John Currin: Part of the Problem
Best known for painting women, American artist John Currin has built a career on treading the line between low and high, satire and chauvinism – and always turning the mirror back on the viewer.
Image credit: John Currin, Sunflower, 2021 oil on canvas 172.7 x 91.4 cm. Photo: Robert McKeever Courtesy Gagosian, New York © John Currin
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, John 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 of his work, 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 ...Subscribe to read this article in full
