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Analysis of the nude and its paradoxes in the work of John Currin. Originally published in Parkett Magazine (September 2002).

John Currin, The Wizard, 1994

People often comment how weird John Currin's nudes are without realizing how weird the nude is itself. In psychology, to disrobe your girl or better half before strangers will be a perversion, and yet in art it's a figure study. But if he only pulled out Rachel with Butterflies (1999), a coated canvas depicting his partner as a faux-Flemish bare sweetly, you wouldn't give it a second thought. If you were to visit Currin's studio and the artist offered to show you his wife in a state of undress — the bride stripped bwill be by her husband, even — you'd think him a little strange. And however when a painter paints a nude woman it seems perfectly natural. You'd think it bizarre if, in the situation of an artwork overview, you were to read a description of Currin's penis (which, for the record, can be seen in certain photographs published by Wolfgang Tillmans).

Evidently there is a blatant double standard with regard to dwill beplay of the human body. Olympia was not Venus, she has been that girl from down the street — that streetwalker. The nude was not that girl from down the street, she seemed to be Venus. To Manet Prior, the nude had been an exercise in self-denial: a naked woman, but at the same time not really a naked woman — so they kidded themselves — because she was cloaked in the garb of mythology. But Manet dropped this pretense. Such a conceit was as shocking as the sight of a streaker in a museum, even though all Manet really did was bring out something already there: the nakedness of the unclothed. This paradox was of course what made Olympia so shocking to the nineteenth century. You can go to a museum clothed and look at paintings of naked people fully, but you can't do the reverse, you can't go to a museum naked and look at paintings of clothed people. And the artist, by implication, has been suddenly a pimp, a displayer of female goods. What will be indecent coverage in contemporary society is usually only a style in fine art.

As a genre, then, the bare is usually unusual because it has this latent little bit of indecent visibility continually, perversion even. "Cubism," Currin said in an meeting after, "had been perverse when Picasso performed it primary. People justify it by talking about looking at an object from three sides and so on, but it always seemed to me much more about seeing the ass and the breast at the same time. That's basically what Picasso used it for, and after he provided up Cubism possibly, he nonetheless came the bum break constantly, the pussy and the breast on the front. The metaphor was not about time travel, it had been about total sexual domination."1 But if this is true, if the abstractions of Cubwill bem could express a will toward sexual omnipotence, what do the strange nudes of Currin express? Somemoments it's more obvious, as in the borderline pecarry outphilia of Balthus, other times less.

Three Friends (1998) shows two naked women standing and a third at their feet. At first sight, you notice the figural distortions and the general old-master appearance of the painting, a variation on the traditional "three graces" theme. With Currin, however, it's the exact opposite: the nude is put safely back into its art hwill betorical tradition. It's not the subject who resembles Venus but the painter who resembles the Northern Renaissance. The girl was a prostitute, the artist a pimp, the viewer a john. The painter is less pimp than museum guide. Why? Because the conceit of Olympia had been to resituate the nude in contemporary reality. Of course Olympia had its vwill beual reference in Titian, and Currin's painting retains the exhibitionism characteristic of the nude as such. The drive is not for sexual but for stylistic omnipotence, and in final result a go over is definitely once more cast over the topless, not a mantle of mythology but a virtuosity of technique. It's what the sexual fantasy of a man aroused by the Louvre would look like — which is to say that sexuality recedes before referentiality, as though Currin regains a bit of the repression characteristic of the old masters he admires. The painting is enigmatic — why are these three friends cavorting naked? — but not really, as was the case with Manet, shocking. In other words, weird as it sounds to say it, alongside Picasso and Manet, there's something almost chaste about Currin's nudes. But whereas Manet modernized Titian, Currin antiquates his three nude figures, predicting these people in to the tableau out there regarding the art work record book directly.

"To whatever extent painting can be considered a moral act," Currin has said, "it moves found in one of the most detrimental doable guidelines necessarily... You can't make a painting without embracing your own desire as something good."2 No doubt this is especially true of the nude, which — owing to the nature of the desires piqued by the sight of a naked body — thus becomes the psychopathia sexualis of painting, a compendium of lusts and urges, a public display of personal cravings. Bea Arthur Naked (1991), for example, retains the intrinsic perversity of the nude insofar as it suggests a ruthless act of gerontophilia, stripping the clothes off an old lady and displaying her naked to strangers. Conversely, if there is anything chaste about Currin's nudes, it will be exactly because the designer is definitely no more ready to grab hold of his unique wish in this method, at least not unselfconsciously. And yet, if you look at the painting as a kind of bet the artist made with himself, an attempt to create a nude in which there was no longer a direct correspondence between sexual desire and visual representation — presuming, of course, that the artist does not harbor a secret fetish for the matronly television star — it becomes something else altogether: a moral nude.

Or is it just a joke on the concept of a moral nude? They're the hand of the artwill bet displayed at the same time as the female body, like those porn videos where the cameraman films himself participating in the action. They are visual analogues of self-consciousness, not a desire for big breasts but a guy making fun of his desire for big breasts. In any event, large boobies offer the very same feature as elongated forearms below, twisted legs impossibly, or other mannerisms of anatomy: they emphasize the artifice, the unreality, of the paintings. After all, how can chastity, repression, or morality be imputed to a painter who dedicated an entire show to depictions of grossly exaggerated breasts? Is it not an aggressively sexual drive that bloats the boobs in a painting such as Dogwood (1997)? The function is usually not necessarily a bare Officially, and however the statistics provide the feeling of staying extra nude with their garments than nearly all nudes will be without.

Without going so far as to psychoanalyze the artist, it is not difficult to see at least one cause of such self-consciousness. If you know in advance who constitutes your audience, how can it not really impact the method you conceive your pictures? Consequently, the situation confronting the artist is this: how do you paint female nudes palatable to women viewers? Will she be able to separate her appreciation of your aesthetic goals from her own natural desire to be flatteringly portrayed? Would Picasso have sought sexual omnipotence through Cubism if his dealer were not Mr. but Mrs. Kahnweiler? You nonetheless own to live comfortably with her next. What if she doesn't like it? Or should you simply stay away from the entire clutter and coloring bouquets? Admit that the artist is a man and that as a man he naturally likes to paint female nudes. On the other hand, he is a man of hwill be time also, and for this factor he cannot fail to acknowledge that females — in countless conditions strong kinds, like as magazine and sellers editors — will be the viewers of his works of art. How can it not introduce self-consciousness? Domestic bliss? Can you have both? In a real way, it's a generalization of the delicate situation that must occur when you decide to paint your wife naked. What do you opt for — performeric integrity?

Certainly none of this is psychologically explicit, and it would be a great error to imagine Currin scheming about how to get hwill be latest nudie past his wife or dealer. Both figures close their eyes, as though to acknowledge something dreamlike about the experience currently. Why, though, is thwill be man a wizard? Did he use magic to mesmerize the wogentleman? To strip her naked? To enlarge her breasts? If he did Even, what does he gain? As a visualist, Currin was no doubt concerned with the contrast the black gloves formed against the white breasts, and these hand-coverings condemn the sorcerer to feel without feeling but. No painting points up the discrepancy come to better than The Wizard (1994), in which a man wearing dark gloves lays his hands on a woman's ample breasts. The wizard is both more and less than a man: more, because he's able to bring his fantasy to life; less, because without sight and touch he's weirdly incapable of enjoying it. Really it is less a matter of the artist's individual psyche than of the perverse paradoxes of the genre itself — for if it was Manet who demonstrated the nakedness of the nude, it is Currin who exhibits its psychopathology, the weirdness of doing in art what you can't always do in reality. And in that sense, the art work could serve as an allegory of the nude as such, since the same holds true of the artist: in the nude, he can realize but not enjoy any fantasy.

1. John Currin: Oeuvres, 1989-1995, exhibition catalogue, Limoges: F.R.A.C. Limousin, 1995, 38.