The Look of Love, Eye Miniatures from 19th Century Britain

 

Books on portrait miniatures do not come out that often. When word spread that eye miniature collectors Nan and David Skier were publishing Lover’s Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, a follow-up book to their 2012 book, The Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, we reached out for a sneak peek at what’s behind their collection, how they’ve cultivated their own eye for these tiny treasures, and what insights the new book shares.
 
How did you start collecting eye miniatures?
 
DS: It started a long time ago. I’m an ophthalmologist and we’ve always been interested in antiques: tea caddies, English calling card cases, etc. We were at a medical meeting in Boston in the 1980s and we went to the Cyclorama Antique show. We came to Edith Weber’s booth, which specialized in antique jewelry. Nan has some fabulous antique jewelry, and we were looking around and – I can still remember it – there was this gorgeous ring, surrounded by diamonds and blue enamel, guilloche, which contained the image of a single eye. A young man – it was Barry Weber – came over and asked if he could help us. We asked him about the ring, and he said, ‘that’s an eye miniature or lover’s eye. Do you know anything about them?’ We knew nothing about them, so he went into the story. Not only was the image beautiful and intricate and delicate but it was in wonderful pristine condition; we said, ‘we have to have that.’
 
What was it about that one that captivated you?
 
NS: Although David is an ophthalmologist, what really captivated us was its beauty, its significance, its secret story, its age and rarity. That eye ring is now example number one in our book.
 
What did you learn from him, what advice did he give you?
 
DS: Barry told us that eye miniatures were a way to exchange a gift with a secret lover. Looking at that single disembodied eye, it was hard – if not impossible – to guess the identity of the sitter. We consulted with Barry often over the years before his death in 2010, but we will never forget the warning he gave us at that first meeting – ‘this ring is made of watercolor painted on ivory, so please do not wash your hands while you are wearing it.’
 
Are there fakes on the market?
 
NS: Portrait miniature dealer and our friend Elle Shushan, who edited our new book, Lover’s Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, says that 98-99 percent of eye miniatures currently on the market are either fake or fashion, but not actual life portraits of eyes.
 
How are they faked?
 
DS: People buy antique miniature surrounds, which are easy to find, and they can cut down a period portrait miniature, or even insert a newly painted eye image.
 
When were these popular?
 
NS: These were first popular when George III was King of England. His son, who became King George IV, fell in love with Maria Fitzherbert, a twice widowed commoner and a Catholic. Since they could not legally marry because of her religion, they arranged a secret, morganatic marriage without the blessing of the King. This ‘left-handed’ marriage could not be officially recognized. He and Maria exchanged eye miniatures; the one he gave her is with her family, the one she gave him was buried with him.
 
Were these a singularly English tradition?
 
NS: There may have been some French eye miniatures that preceded this, but most are British.
 
Why is that?
 
DS: These are so small; most are not signed by the artist. Unless there is an engraving on the back or other identifier, it’s very hard to know where they are from or who the artist might have been. We own more than 130 eye miniatures and we have determined the identities of only five. What is so alluring about them is that they are so mysterious. They were supposed to be anonymous.

 
Did all miniature painters paint eye miniatures?
 
NS: No, most miniature portrait painters did not paint eye miniatures. Richard Cosway and George Engleheart were some of the most well-known painters of eye miniatures, largely because they both kept really good records.
 
DS: What’s interesting about Cosway – and there’s an essay on Cosway in the new book – is that George IV was a notorious gambler and never paid his bills to Cosway.
 
What was the most important thing you’ve learned over the course of your collecting?
 
DS: What’s important to learn is the connoisseurship. To read everything you can, to talk to people, to examine what you have and to develop a keen eye so you will understand the pieces as you look at them.
 
NS: Quality and condition are critical factors for us. We’ve been offered many and we want them in pristine condition.
 
Has your collecting evolved over time? How?
 
DS: We’ve always bought the best we could, but it’s evolved. We want things to be right. Eye miniatures come in so many forms – rings, brooches, bracelets, necklaces, boxes, even cufflinks, that we want to have examples of many kinds. As we collect, we want the more special and rare pieces… We want only the really great ones, the ones that will get us someplace. If we see a similar form that’s better than one we already have and it has good provenance, we’ll buy it.
 
Is your complete collection?
 
NS: As long as we are alive, it will never be complete. We love looking for these together and are always on the hunt. People who know us will let us know if they see a piece they think we’d like.
 
Do you always agree on what to buy?
 
DS: Almost always. Things have to really appeal to or ‘zing’ us. We also have a ‘two-out-of-three’ rule when it comes to buying things. We work with an advisor for the artwork we buy – Elle is our advisor on miniatures; we have another advisor for the American Ashcan School paintings we buy – two of the three of us have to agree it’s worthy.
 
What does the new book discuss that the first one did not?
 
NS: We’ve learned a great deal in the past nine years which we have incorporated in the new volume, adding to essays, adjusting descriptions and providing recently discovered information.
 
There are four new essays. Graham Boettcher, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art, has written a wonderful piece about the artists painting eyes in the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries, including such oddities as the ceiling in Blenheim Palace, where Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough commissioned her eyes and the Duke’s to be painted. Additionally, Graham’s essay profiles the artists painting eyes today.
 
Elle Shushan has delineated the much-asked question “Fake or Fashion,” illustrating why one piece may be considered fashion and another was made to deceive. In another essay Elle examines the rare and wonderful “flower eyes” of which only six are known, with one in our collection.
 
We are pleased to have Dr Stephen Lloyd, the acknowledged expert on Richard Cosway, R.A., to explain and illustrate the most notorious of eye portraits – those painted by Cosway for the Prince of Wales and Mrs Fitzherbert.
 
What has been your most recent eye miniature acquisition?
 
DS: Elle gave us as a gift a portrait miniature in which the sitter was wearing an eye miniature. It’s the only one she’s ever seen, the only one we’ve ever seen. That’s the most recent addition to our collection.
 
Do you collect portrait miniatures?
 
DS: We only have a few, which relate in some way to our eye miniature collection.
 
Do your children and grandchildren appreciate your collection? Do they share your interest?
 
NS: We’ve explained the value and rarity to our children so they can make an informed decision as to what they do with the collection when it becomes theirs. We’re doing this – collecting, creating the books and putting on the exhibitions – for our own pleasure and enjoyment
 
The first book was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art. Do you have plans to have another exhibition in conjunction with this new book?
 
DS: Not right now. We’ve been very, very careful during the pandemic. The eye miniatures are very fragile so conditions for exhibiting them have to be very specific. For “The Look of Love,” exhibition, which originated at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Ala., and traveled to the Georgia Museum of Art, Winterthur and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the collection was lighted by recessed fiber optic light cables and each exhibition case was sealed and climate controlled.
 
NS: All of the eye miniatures in the “Look of Love” exhibition were also shown on iPads, which allowed the visitors to enlarge, flip and rotate the objects, and to see them open and closed. At the time, this technology was revolutionary and really brought the objects to life.
 
DS: We are amazed at how wide our audience has been. We get frequent requests to use images of the eyes. A Norwegian rock ‘n’ roll band put some of our eyes on the cover of their album. If it’s a legitimate and reputable request, we consider it.
 
Q&A: Nan & David Skier. By Madelia Hickman Ring. Antiques and the Arts Weekly, September 14, 2021. 

From the moment the Prince of Wales (later, King George IV of England) laid eyes on Maria Firtzherbert at the London opera in 1784, he knew it was love. But Fitzherbert, a Catholic, twice-widowed commoner, knew that British law would never allow their union. She fled to France to escape the future king’s ardor, but Fitzherbert’s absence only inflamed the prince more. In his passion, he sent Fitzherbert a miniature portrait of one of his eyes. She reciprocated with her own eye miniature, and one month later, the two were married in a secret ceremony. The scandalous tale of love at first sight set off a craze for eye miniatures across England that would stretch for nearly four decades.

 
A new book, Lover’s Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection (D Giles Limited, 2021) edited by Elle Shushan, features a richly illustrated cache of over 130 of these bejeweled, hand-painted treasures. Eye miniatures are typically made of painstakingly detailed watercolors on polished pieces of ivory, and surrounded by carved gems, enameled metals, and human hair. These exquisite, enigmatic objects are frequently unsigned, making the majority unattributable to a single artist, and because they depict only a single eye and sometimes a stray lock of hair or eyebrow, the sitter’s identity is also often obscured. Of course, this mystery was part of the eye miniature’s allure — as it was for the king and his commoner — but it is also perhaps for these reasons that scholars have largely ignored eye miniatures until recent years.
 
Eye-themed adornments have been around since at least the Etruscan and Roman times, but the Georgian and Victorian version was likely inspired by a mid-18th century “French folly,” as the English politician and art historian Horace Walpole grumbled in 1785. Most lovers’ eyes were worn as jewelry, especially on brooches, lockets, and pendants worn close to the heart. Others decorated small functional boxes and etuis used to hold toothpicks, false beauty marks, and other trinkets. Most eye miniatures were exchanged between lovers, though they were also given to close friends and family members. Others were produced as memorial tokens after a loved one’s death. In this case, the eye is often surrounded by clouds to symbolize the subject’s ascent from earth.

 
But it wasn’t just the eye itself that carried meaning in these small portraits. An essay by art historian Graham C. Boettcher explains the messages conveyed by the miniatures’ accompanying diamonds, coral, and other gemstones. Pearls, for example, symbolized purity but also tears, and often framed the portraits of the deceased, while garnets represented friendship. Another essay by Shusan details the ways that eye miniature artists utilized the language of flowers, or floriography, in their work. For example, a miniature thought to be the eye of Mary Sarah Fox surrounded by foxgloves may be a play on the sitter’s last name, but could also connect the sitter to the energy, magic, and cunning that the flower was then considered to represent. In addition to eyes, some miniatures also featured locks of the sitter’s hair, another fragment of a beloved body to be captured and cherished by the miniature’s owner forever.

 
Although the king later abandoned Fitzherbert for a more legitimate marriage, he requested to be buried with her eye miniature placed directly over his heart upon his death. In this way, he took a piece of his lover — and her watchful gaze — with him to the grave. Lover’s Eyes illuminates this and other romances connected to eye miniatures, shining a light on these small but powerful portraits.
 
The 18th-century English Craze for One-Eyed Portraits.  By Lauren Moya Ford. Hyperallergic, September 19, 2021.
 

 

In 1785, when Maria Anne Fitzherbert opened a love letter from her admirer, Prince George of Wales, she wasn’t expecting to find an eye, gazing intently back at her.
 
The British prince was lovesick—and desperate. He’d fallen hard for Fitzherbert, but their courtship had been disastrous: Royal laws forbade a Catholic widow like his beloved from becoming a monarch. To make matters worse, the upstanding Fitzherbert had fled the country after the prince’s first proposal, in an attempt to avoid controversy.
 
But the prince was determined, and on November 3rd, he penned a passionate letter begging again for her hand in marriage. This was no ordinary proposal, though—it also contained a rare, spellbinding gift. “I send you a parcel,” George wrote in the letter’s postscript, “and I send you at the same time an Eye.”
 
Indeed, the package contained a very small, potent painting of George’s own right eye, floating uncannily against a monochromatic background. No other facial features anchored it, save a barely-there eyebrow. All focus was on the composition’s core, where a dark iris gazed ardently from behind a soft, love-drunk lid.
 
No records document how Fitzherbert responded to the eye itself, but “it must have bolstered the prince’s marriage proposal,” as scholar Hanneke Grootenboer pointed out in her 2012 book Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures. Soon after his letter, the star-crossed lovers wed in a covert ceremony. To cement the union, another disembodied eye was painted—this time in Fitzherbert’s likeness, nestled into a locket for the prince to treasure. No matter where his royal duties took him, George could open the jewel and receive his bride’s amorous gaze.
 
The Prince of Wales and Fitzherbert weren’t the only ones exchanging eyes in 18th-century England. Eye miniatures, also known as lover’s eyes, cropped up across Britain around 1785 and were en vogue for shorter than half a century. As with the royal couple, most were commissioned as gifts expressing devotion between loved ones. Some, too, were painted in memory of the deceased. All were intimate and exceedingly precious: eyes painted on bits of ivory no bigger than a pinky nail, then set inside ruby-garlanded brooches, pearl-encrusted rings, or ornate golden charms meant to be tucked into pockets, or pinned close to the heart.
 

As objects, lover’s eyes are mesmerizing—and bizarre. Part-portrait, part-jewel, they resist easy categorization. They’re also steeped in mystery: In most cases, both the subject whose eye was depicted and the artist who painted it are unknown. What’s more, until the early 2000s, little had been written about the objects’ history and significance, though they have been part of the collections of museums like the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Big questions loomed: What sparked their popularity? Why had they faded so quickly from use? And why portray a single eye, as opposed to a whole portrait?
 
 Grootenboer, an art historian specializing in portraiture and the art-historical gaze, has made it something of mission to fill in these blanks. Some answers, she knew, resided in late 18th-century British culture. It was a time before photography, when “people were desperate to give each other not just images of themselves, but part of themselves,” she told Artsy. Before the advent of lover’s eyes, miniature portraits depicting a loved one’s entire visage had also become popular. (Often, they came with a lock or braid of hair affixed behind the tiny canvas.) Their purpose was adoration. By looking upon the little likeness, which was typically small enough to cradle in one’s hand, the recipient could “evoke someone’s face,” Grootenboer said. The paintings acted as tiny proxies to be kissed, pressed to bosoms, and talked to when the subject was out of reach.
 
But lover’s eyes were different. Instead of standing in for the whole person, they depicted just a minute feature. What’s more, they embodied a specific action: the gaze. “It is the look of someone that the [lover’s eye] is a carrier of,” Grootenboer explained. “It is the look that someone wants to imagine, and wants to feel as resting upon themselves.”

 
The act of looking, and its importance in late 18th-century British society, is central to deciphering the mysteries of eye miniatures. At the time, British culture “was infatuated with with seeing and being seen,” Grootenboer explained. Because social codes limited public interaction between people of the opposite sex, looks could more easily be exchanged than words. (These limitations also triggered the more illicit phenomena of peeping or keyhole-spying.)
 
 
In the process, looking became both significant and codified; in other words, different types of glances conveyed different emotions and messages.
 
Eye miniatures materialized in this environment, where even the subtlest glance could convey lust, love, surveillance, or a heady mix of all three. It’s no wonder, then, that an expression of devotion would come bearing a gazing eye.
 
Each miniature feels precious and exceedingly intimate, though their moods oscillate from adoring, longing, and lusty to penetrating and eerily watchful. One looks bashfully from the center of a circular pin, resembling a peephole, as if hinting at his or her more lascivious desires, while another gazes, heavy-lidded and adoring, through a sparkling wreath of gems. Others express darker, more melancholy messages: From one ornate golden setting, a man stares controllingly, brow arched, as if attempting to dissuade infidelity; he is watching the woman who carried this jewel, even in his absence. A pearl-rimmed eye secreting two diamond tears, on the other hand, likely represented a deceased loved one; through it, the subject’s glance remained immortal, even in death.
 
In part, it’s the intimate nature of eye miniatures that Grootenboer credits with the mystery surrounding them. The gaze communicated by each painted eye, and therefore the object itself, “was only important to the lover or to the person that was intimate with the portrayed,” explained Grootenboer. As their subjects and owners left this world, the significance of each jewel faded, too.

 
What’s more, by 1830, the trend itself petered out. Photography had emerged, promptly snuffing out any interest in miniature portraiture “because it offered a real portrait,” Grootenboer said. From then on, production of lover’s eyes all but stopped, and the names of their subjects, owners, and the love stories that inspired them were largely forgotten.
 
Yet even without their context, lover’s eyes retain their piercing gazes, their ability to hypnotize. “We feel this gaze resting upon us. We feel this connection with this subject that you have never met. You have the feeling that you know this person a little bit,” explained Grootenboer.
 
“In that way, they articulate the essence of portraiture: the act of looking at you, the ability of a painting to hold you in its grip.”
 
The Mysterious History of Lover’s Eye Jewelry. By Alexxa  Gotthardt. Artsy, January 4, 2019. 

What would have been sexier for early 19th-century British nobles than having a passionate affair? Flirting with their lover right in front of everyone. How? By wearing one of the most intimate parts of their beloved—the eyes—all over their body.

 
Eye miniatures, also known as lover’s eyes, were a subgenre of jewelry that became the height of fashion in the Georgian era. For centuries, tiny personal portraits of one’s beloved had been common adornments, but depictions of that person’s eyes alone were something pretty new. Although eye miniatures were first spotted around the time of the French Revolution, they became very popular across the Channel around the same time, due to one particular royal trendsetter.
 
That fashion-forward fellow was the Prince of Wales, the future George IV and eldest son of King George III of American Revolution fame. In contrast to the moral rectitude of his famously faithful father, George Jr. collected true loves like other men did horses. His most infamous affair started in the early 1780s, when the prince fell head-over-heels for married Catholic Maria Fitzherbert.
 
The 1701 Act of Settlement forbade British royals, especially the future head of the Church of England, from wedding Catholics. Despite her eminent unsuitability, George wooed Maria with endless affection, a faked suicide attempt, and quite a few gifts. He also commissioned British miniaturist Richard Cosway to paint a portrait of his eye, which the prince mailed to her, along with a marriage proposal.
 
Maria eventually made her lover a portrait of her own eyes. The two were wed soon after, which was illegal; George III eventually forced them apart and made his son marry a German princess. Although the match with Maria was ill-fated, the Prince of Wales started an imitable fashion for eye miniatures, also known as “lover’s eyes.” Only about a thousand of these exist today. All were produced between the 1780s and 1830s, in America, Western Europe, and Russia.
 
Affluent individuals would wear these trinkets on every appendage, from finger rings to brooches and pendants. These lovers’ gifts, often set on plaques of ivory, were discreet. Presumably, only the wearer and the portrait subject would know the identity of the beloved being depicted, keeping the experience intimate. And the places people would wear them—on the wrist, near the heart—created a “tactile connection between the owner’s body that mirrored the emotional closeness between subject and wearer,” as art historian Jennifer Horn noted in The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America.

 
It can be difficult for modern art historians to identify the subject of small portraits. After all, you can only see eyes, eyebrows, and maybe a bit of hair.
 
If you were particularly close to a relative, you might even get a lover’s eye made of a beloved family member. One 18th-century example featured a brown eye beneath some clouds; the gaze in question belonged to Margaret Wardlaw, who died at the age of nine.
 
Other pieces were surrounded by pearls, symbols of tears and indicating that the subject passed away. One such example appears in the collection of Dr. David Skier and his wife, Nan. In 2012, they loaned their collection of lover’s eyes—numbering over 100, among the largest worldwide—to the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. Although this exhibit has since closed, you can still get your fill of lover’s eyes around the northeast United States, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
 
 
19th-Century ‘Lover’s Eye’ Jewelry Was the Perfect Accessory for Secret Affairs. By Carly Silver. Atlas Obscura, September 15, 2017. 

In the 18th and 19th centuries, wealthy British and European lovers exchanged "eye miniatures" -- love tokens so clandestine that even now, in the majority of cases, it is impossible to identify their recipients or the people they depict.

 
Experts believe that there are fewer than 1,000 "lover's eyes" in existence today. Of that small surviving hoard, the largest single collection belongs to the Skiers of Birmingham, Ala. David Skier, an eye surgeon, and his wife, Nan, have been collecting "lover's eyes" for decades -- and their collection will go on display for the first time ever at the Birmingham Museum of Art next month.
 
Over the phone, curator Dr. Graham Boettcher outlined the history and uses of these petite, jewel-like paintings. The accompanying slide show highlights some particularly splendid examples from an altogether remarkable collection.
 
Can you give us a brief history of these so-called "lover's eyes"?
 
According to lore, the story of lover's eyes goes back to the end of the 18th century, when the prince of Wales -- who later became George IV -- became smitten with a twice-widowed Catholic woman named Maria Fitzherbert. He courted Maria Fitzherbert rather unsuccessfully at first; he kept trying to win her affection and profess his undying love to her, and she wasn't really going to have any of that. Finally, he staged a kind of half-hearted suicide attempt (I think it was more of a cry for help than an earnest effort to take his own life) -- and then she reluctantly agreed to marry him. But shortly thereafter -- I think really the next day -- she came to her senses and realized what exactly she had done by consenting to marry the prince of Wales, which of course was totally illegal according to the laws (first of all, the king had to consent to the marriage of the heir to the throne, and second, he would never have consented for the prince to marry a Catholic, let alone a twice-widowed Catholic six years his senior).
 
So Fitzherbert fled to the Continent, trying to escape George's attention, but he didn't give up. On Nov. 3, 1785, the prince wrote to Mrs. Fitzherbert with a second proposal of marriage. Instead of sending an engagement ring, as we might expect today, he sent her a picture of his own eye, set in a locket, painted by the miniaturist Richard Cosway, one of the celebrated artists of the day. At the time, they referred to these pieces as "eye miniatures"; today we call them "lover's eyes," but that wasn't a period term -- that's a term coined by the New York-based jeweler Edith Weber, who's handled a lot of these over the years.

 
Anyway, George sent a note with this eye miniature, and it said: "P.S. I send you a parcel, and I send you at the same time an eye. If you have not totally forgotten the whole countenance, I think the likeness will strike you." It's not known whether it was the letter or the eye that changed Mrs. Fitzherbert's feelings precisely, but shortly after that, she returned to England and married the prince in a secret ceremony on Dec. 15, 1785. Soon, the fad for these eye miniatures began to catch on -- so this episode is, according to legend, the genesis of the eye miniature.
 
There is some evidence to suggest that these had appeared in France a few years earlier, and that the Brits were only adopting a French invention; I think the jury's still out. In any event, the love affair between the prince of Wales and Maria Fitzherbert popularized these objects and spawned a fad that lasted well into the 1830s -- and even later, past Queen Victoria, who was known to have commissioned a number of these objects during her reign. There are even artists to this very day who are painting lover's eyes. One is the great-great-grandson of the famous Philadelphia portraitist Thomas Sully; he's sent me a picture of a miniature he's working on. Rather than paint on elephant ivory, which of course wouldn't be legal nowadays, he paints on mastodon ivory. He also points out that he usually has them commissioned by faithful spouses, not lovers or mistresses.
 
The original idea was that, by only showing an eye, these miniatures would effectively conceal the identity of the person who was shown, right? This way, the miniatures could be worn or exhibited publicly?
 
Exactly. Only someone with really intimate acquaintance -- a lover, a spouse, a close family member -- would recognize an individual's eye, so they could be worn in a more open way. They didn't have to be encased inside of a locket. There are rare instances in which we do know the identity of the subject, because of an iron-clad provenance or documentation, but typically we can only tell if there's an inscription.
 
Some of the eyes in the Skier Collection have inscriptions that reveal the identity of the sitter, but still, oftentimes these will be fairly generic; it'll just say the name of the individual -- and if it's a memorial piece, it might give the date they died and how old they were. Through genealogical research, we've been able to discover the identity of certain people, but some of the names are a little too generic; we're only able to establish certain identity in a handful of cases -- and I think that's by design. That was really the intent of these things, to keep the identities secret.
 
How did the Skiers start collecting these objects?
 
Nan and David Skier started collecting "lover's eyes" about 20 years ago -- and I think you'll love this detail: David Skier is a prominent opthamologist here in Birmingham. So he's someone who deals with eyes all day long. They came across their first lover's eye at an antique show in Boston, and were just utterly captivated by it. (The first eye that they saw was a really exquisitely rendered one: quite early, from 1790, with a blue enamel surrounding -- often associated with eyes that were commissioned by and for the nobility. It's also encrusted with diamonds and pearls.)
 
For 20 years, the Skiers have quietly built what is really thought by all who have been asked -- all who would know -- to be the largest collection of these materials in the world. Larger than any institutional collection, certainly. Larger than the collection of the Queen herself.
 
When the "Antiques Roadshow" came to Birmingham, one of the appraisers on the show, Barry Weber (to whom the catalog is dedicated -- he passed away recently) approached the Skiers about doing an educational segment on lover's eyes, and of course they were happy to share their collection; that was the first time the collection received any sort of notoriety.

 
And this is the first time this collection has been exhibited in a museum?
 
That's correct. This is the largest exhibition of its kind. There are certainly a few museums here and in Britain that have small collections of lover's eyes but display them with their permanent collection; I think Philadelphia has about 30 or so eyes, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a few in their collection, as do the Royal Collection and the Victoria & Albert in London. But this collection is three times larger than any institutional collection.
 
Because these things are tiny, I think a natural impulse on the part of exhibition designers would be to put them all in one case -- but then you can take them all in in an instant, which doesn't really do justice to the artistry that went into making these. Each one is so carefully rendered, and they all tell very different stories.
 
"Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection" will be on view at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Ala., from Feb. 7 through June 10, 2012.
 
The secret history of "lover's eyes". By Emma Mustich. Salon, January 21, 2012.

Monuments to Lust, In Conversation with John Currin

 

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.
 
Phong H. Bui (Rail): Before we get to a discussion on the issue of grisaille in this recent group of paintings, looking at the Climber (2021) at this very moment, with the female nude stretching her supple body diagonally in front—I mean every part of her body is painted with such measure and diligence in endless pairs of opposites, which you’ve done before but never to this extreme, be it the large breast versus tiny hands and feet, small hands versus large torso, round forms versus pointed shapes, and so on—knowing you love Willem de Kooning, I can’t help but to think of his mediation between cubism and surrealism, especially from the mid to late 1940s, for example Pink Lady (1944), Pink Angels (1945), Fire Island (1946), where the sense of motion and speed is implied by the necessary and novel distortions that correspond to the fluidity of linear constructions across the picture plane…
 
John Currin: Yes, especially Pink Angels, and even an earlier picture like Summer Couch (1943) from which the later black and white painted with enamel paper on boards like Dark Pond (1948), Black Friday (1948), among others wouldn’t be possible. And of course, de Kooning’s spatial vision reached its peak in Attic (1949) and Excavation (1950), which in addition to the jam-packed fragments of the body, I also thought of Flemish drapery.
 
Rail: Which makes perfect sense since de Kooning was born in Holland (in 1904), and came to the US in 1926.
 
Currin: Right! At one point, after having worked on the drapery that draped around the two figures for one month, where parts were taken from [Hans] Memling, I realized it wasn’t working, so I made a real drapery set up on a box that I could work from. But in another example, the drapery in Sunflower (2021) is loosely cribbed from the Master of Flémalle’s Everyday Miracle: Nativity (ca. 1420s).
 
Rail: And it equally makes sense now that I think of the cutting sharpness and voluminous yet flowing style of the Flemish treatment of drapery lending its pictorial correlation to your recent interest in grisaille painting. I am thinking at the moment, for example, of Van Eyck’s The Annunciation Diptych (ca. 1435) at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.
 
Currin: I love that painting, and the back of his Ghent Alterpiece (ca. 1420–32), one of the greatest paintings ever made, as much as the front. Actually, I had a Flemish style drapery on the Climber for months, and I finally gave it up. I finally realized it wasn’t working. The left-hand part is taken from Van Eyck, but the rest is stuff set up in my studio, done in a more-or-less realist style.
 
Rail: What about Caryatid (2021) where we see circular forms echo throughout, without falling off the picture plane?

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?

 
Currin: I love de Chirico’s gladiators, as I’ve often talked about them with Lisa Yuskavage and Matvey Levenstein. But for these paintings, I’ve been thinking of and looking at Konrad Witz’s panel paintings of Angels and Saints in niches, like Synagogue, Ecclesia, Saint Bartholomew, The Angel of Annunciation, all from his amazing Heilspeigel Altarpiece (ca. 1435), now dispersed in different museum collections like Kunstmuseum in Basel, and elsewhere in Switzerland. Also, I wanted to include a window within the window so to speak, with a 1970s Southwestern sky with horizontal strips of clouds in color, which made it less about trompe l’oeil and more complex and contemporary. Again, one of the interesting things when I look at these Witz paintings, everyone is clothed with this riot of drapery everywhere. When there is nudity, it’s somewhat embarrassing. There’s not much natural state of nudity, like many of Witz’s contemporaries this Northern idea of nudity is nearly impossible. For I’ve always felt a little silly in making paintings of nudes who were elegant and comfortable in their natural state. As I mentioned earlier, I’m interested right now in the opposite. I’m interested in both presentations of nudity that exist in our dreams, which can be both very exciting and very mortifying at the same time, and the nudity that gets portrayed in these cartoons, like a game of telephone where someone described what was attractive and it got very distorted very quickly. It makes me ask these questions: what do men like? Is this what I like? Is that what women like? Do both men and women talk about what they like to each other? Speaking of de Kooning, I too am interested in the idea of a figure in an interior. De Kooning will often have a room with some ruled lines on a somewhat visible grid, often including a window, which he gets from Picasso. He lets his impulses, his anxiety, all kinds of amazing shit happen within that given space.

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: That’s a great story. That strip of silver paint on the right side is so hostile, so abrasive. It’s a classic de Kooning thing, loving Rubens and then saying to hell with him at the same time. It’s like saying I can’t play the nice guy for very long.
 
Rail: Super true, but I also see that strip of silver as a formal device to somewhat center the figure, otherwise it would slide off too far to the left.
 
Currin: As you said, he wanted to paint the frozen glimpse as fitting to his own anxiety. My anxiety is a different kind, one that finds real pleasure being excited by the idea of turning pornography into a bas-relief, or a sculpture. [Laughs] As we’ve been talking about de Kooning, I’ve realized that the most difficult thing in using monochrome is that I get so starved for color. The last year and a half, I’ve come to realize how much I hide behind color. I love those black and white de Kooning paintings, they remind me that in a way if you get the form right, you can paint it any color you want. It’s like what Picasso, talking about Bonnard, who he hated for Bonnard’s obsession with finding the right blue, said, “when I run out of blue paint, I use red paint.”
 
 
 
Rail: Picasso also said of Bonnard “he’s a potpourri of indecision” who couldn’t decide on anything. We should add that Bonnard is too sensitive for Picasso’s robust masculinity.
 
Currin: I’m also hostile to Picasso’s pure drawing, pure Southern European design. My sympathy is always with the Northern mentality, as a painter my sympathy goes to the Venetian school.
 
Rail: How would you describe your drawing style or technique, knowing that you’re not as invested in finished drawing?
 
Currin: My drawing is really just Abstract Expressionist American. If I forced myself, did a crash course or spent a summer studying, I could maybe draw a little better. Let’s face it, a classic American illustrator like Joseph Christian Leyendecker was fucking amazing. He could draw anything like nobody’s business.
 
Rail: I love Charles Dana Gibson’s drawing also. What about Jack Kirby’s comics! How amazingly distorted those muscular characters like Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, with foreshortened arms, amazing calves, six packs and so on! I’m glad that we’re having this honest discussion about drawing, John, because I’d in fact studied illustration in college, but I dismissed it as an inferior art until the Norman Rockwell show, curated by one of the most brilliant and irreverent art historians, namely Bob [Robert] Rosenblum at the Guggenheim in 2001.
 
Currin: The weird thing about Rockwell though, he’s a great artist, but the paintings are a bit dead when you see them in person. They’re only alive on the cover of a magazine or in a book. I’ve been looking at Hokusai’s Manga, the how-to-draw manuals. It’s got everything, people in various actions, all types of plants, landscapes, demons, all kinds of animals, including pages of 40-something cats licking their balls. All of the illustrations are prototypes, which is a completely different idea from Western art, but the same level of incredible encyclopedic mastery. He can draw anything.
 
Rail: As you know, the way in which Eastern artists make art derives from the internal translations of such manuals, they were never taught to work from nature directly. Copy after nature, or whatever you’re looking at would be considered inferior. Think of the image of Buddha, for example, meditating under the Bodhi Tree, trying to reach Nirvana, which means “not being here” the extinction of desire and individual consciousness. Now juxtapose that with the image of Christ on the cross, blood spilling out from the crown of thorns on his head, his hands and feet nailed to the cross in addition to his almost naked body with terrific gravity of erotic and sensual implications. Which image do we think compels more drama?
 
Currin: Christ on the cross is of course the most dramatic image ever invented in art. My feeling is that Christianity makes realism necessary, in order to convey Christ’s suffering, how he died for our sins. In mastering optical phenomena that are limited by time, not eternal, the artists, the maker, and the viewer, the worshipper alike are observing God’s work. To some extent, both are translators of how the image gets made and read. The goal seems to be to intensify our humility in relationship to the world, to nature. It creates a spiritual quest to understand nature, in a way I suspect other religions don’t in the same way. The cross is the best symbol, iconography, signifier, trademark that we could have.
 
Rail: True, as it may have started with how to translate the story of Moses at the battle with the Amelekites. Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed, and when he let his hand down, Amelek prevailed. Aaron and Hur then held up Moses’s hands on both sides, hence Israel prevailed. If you were a monk tasked with translating this image on an illuminated manuscript as early as Hiberno-Saxon art of the post-Roman era, you would have to think of all the different multitudes of angles you could translate most effectively.
 
Currin: The frontal view is the most powerful I would think.
 
Rail: In spite of losing the broad view of the battle in either cases of profile or three-quarter view, which wasn’t invented until linear perspective in the early 1400s in Florence.
 
 
Currin: As Rachel was doing yoga this morning, I heard her instructor say we’re worshipping in the temple of our bodies. I thought about Jesus not being in the temple of his body, for his body betrayed him. The body is just a rotting piece of flesh that he generously decided to become. I find that so dramatic and so terrifying. And that’s the same reason why the idea of the perfect rhythmic and frontal nude puts me off a bit. Take Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, surely one of the greatest paintings ever made. When the wind blows in an Italian painting, it makes these perfect sine waves blowing away from the hair. But when the wind blows in a German painting, as it gets away from the body, from the world, it becomes totally hostile. Satan is everywhere, and God is nowhere near controlling things mathematically. It becomes a terrifying fractal, where the image is turning into stone. It is at peace and static because it’s not alive. In Western art the idea of being alive is a total gasoline explosion, it’s a sunrise or sunset happening right now. That’s why the image of the sunflower gives a bit of life to the painting.

 
Rail: Looking at Rachel’s face in Sunflower, which reminds me of Clytie the water nymph, who turned into a sunflower, where every day she looks at the object of her unrequited love, Apollo the sun god, as he rode his golden chariot across the sky.
 
Currin: An invention by man no doubt.
 
Rail: Rachel and I once discussed how we are grateful to Carl Jung for the idea of the anima, the unconscious feminine side of man, and the animus as the unconscious masculine side of a woman, a more balanced view of the world than Freud’s predominantly male-oriented theory of libido.
Currin: Which I’m sure Rachel would say she’s more masculine than me at times! [Laughs]
 
Rail: Yes, she did! [Laughter] Anyway, regardless of the different critical response, positive or negative, to your work, I appreciate in a brief and perceptive text on your work in the catalog of his show Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque, Robert Storr wrote “your love for the medium of oil paint and painting is more important than the subject essentially.”
 
Currin: Once I discovered my love of looking at paintings, I found myself falling in love with different painters. I love the High Renaissance, the Mannerists of course like Parmigianino, Jacopo da Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, to name a few, as much as the Northern Mannerists like Maerten van Heemskerck, Cornelis van Haarlem, and Lucas van Leyden for example. The truth is I may be inspired by the face from a Botticelli painting, the torso from a Lucas Cranach, or the legs from someone else. As I told you, I also love American illustration from the ’50s and ’60s. There are lots of other sources that would appeal to whatever I was working on at any particular moment. It’s true that I work pretty hard to make the final painting look effortless but the truth is each painting requires so much: taking away what didn’t work, scraping and sanding parts, redrawing, repainting, which can turn out amazing or not at all. Either way, I love painting. I used to feel anxious when I was making abstract paintings, years ago, but once I began painting the figure, it brings me great joy.
 
Rail: James Lawrence seems to suggest your sense of technical acumen and sense of touch are both treated with equal terms of endearment. Even at the expense of what may be considered absurd, but also “absurdly” well-made things across the table, as Storr thought of it similarly.
 
Currin: When I see beautiful older paintings in museums here in the US, and all over really, I feel they are so alive, I connect with them as much as I do contemporary art. I don’t see art history as straight, linear, or progressive with all the rules and regulations. It’d be hideous to think that Picasso is greater than Rembrandt, or Ingres than Leonardo, or say Giotto’s frescoes are more beautiful than cave paintings. The past has never simply disappeared. We learn a lot from the past, so why not embrace it with pleasure and humility instead of thinking of it as an oppressive deadweight of tradition.
 

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.

 
One wall of the studio is covered with wigs on mannequin heads, creating a backstage-like setting for sketches of women flashing the viewer or sitting on a face. We’re on the topic of offensiveness again. “Sometimes I wish I was doing different imagery that wasn’t embarrassing,” says Currin, “in the way that it might be embarrassing to whoever-buys-the-painting’s kids’ friends’ nannies. But then again, I’ve gotten used to it. And really, over time, all that stuff is pH neutral after a while. It will look old-timey in another fifty years, if even that.”
 
When Currin was younger, he says, he liked “the idea of offending people” because at least that meant he was being recognized. “I wanted to become a famous artist. I don’t feel the same way now.” Perhaps, I suggest, that’s because he is a famous artist now. It’s also that he’s older, he answers. “There’s an aspect of flirtation to being offensive. . . . When you’re young and attractive, it’s easier to feel that.” Not that he ever set out to offend, specifically. “If I was honest about what I really wanted, it would be that people would fall in love with me by looking at my paintings. That they were so beautiful people would start crying and fall in love with me, you know? That’s what I want, is to be like Botticelli. I don’t want it to be a succès de scandale.” Later, he clarifies, “People mistake my being offensive for slumming in a lower order of sophistication. I do indulge myself sometimes and enjoy people’s distaste for how easy my work might seem, as a result. If I ever fell prey to being gimmicky, it would be that the form should be as stupid as possible, but you should be able to keep peeling it forever.” Looking around the studio, he says, “I don’t know what a woman would think of these . . . but men might find these as offensive as women might. It’s unsexy to everyone. And yet it’s porn. And then, being sculpture, you know, the form carries the meaning, literally and figuratively. The decisions about form carry sociological meaning. There’s no narrative.”
 
“No narrative” might be a way to describe many of Currin’s artistic ideas, meaning that the images are rife with stories yet hope not to project any, opting for a pantomime or joke instead. “It was a revelation to me,” he says, “to realize that Poussin is funny. I used to dislike Poussin because of the narrative. I didn’t like that a story was being told by the poses. I don’t want to know whether it’s Udipious and Ferinthius being surprised by Sledonius or something like that; I don’t know the story.” Poussin’s paintings must only depict his own feelings, using mythology as metaphor, says Currin, darting around his studio to find the right book and paging through it. “They’re about him looking around his own world and thinking it was crummy and not classical and disappointing. Everything looked to him like Route 1 in Connecticut, with Arby’s and shit everywhere. I may be imagining, but I get a sense that he’s dissatisfied with the way his world looks. That it doesn’t jibe with the way he thinks things ought to look, and not just aesthetically. He’s embarrassed by his world, maybe in the same way that I feel sort of embarrassed by my world.”

 
 
This revelation led to more, says Currin. He kept finding a similar uneasiness, or “just a nagging feeling of inauthenticity—hence all the classical Roman-looking people running around, and then, in the landscape, you see something real happening. It’s all about nostalgia, about pining for some other time and kind of creating it there, Arcadian Earth. That’s part of all painting, rather than just my situation as an American painter.” It’s helped Currin find his place in the art world, or at least in an art history timeline. “I’m sort of born with a clown suit on and I can’t help it,” he says. “As an artist, I’m never going to make something that’s going to be unpolluted. . . . It’ll never be classic. My work is based on the vache period of [René] Magritte, [Francis] Picabia, and [Gustave] Courbet, all that goofball stuff. Then, the older I get, I can start to see little echoes of that in supposedly classic art and I’m starting to realize, yeah, maybe all art’s this way. Maybe that’s part of being a good artist, just living with that feeling.”
 
John Currin : Monuments to Lust. By  Natasha Stagg. Gagosian Quarterly, September 10, 2021.

 

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.

 
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.
 
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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.