When Alison Kubler asked me to write on American painter John Currin for this, Vault’s special ‘sex issue’, I jumped at the opportunity, but then I started to fret. Why did she imagine I was the man for the job? Was I a natural fit somehow? Was I being typecast? Who else was being covered in the issue, and who was writing about them? And why do a sex issue now, in this woke moment? Isn’t that asking for trouble?

With his paintings of women, Currin has been asking for trouble since day one. He made his name in the 1990s with his bawdy views of breasty girls, based on the sexist cartoons so popular in our dads’ day, and for his studies of sullen post-menopausal women, suspended, as he explained, ‘between the object of desire and the object of loathing’. Both screamed ‘wrong’. Currin was called out for shameless chauvinism and attention-seeking bad taste. Village Voice critic Kim Levin called for a boycott, though later changed her tune. Of course, Currin’s works were not blind to political correctness and decorum, but knowing affronts to them—parasitic upon them.

Currin is a social satirist—part of a long tradition in art and beyond. His work plays with social types (them and us) and social expectations (theirs and ours)—it is as much about class as sex. It combines high and low, the ideal and the real, the conservative and the transgressive, the prim and the pornographic. It ranges from affected ‘bad painting’ (in the beginning) to virtuoso work (subsequently). Currin engages popular sources: Frank Frazetta fantasy art, Playboy and Mad, retro girlie comics and Danish porn, Norman Rockwell cover art and 1970s alpha-male magazine ads. And he mashes them with references to elite (male) art history: the mannerist distortions of Parmigianino, the rococo frolics of Fragonard and Boucher, the neo-classicism of Ingres, the gnarly realisms of Courbet and Manet, the anti-modernism of Balthus, and the vulgarity of vache-period Magritte and pinup-period Picabia. It’s all a game. Currin shuffles and deals his cards again and again in endlessly surprising ways, until we don’t know which way is up.

Critics wrestle with Currin’s pastiches. Do they exemplify or ridicule the male gaze? Should they be lauded or condemned? Currin is not a stationary target. As his works combine idealisation and caricature, sentiment and schadenfreude, we can never be certain which way or how far to go with our reading. Whatever criticisms his works call forth, enough wiggle room is factored in to permit a counter case. In his wildly ranging oeuvre, he even had a textbook feminist moment. In his 1997 series The Jackass, he détourned ads from old Playboy magazines, so their largely female supporting cast were no longer smiling at the antics of the alpha-male protagonists, but scowling grotesquely, spoiling the affect.

Currin may nod to the old-master tradition, but our relation to the old masters has changed. In the TV series Ways of Seeing (1972), made when Currin was a boy, John Berger introduced his mainstream audience to a feminist critique of male-gaze, old-master paintings of the female nude. He famously observed, ‘… the mirror became a symbol of the vanity of women. Yet the male hypocrisy of this is blatant. You paint a naked woman because you enjoy looking at her. You put a mirror in her hand and you call the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you have depicted for your own pleasure.’ But Berger was talking of a time—and still in a time—when male viewers were on firm footing, lurking in the shadows outside the frame, their bad faith unchecked, enjoying their boudoir paintings in peace. Now, by comparison, male viewers walk on eggshells. We don’t look at Currin’s paintings of women and judge women. Instead his paintings hold up a mirror to us, judge us, chewing away at our complicity. We can feel vulnerable standing before them in galleries, and think twice about blurting out our gut responses to them, lest we expose ourselves as part of the problem.

Currin’s critics have to watch what they say. If they attack Bea Arthur Naked (1991), saying—as some did—that it’s a misogynist joke because no-one could possibly find the topless golden girl sexy, they risk coming across as dicks themselves. Of course, the truth is that someone somewhere will find Bea Arthur Naked sexy. While feminism targets normative representations that express what’s supposedly generally desirable, Currin’s works operate more like niche pornography, made for ‘connoisseurs’ hankering for specific things, for reasons they can or can’t explain—gaunt faces, odd noses, big bellies, misshapen legs, wrinkles, walking sticks, regal interiors, fur. They make me realise that those fetishists may be standing next to me in the gallery, enjoying the works in a different way. 

That said, now and then a Currin painting speaks to me directly and I wonder why. When I saw his 2010 New York Gagosian show, I was entranced by Big Hands (2010). Its subject was a buxom blonde with big eyes and a tiny head. But I think my interest had more to do with the way Currin’s cruel title reduced her to her disproportionately large hands as if they were a stigma, granting her a pathos she wouldn’t have had otherwise. It was a honey trap. Having lovingly painted her for me, Currin then pretended to pick on his creation with his title, so I might rush to her defence (in my head). Later, I remembered the Victorians, and their penchant for paintings of pathetic, damaged children. They loved them, because their tearful responses confirmed that they had heartstrings to pluck. Sympathy is laced with self regard.

Sometimes people find themselves amused and attracted by things they shouldn’t be. They laugh and love instinctively, before they can check themselves. Humour and desire are certainly traps for critics who seek to remain above the fray, making their sober judgements on behalf of the World Spirit, not based on unfortunate childhood experiences or whether they were breast fed. I think that’s why some critics can be merciless with Currin; not wanting to betray an iota of engagement, lest they become tainted. Not that it matters to him. Criticism is key to his button-pushing project, making his most vitriolic critics his most valued collaborators. His project is unimaginable without them.

Norman Bryson provided a negative but nuanced reading of Currin’s work in his essay ‘Maudit: John Currin and Morphology’, written for the artist’s 2006 Gagosian monograph. Bryson calls out Currin for his misogyny, homophobia, and general odiousness, while trying to account for—even appreciate—how he works his magic. Bryson works hard to keep Currin out of his head. ‘My main difficulty in viewing the image lay in its ability to recruit me into its own offensive perspective’, he wrote, of Currin’s 1997 painting Cripple. However, Jennifer Higgie, reviewing the book in Frieze, felt the need to offer some balance: ‘What Bryson doesn’t address … is how surprisingly tender a painter Currin can be. He paints his wife and child as though he has just kissed them, flowers as if they’ll always bloom and golden curls as if they’re more valuable than diamonds.’ And, if Currin were simply loathsome, would Jennifer Lawrence let him paint her portrait for the cover of Vogue, with her neck like a giraffe’s and in a silly fur hat? 

Some critics condemn Currin, while giving his Yale-art-school friend Lisa Yuskavage—who ploughs the same field—a free pass. Ian Alden Russell, for instance, casts Currin as the problem (‘a brazen manifestation of late-twentieth-century chauvinistic objectification of the female body in American culture’) and Yuskavage as the solution (‘where Currin is complicit in the aesthetic objectification of women, Yuskavage attempts to disrupt this process’). As a woman, they presume, Yuskavage must see the argument from the other side, but it’s a bit of a line call. I wonder if she tires of being co-opted as a rod to beat Currin.

Currin doesn’t do denial, probably because the criticism works for him. He basks in the attention. When questioned, he tends to admit to problematic attitudes, WASPy ways, and privilege. He makes provocative comments, like, ‘When I hold a brush, it’s a weird object … As if part of the female sex has been taken and put on the end of this thing that is my male sex to connect with a yielding surface.’ Hmmm.

Currin’s latest show Memorial—which opened at Gagosian in New York, late 2021—was at once his most obscene and his least sentimental, least sexy. And it was unusual in presenting a series, when he generally offers a miscellany. The seven paintings pull in opposing directions. On the one hand, Currin amps up the vulgarity, representing distorted, mostly nude females with often absurdly inflated breasts in porno poses, splayed for inspection. On the other hand, he presents them as lifeless, cold, colourless marble statues in illusionistic niches, their legs joining their high heels, all apiece. The look is a flagrant steal from those Jan van Eyck grisaille paintings that ape the appearance of sculpture, with Currin swapping out Van Eyck’s devotional figures with slutty ones. Some of Currin’s figures are more cartoony, others more realistic, with attitudes ranging from gymnastic to weary, from sex doll to crone.

The Memorial works have been promoted as ‘monuments to lust’, but Currin’s female figures aren’t Renoir ripe, more Cranach creepy. Does he cue the male gaze only in order to pull the rug, with morbid morgue associations canceling out musky brothel ones? Or is he simply bolstering that classic misogynist memento-mori theme, the transience of (female) beauty—woman understood from a male viewpoint as sex and death, beauty always ready to turn? Does he get away with his hedge this time? I’m not sure. I’m waiting for the jury.
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[IMAGE: John Currin Big Hands 2010]