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Exacting images of people in the celebrated and banal act of wearing clothes. Could this be you? James Startt focuses on Uniforms.

On a sun-bleached rooftop a stone’s throw from the Villa Borghese in Rome, romantic minimalist Livia Signorini unfurls a “quilt” made of Horvath candy wrappers.

Painting is either back, or, never left the building. A discussion around the state of art today.

Did Picabia prefigure our current
human-technology questions?

MADE IN JAPAN: KILLER CUTENESS INVADES PARIS

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A letter from Paris, from Basel. Art 32 Basel reviewed.

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Jonathan Horowitz's interactive low- technology web enabled art show reviewed.

part 1 Art, Paris, porn and the web.

part 2
Looks at art and porn in the context of still imagery and film.

part 3 asks: is sex in art cultural satisfaction?

letter from paris : : matthew rose

painters at the turn of the century

dear painter, paint me…
Painting the Figure Since Late Picabia

by Matthew Rose

Painting is either back, or, never left the building.

The age-old profession of applying paint on canvas may have simply been overshadowed by the plethora of art strategies begun as early as 1917, with Duchamp’s “Fountain,” the overturned urinal signed “R. Mutt.”  Interestingly enough, Duchamp’s very good friend, Francis Picabia, was a tried and true painter, although his approach to the canvas was anything but conventional.  The flamboyant French artist (1879-1959), immensely talented and outrageously brazen, mapped out a world of tongue-in-cheek kitsch works in a prolific explosion that spanned the middle parts of the 20th century. (See the Joseph Nechvatal review of the Picabia show in Paris here).

Picabia’s late work from the 1940s, the fulcrum of this exhibit, borrowed generously from soft-core pornography and other photographic sources, and does more than inform the direction these artists have taken.  Combining the comic, kitsch, popular culture and adding a jigger or two of surrealism, Picabia undoubtedly had a great deal more influence on pictorial subject and style than he’d ever dreamed.

 
Francis Picabia, La Brune et la Blonde, 1941  Courtesy Flick Collection © VBK Wien 2002

 “Dear Painter, Paint Me…”, (the title taken from Martin Kippenberger’s 1980s series) is a travelling exhibition (Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt) turns the spotlight on contemporary figurative painting since the Frenchman’s heyday painting pin ups in the 1940s. 

Among the 18 artists in this expansive show, modern figurative masters such as Alex Katz, Luc Tuymans and even the droll French outcast Bernard Buffet, are complemented by the sexy and often grotesque contemporary worlds of John Currin, the surreal pop worlds of Neo Rauch, and the dreamy romantic ones of Elizabeth Peyton. Kippenberger, a strong influence on the group, is well represented, as are a handful of single-minded, dyed-in-the-wool painters of a younger set: Kai Althoff, Glenn Brown, Brian Calvin and Peter Doig.  Sigmar Polke, perhaps the most Picabian of the group, appears with several mid-1960s masterpieces, works that are funny, skilful and acid, laying bare the bones of 20th century man (and woman).

Kurt Kauper, Cary Grant #2, 2001-2002 Courtesy ACME Los Angeles

 A funny choice for the brochure of this exhibit is Kurt Kauper’s nude Cary Grant (Cary Grant #2, 2001-2002), showing a handsome sunny Grant in lotus position.  Another Grant nude painting gives us the Hollywood icon relaxed and naked next to his fireplace, his tan lines gleaming as the fire blazes.  Kauper writes in the accompanying catalog: “I started these paintings because I love Cary Grant… … and second because I wanted to see if I could make the heroic male nude convincing in the twentty-first century”  After Kurt riffs seriously about heroism and eroticism, he also adds that he wants the paintings to be funny.

In the excellent catalog, “Dear Painter, paint me…”, a 200-page color book chock full of essays on the state of contemporary painting, as well as interviews and texts about each artist in the exhibition, offers a full frontal view of how painting survived its own demise.

Of particular note are contemporary artists Neo Rauch, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton and Kurt Kauper.  Each has taken the high road in painting, building on popular culture, art history and the belief in the inevitability of paint on canvas over and against the onslaught of “new technology” art works (read: installations) that currently dominate the international scene.

Neo Rauch, Grat, 2000  (Courtesy Gallery EIGEN+ART Leipzig/Berlin  Photo: UWE Walter © VBK Wien 2002).

Following is an interview with Kunsthalle Wien’s Chief Curator, who with Alison M. Gingeras, curator, Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de creation industriel, Paris and Blazenka Perica, Curator, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt set this vast exhibition in motion. 

Matthew Rose:  Why this resurgence, or the appearance of one, in painting?  What key events in art since the mid-1960s have come together to produce yet another generation of painters?  Didn't Joseph Kosuth and others pronounce painting dead in 1965?

Sabine Folie: Your question demands an almost encyclopaedic answer. Let me just briefly focus on some artists in our exhibition, the reason they were chosen and in this way, try to answer part of your question.

The belief in representation after World War II indeed vanished, or as Kosuth put it: “The history of painting is the history of fabricating ‘other worlds’; be they of social orders, historical myths, religious dreams, or personal inner voyages. Long before Manet and through  to abstract expressionists, the painting has been a magic rectangle: a window to another world. Believing in painting has meant that to be able to see a painting you have had to see the paint-on-the-painting and the paint-on-the-wall as being different in quite a special way, and we have.”

Kosuth argues that painting and painterly means were obsolete, as it was no longer interesting to represent the world via painting, as every art as expression is a kind of forgery, and therefore destined to fail. Objects, as such, speak for themselves and the context they exist in. Therefore, low culture, everyday life, and the vernacular entered again into the world of high art, i.e. painting, trying to undermine its representational status.

We start with Picabia and Buffet as two figures of denial, and the same time, they celebrated art and painting as a special activity. Picabia, with his nihilist, sceptical, trashy attitude, and Buffet with his non-academic, prolific art, his “bad painting.”

Nevertheless, I think that in referring to our show, one must also differentiate between a reaction to painting from conceptual and minimalist art in America and Europe. Alex Katz, for example, was interested neither in the macho-gestural-teleological attitude of abstract expressionists nor in pop art. His figurative painting is his detached, “cool” way to subvert the formalist and transcendent belief in the modernist painting theorized by Clement Greenberg.

The same attitudes held true for painters in Europe: while conceptual and minimal artists were able to articulate their specific ideas towards Zero, Op Art, kinetic and pop art, etc., Sigmar Polke, Richter and others subverted these modernist attitudes with a decisive figurative realism. Polke worked explicitly in the tradition of Picabia by quoting and counterdrawing abstract painting in the series “Höhere Wesen befehlen,” for example, or by overlapping different layers of paint, drawing, and motifs from art history.  These were typical symbols of the trivial German after war -- everyday life similar to the syncretistic process in Picabia’s “transparences.”

Kippenberger’s celebration of the death of the author, of the comical, the joke, the strategic dilettantism and its failure influenced a whole generation of artists/painters. Kippenberger, amongst others was indispensable in allowing the reflective return to virtuosity, seriousness and at the same time demonic subversion of painting by the younger generation of artists.

Matthew Rose: Can you explain the popularity of painting today by many young artists?  Artists who have turned away from electronic art (web art), installations and video?  Is there something just simply enduring about paint on canvas that DVDs and stacks of televisions just don't provide?  Is it a market-oriented impulse or are these artists “retro?”

Sabine Folie: The popularity of painting has neither to do with a market-oriented impulse nor with a retro-attitude of the artists. Painting was, and still is, a vehicle to think about the means of art.  It is entirely conceived conceptually, and is in no way just a hedonistic, affirmative retro-academic salon activity. Painting may have been for a short time somehow denied by an overexposure of video-computer-art or photography, but in the end, its methods of representation and transformation were enriched by all those media and not diminished.

I think that neo-conceptual art of the discoursive, linguistic and rather abstract direction has reached its limit of mediation. Visual involvement, the touching (also intended as an intellectual/emotional punctum as Barthes put it) aspect, corporeality of the painterly surface conveys passion, excitement and knowledge. It transfixes our minds, our mental reservoir, our history and our sensuality because of its allusions and its immediacy, even if it thematizes the impossibility of representation.

Matthew Rose: Where does the abstract art movement stand over and against abstract painting?  Has abstraction lost its irony -- did it ever have any?

Sabine Folie: Abstract painting rarely was ironic, it had more a teleological, metaphysical, dogmatic inclination in the Greenbergian interpretation of the pure and a even romantic impetus. And of course abstract painting was politically correct, anti-ideological in the sense of a totalitarian/fascist contamination, whereas realistic painting was appropriated by fascist regimes. There were also strategies to subvert abstract art through abstract painting. Sigmar Polke made fun of abstract art through abstract painting (“Höhere Wesen befehlen…”)

Matthew Rose: In many of the works in the Dear Painter show, kitsch, neo-pop, or a hybrid brand of both married to surrealism is overwhelming present.  I'm thinking of Glenn Brown, Neo Rauch; John Currin has mastered his own brand of idiosyncratic kitsch. Others circle the wagons around this school of low comedy.

John Currin, Dogwood, Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery NY NY Photo: Fred Scruton, NY)

Sabine Folie: Contemporary painters want to make use of the numerous possibilities of the visible, independently from their contents.  As like Glenn Brown put it:

 “I looked at the history of painting and couldn’t see why expression should be aligned only with the brush mark.  Though painters toy with it, the genuine is something that artists are too in awe of.  High Modernism turned the hand of the artist into a cliché.  However, I like clichés. I like portraits and flowers and still lives and trompe l’oeil and the story of Van Gogh cutting off his ear.  These things involve sentiment, and sentiment, like Steven Spielberg movies, makes me cry.  For some strange reason along with the 80% of the population these things make me feel real; genuine brush marks generally don’t.”

Matthew Rose: Do you find that painting in its “slowness” tends to cover subjects in more detail than contemporary conceptual work?  In this I mean, a painter can flesh out 20 views of the same idea, and yet still manage to create visual and intellectual excitement.  One could not say the same of contemporary installations using video.  I suppose my question is: Why do viewers NOT get bored by paintings focused on the same subject?  Is it the “quality of the brushstroke” that keeps viewers connected?

Sabine Folie: I think a videoartist could also produce different interpretations of the same idea/view without becoming redundant as a painter can in making replicas of the same subject. In realistic painting there are a wide range of possible subjects as well as layers of different influences melting together and generating something new. There is also this allusive play of decisions regarding things to say, other to deny, voids, prefigurations, etc. As I said before the corporeal involvement through the materiality of the paint, the canvas , etc., is an enormous, intriguing and touching fact.

Matthew Rose: If Picabia, the flashpoint for the Dear Painter exhibition, were alive today, what do you think he might be working on?

Sabine Folie: Picabia today would probably oscillate between neo-pop and post-conceptual.

Quotes from the catalog:

“I view the process of painting as an extraordinarily natural form of discovering the world, almost as natural as breathing….  The subliminal character of painting was once defined by Otto Dix when he said something to the effect that he was capable of committing a murder out of sexual passion but not capable of painting it.”  -- Neo Rauch

“To this day artists who show skill, craft or pride in their work hold themselves up to ridicule, or worse still, mediocrity; it’s cool not to care. I have this vision of some collector holding up some piece of junk and announcing how many hundred thousand dollars he paid for it, all to rapturous applause…. I adore the act of painting, it’s so extraordinarily subtle, it is something you can never be too skilled at…. To paint the expression of a face and to change that expression, from happy to sad by one minuscule change in the shadow of an eye, makes one never want to do anything else.” -- Glenn Brown

“I keep wondering why painting is devalued so much.  Part of the reason is that most of contemporary painting is terrible because the culture around -- apprenticeship, visual connoisseurship -- is dead.”  -- John Currin

“I just paint what I see around me.  So I started painting my friends, and looking for a gesture that was of my time.  My time was people smoking and drinking, and I painted that…. When I started painting portraits in the 1950s, people called them cold, inhuman.  Thirty years later, they started saying they were tender.”  -- Alex Katz

“It’s an almost nineteenth century idea that what’s on the inside appears on the outside.  Balzac was into the curve of your nose or mouth expressing some kind of inner quality, that it could be read on your face.” -- Elizabeth Peyton

“I think figure painting’s ‘traditional concerns’ were dislodged well over 100 years ago, if not by Manet or Cézanne then certainly by all those that followed on their heels.  It’s been over 50 years since Pollock’s heyday.  I think a lot of people honestly believe that the drip paintings were the period at the end of a sentence.” -- Brian Calvin

Why do you paint?  “Because I get bored, and in my opinion I bore other people.  When I was young, I copied my father’s paintings.  Then I sold the originals and substituted the copies.  Since no one saw any difference, I had discovered my calling.”  -- Francis Picabia

For more information on “Dear Painter,” go to: www.kunsthallwien.at
Museumsplatz 1
A-1070 Vienna
phone +43-1-52189-1270
fax +43-1-52189-99-1270
office@kunsthallewien.at

Matthew Rose is a writer and artist based in Paris.
E: mistahrose@yahoo.com

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