Designing Women

Kee

p in mind that the John Currin retrospective, now at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, is not actually called "Welcome to the Boom Boom Room." It's just hard not to think of it that way, and not only because so many of Currin's paintings are of women with breasts so large you want to yodel from one to the next. (It's a safe bet that he's the only painter of note ever to rate a review in Juggs magazine. A rave, of course.) But there's another kind of boom boom that Currin also brings to mind these days. It's the steady pounding of hype. At 41, with a measure of talent and no shortage of sheer cunning, he's routinely described as the painter of the moment. The Currin retrospective has already been seen in Chicago and London, and at every stop, all the bugles of fame have been sounding.

Currin can make an easy target, a balloon just waiting for a pin. In interviews he doesn't hesitate to name himself as the best artist in Manhattan or to theorize in his lofty, jejune way. (One of his latest conclusions is that American painters have never manifested "the will to make a masterpiece"--which would have come as news to Jackson Pollock, to say nothing of the thundering landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church.) But whatever his merits as a thinker, as an entrepreneur Currin is doing fine. With his wife Rachel Feinstein, a sculptor whose high forehead and pert chin turn up repeatedly in his work, he's a regular on the art-world party scene, working up press coverage and collector interest. Steve Martin buys his work. Two years ago, one of his paintings, Ms. Omni, sold at auction for $650,000.

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Over time Currin has gone through a succession of styles, from the deliberately slapdash to an ever more fine-grained illusionism, the kind that reports to the eye in detail about the clammy surface of a raw turkey or the plush of a fur jacket. But at every turn, his chief subject has been women, sometimes silky and creamy, sometimes wrinkled and brittle, sometimes with stupendous, impossible breasts.

Currin isn't the first artist to work at the intersection of art and trash. The kitsch shenanigans of Jeff Koons have been a major inspiration for him, and so has the later work of Francis Picabia — those painstaking oils from the 1940s that Picabia copied from naughty photographs. But in the mid-'90s Currin began to introduce old master borrowings into his work, at first conflating them with soft, pillowy porn, then working them into more conventionally scaled nudes and lately scattering them into satires of life among the well dressed and well fed. His art-history references come from all over — Botticelli, Mantegna, Courbet — but a favorite is the nudes of Lucas Cranach, the Northern Renaissance painter whose high-waisted women with elongated limbs step toward us with strange, awkward footsteps.

Figurative artists have always quoted from the past, but Currin, like a good postmodernist, puts his quotes in big quotation marks. Walk through any of the later galleries in the Whitney show, and what you experience is a sustained conceptual flutter, a continual flickering between high and low, Mannerism and kitsch, Parmigianino and sleazerino. It's a strategy that makes his work radical and familiar at the same time, like an especially snappy new running shoe, which in any market is never a bad idea.

The pictures that first got Currin noticed were more edgy than reassuring — imaginary portraits of older women, angular and wind sheared, urbanely dressed and fending off, with mixed results, the ravages of time. They were simple, awkwardly painted and perfectly calculated to offend feminist sensibilities. When the critic of the Village Voice took the bait and urged her readers to boycott Currin's first solo exhibition, in 1992, bingo, a star was born! The art world may be less politically correct now, but rendering women as sex kittens or, worse, as sexless hags, is still not something male artists can get away with easily. So the wall cards at the Whitney strain to assure us that Currin fully intended to emphasize the dignity of these women. But the pictures, as pictures will be, are a good deal more ambiguous. It's hard not to notice that Ms. Omni looks a fair bit like Lyndon Johnson in drag, which may not be the most dignified way for anybody to look.

By the mid-'90s Currin had moved on to his Russ Meyer phase. In canvases like The Bra Shop or Jaunty and Mame, pneumatic women admire one another's bodacious ta-tas. Although the bodies are rendered smoothly, the faces are roughed up with a palette knife, a gesture that one assumes is meant to frustrate the viewer's enjoyment of the picture as cartoon erotica. Then something happened. Currin put aside the bad-painting pose and started to paint with genuine aplomb. His charms still rested strongly on the warmth of our feelings for the great paintings he was copying, but sometimes he could sublimate the old master references deeply enough and impose the kitsch perspective subtly enough to produce a mesmerizing formation of paint like Heartless, a woman with a heart-shaped opening cut above the waistline of her dress.