Eighty percent of the great paintings in the world are bearded guys or muscle men fighting or something like that, so after I do all these Venuses, it becomes a temptation to do a few Marses.
JACOBS: Does the decision to do this show now have anything to do with what’s happening in the culture at large?
CURRIN: It is a fraught moment for men in general and maybe for me in particular. It’s been on my mind with my paintings, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I suppose I feel some inhibitions as a result of it.
JACOBS: You mean that you feel inhibitions about painting women?
CURRIN: About my imagery, yeah, but I always have. I’ve felt those inhibitions before the #MeToo movement. But right now, when the entire culture is paying attention to the same thing, I feel like I’m painting in public or something.
JACOBS: I’ve always seen your work as your celebration of and adoration for women.
CURRIN: The meanings and feelings of my work are never entirely under my control. There’s definitely sexism, misogyny, and all kinds of bad stuff that comes up in the work. But right now, when there are so many people paying attention to what you should and shouldn’t do—
JACOBS: The judges.
CURRIN: Yeah. I know it’s high time for some of this. But it makes me a little inhibited, and any good artist needs to get over that.
JACOBS: In terms of creative work, at each step we’re always asking ourselves, “Can we do this? Does this feel okay? Should we stay away from this?” And even if, in the end, we go back to making the choices we make, it’s definitely an energy-consuming, thought-provoking derailment for a while. I don’t know if the process of art is different, but I personally feel a certain responsibility to listen to those conversations before just barreling ahead.
CURRIN: I guess so, but I don’t think it’s helpful in terms of making art. You can keep yourself out of trouble, but I don’t think it’ll help you make anything better. You can’t make mistakes if mistakes now carry such a high price. And so you end up retreating into your personal life. And speaking of midlife crises and sports cars and stuff, you retreat into yourself no matter what at a certain age, because you don’t have the stake in culture that young people do. I think that’s just a fact of getting older. In a way, my engagement is weirdly less high-stakes, even though I can get in more trouble now. It’s more that I don’t care as much now as I did when I was a complete nobody who cared a lot. Which is, I guess, another way of saying, “Oh, you’ve just become a boring conservative.” But I think it’s more that I’m focused on my family and on my ability to keep making work. That’s really what it is. I never wanted to sound like one of those ’70s rockers in the ’80s talking about keeping the faith, but here we are.
JACOBS: I think it’s a natural evolution for anybody as they get older—all the things I hoped I’d never say, I’ve said recently.
CURRIN: The funny thing is, that’s the man I’m painting. I’m representing the asshole or the guy who lost the plot. The image of men I give voice to in my work is a clown-like parallelism of not worrying about stepping on people’s toes, that whole Clint Eastwood “go it alone” type thing, which itself is a parody of sensitivity. And that’s what I do when I’m working. I follow my feelings and then I resolve or interpret them. It’s not like I start with a motive. It’s the other way around. I start with feelings and blunder my way through an idea. Which is why, when you feel the Eye of Sauron on you from the start, it’s inhibiting. I can’t imagine what it’s like in your world, where you get in trouble for doing braids. [In 2016, Jacobs was accused of cultural appropriation for sending models down the runway in hairstyles that referenced dreadlocks.] How can you do anything if the trip wires are everywhere?
JACOBS: I speak to friends in different creative professions, from Sofia [Coppola] to Lana [Wachowski]. In each of our ways, we feel that pressure. The question is, do you trust your instincts? Do you make your work and make your mistakes, which seem like part of the process?
CURRIN: The mistakes that you should really regret are the ones that make things ugly, not the things that offend people. If you make a bad painting or a bad dress, that’s a mistake you should regret. And even those mistakes can later turn to gold. You make something embarrassing and terrible, but the reason you did it lingers, and without making mistakes, you’ll never make anything good. So I don’t think it’s helpful to get in the habit of avoiding mistakes. It’s not really a great moment in our culture right now. In a way, painting men, I know no one’s going to get upset with that.
JACOBS: Do you feel that you’re less criticized when you do men? As you said, there is still something exaggerated and clownish about your portrayal of them, just as when you do women.
CURRIN: Well, I’ve always liked stereotypes as a vessel. I hope this doesn’t sound like bullshit, but stereotypes appeal to me because they’re so dumb and because the meaning they convey is already known. It’s nothing new. But then there are the unrelated feelings and associations and meanings that can inhabit those stereotypes. Do you remember when we watched The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant [1972] together? Those characters are extreme vessels, but they’re presented as normal. Everybody is gay and dressed up and dancing and crying and weird shit is happening, and time is moving in a weird way. But I like the idea that stereotype becomes an internal, almost classical template of representation, no matter how flamboyant or strange or otherworldly it appears. It might come off as mean-spirited or whatever, but I can’t express myself without that rigid structure.
JACOBS: This might be a basic question, but do you paint women using live models?
CURRIN: Yes, although less now. I’ve found myself less interested in it. I’m more interested in making it up. I went through a period of about ten years where I felt like I shouldn’t paint if I didn’t have a model in front of me, but eventually it started hampering me a bit. Also, I want to be alone more. If you’re painting from a model, you’re not alone. I don’t much like that.
JACOBS: Your male paintings aren’t from models?
CURRIN: No, not unless it’s me in the mirror, or something like that. I don’t really like to paint men. Early on, I painted women from magazines and put beards on them because I was so put off by the idea of painting men.
JACOBS: Tell me about the Jackass series that’s in the show. I’ve always loved those ones. They crack me up.
CURRIN: Actually, that came from the guy who introduced me to Rachel. He called me up out of the blue—I really didn’t know him—and he said he was a good friend of Rachel’s, and it turned out he told Rachel he was a good friend of mine. He really didn’t know either of us, but that’s how I met Rachel, and I fell in love with her and I asked her to marry me right away. This guy was like an angel. Anyway, he sent over 20 boxes of Playboy to my studio one day. They just showed up. There were from 1968 to 1980. They were literally golden age—the centerfolds were brown and orange, like food-photography colors. Playboy would have these inside ads for its ideal demographic about buying stereos and how they like cologne and how rich they are—that kind of stuff. The title was, “What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?”—meaning that the sort of man who reads Playboy buys $700 worth of stereo equipment. Then they had these amazing photographs of this man shopping for the kids, and the woman who’s with him is completely in awe, and then the other women 15 feet away are also all looking at him, just thinking he’s great. I thought it would be funny to make all the women hate him. So I just turned him into the opposite. I called him “The Jackass” because my dad used to call people that. But it could also be a simple metaphor for what we were talking about before of making your art and not worrying about what people say about you. This guy maintains his serenity and confidence in the face of all this hatred and disapproval. That’s really all it was. I just took gloss and changed the women’s faces. And sometimes the faces of the animals and other men, so everyone hates him.
JACOBS: They’re hilarious.
CURRIN: This guy is so cool. He shops for his own vegetables. He takes a plane to Alaska. He does brunch.
JACOBS: He’s just the best. Stylish, cool, athletic, caring, sensitive, and well rounded—he’s the shit.
CURRIN: It was thrilling to make these ads more dramatic by making the women scream and yell, and cry in completely outlandish situations. I wanted to try to get some real emotion in there. No matter how ironic or cynical I’m being, I can’t help when I’m actually doing the work to try to feel it. I think of it more like a rococo painting, where the situation in its entirety is ridiculous, but things are really happening—there’s color and emotion. It wouldn’t be effective if there weren’t real emotions at play. The other reason for them was that at this time, in the late ’90s, I was getting more of an urge to make compositionally complex paintings. I was still in my mode of isolating a woman, or her body, and having this magnifying glass in the sun burning a hole in her with concentration. I wanted to do something more [Nicolas] Poussin, more chaotic. I ended up with the pornographic paintings.
JACOBS: I was just about to ask you about the pornographic paintings. You mentioned that you don’t like to paint men, and yet these paintings are filled with men in the act of sex.
CURRIN: Well, weirdly, I found that painting a bulging penis was easier than painting the guy’s face. I’d paint a penis as if it were a vase on the table. The guy could be a cartoon. His penis has to be convincing and real and exciting and spectacular, but the face just has to be the right number of eyes and a mouth. That kind of solved my lack of empathy for men. Mostly, though, it satisfied my urge to make a really complex painting with stuff going every which way—not just sex organs, but people’s arms and legs. I was trying to figure out how to make something as clunky and old-fashioned as oil painting as exciting as advertisements.
JACOBS: Does your own heterosexuality come into play when you’re painting men?
CURRIN: I think so. I think it’s harder for me to caress men’s bodies with a brush. I actually think in the olden days, sex roles might have been a little less rigidly stratified. And so I think physical contact between men was less sexualized. Straight men back in the glory days of painting had a healthier or more comfortable attitude toward physical contact with men than they do today—or rather than I do. I have a rather unhealthy or uptight attitude toward men’s bodies. For instance, I always found comic books weird—the muscles and tight clothes, it always bothered me. My favorite artist as a teenager was Frank Frazetta, who did Conan the Barbarian. But I always found it made me a little uncomfortable, all the loving attention to the musculature of the men in a way that doesn’t bother me in Michelangelo, or any of the supposedly gay artists, where it just seems normal and the way you should look at a man’s body. In the 20th century, it became much different, and it probably has a lot to do with the way men were shown in movies and on TV. I rented all these TV shows like Love Boat and Bonanza to look for faces. And what occurred to me was how it’s almost constantly men. You’re basically looking at men when you’re watching a movie or a TV show.
JACOBS: I think that’s a huge part of the conversation today. There’s this patriarchy that has existed in Hollywood, in making movies and TV shows and writing books. It’s all guys.
CURRIN: That’s also what I liked about Petra von Kant. There are no men. They talk about men, but you don’t look at men.
JACOBS: You’ve painted your own sons, Hollis and Francis, as well as your daughter, Flora, and your wife. They are very different paintings than the ones we’ve talked about. How does that personal relationship change the way you paint your subjects?
CURRIN: With Rachel and the kids, a lot of the defenses and inhibitions I have when I’m painting faces go away. The reason I like to paint Rachel is the idealizing that happens. I’m not even conscious of it. I do change things about her face, but I’m not aware of it. And that’s the closest I get to a natural approach to painting. Because honestly when you think of the anachronism it is in the society—politically, sexually, historically, and physically—to do oil painting, the cartoon of confidence that it takes to be a male figurative painter is always on my mind. And I guess that falls away a bit with my children and my wife.
JACOBS: What’s your relationship with the world in general right now? You and Rachel have never exactly been social hermits. You were out and about. But you also have your place in Maine and in Orient on the North Fork.
CURRIN: Any time I have outside of working is taken up by the kids. That’s the truth. I used to have these leisurely ten-hour days where I would waste four hours and then work for six hours, and now I just don’t have the time to waste. Some of the dreaminess of life is gone. It used to be that after the solitude of the studio, I would love to go out and see people and be at a party. I had no idea before I had kids how much time and energy it takes. And it matters more than anything else. I’m not an easygoing person, so just to maintain my blood pressure I’ve got to keep life as simple as I can.
JACOBS: Do you also think your relationship to New York has changed as a creative person?
CURRIN: I’ve always loved New York, especially when I started being able to afford it. It was wonderful, especially being young with Rachel in New York. I went through a lot to try to make a house for my family and myself that would be something special and different in New York. But I have to say, I don’t think my kids like it very much. I feel some significant guilt for raising them in New York City, thereby denying them some of the psychological benefits of being outside of it. I wonder if it’s made them more capable or less capable. I’m not sure.
JACOBS: I loved being brought up in the city.
CURRIN: I know what it’s like to be money poor in New York City, and that was in the New York City of 25 years ago. It was hard then. I imagine it’s much harder now. I think that part of the problem is that people leave at the first sock to the face that they get; they leave and go to Los Angeles. I don’t know whether it’s just that you get punched harder now as a young person, but I know I got hit in the face a lot, figuratively speaking. And literally, too.
John Currin Tells Marc Jacobs What Painting Men Has Taught Him About Himself. By Marc Jacobs. Interview , September 4, 2019.
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