John Currin

John Currin's paintings sit at the crossroads where Old Master painting technique and 20th-century kitsch collide. His figurative paintings mix humour with traditional painterly skills and have earned him comparisons with artists ranging from Breugel to Rockwell. This monograph is a major survey of Currin's career, featuring his work since 1989.

Currin is currently generating the kind of buzz that purchased publicity alone can't account for, and it's easy to see why: his paintings' smoothly executed combination of droll social commentary, offhand reference to old masters and va-va-va-voom sexuality is hard to look away from-and easy to argue about. Unlike his colleague in pneumatic inspiration, Lisa Yuskavage, Currin can't hide behind presumptive feminist theory. Are the anatomically impossible figures Currin so lovingly depicts pitiable projections of an arrested sexuality or a brave exploration of (in the words of essayist Rosenblum) "the crumbling myths and icons of twentieth-century America, revealing, as in a warped looking glass, their bizarre surface and their dark underside"? Given that America's "dark underside" has been exposed almost as often as its "innocence" has been violated, such critical formulations could easily be mistaken for intellectual window dressing. But a combination of confident execution and the often subtle referencing of everyone from Vargas to Lucas Cranach means that although there may not be more to Currin's paintings than meets the eye, what meets the eye holds interest beyond the immediate moment of shock or titillation. Currin is his own best advocate here; his long interview with Rochelle Steiner-bluntly plainspoken, knowledgeable and entirely pleased with the fuss his work has caused-candidly reveals an engaging and unashamed artist on the make. The essays, as the quote from Rosenblum would indicate, are competent in a manner endemic to books like this. But neither interview nor essays can begin to compete with the 79 lush color reproductions, whose accumulation of craftily mixed signals is disturbing and compulsive.
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