The Figure In 1950s America the choice was clear: a painter could paint either abstract pictures or, saving that, abstract pictures. The dominant lingo of abstract expressionism, America's first major art movement, counted among its chief concerns issues of "formal purity," "flatness" and the "all-over unified field," not line, contour, shape or, ever, narrative. The figure, simply put, was cut out of art. Dissolved into an ether of flung, spattered paint, the figure supposedly left the stage, forcing in time the conditions for its inevitable return.
Inspired in part by the need to provide a bookend to "After the Fall," an earlier exhibition that surveyed the development of abstract painting from 1970 to the present, and by a real, honest-to-goodness resurgence of figuration in contemporary painting, the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art in Staten Island has put together "The Figure: Another Side of Modernism," a huge, rambling, fascinating view of the uses, abuses and revelations associated with the painted figure in the last half century.
LISA YUSKAVAGE, NOW YOU CAN DANCE, 1998 Spanning the period marked by Willem de Kooning's reintroduction of a gnarly female into abstract painting in the 1950s to the free-for-all, choose-any-medium-you-like attitude that dominated the dynamic pluralism of the late 90s, "The Figure" traces out a story that reframes the usual history, positing figuration, as the show's title suggests, as another, alternative side of modernism. Ably curated by critic and curator Lily Wei, the exhibition eschews forecasting of any sort for something simpler, more effective: an expository, show-me layout. Organized less in a spirit of revisionism than in an effort to document figurative painting's passage from yesterday's news to today's hot commodity, paintings by some 125 artists line two rickety floors of galleries at the Newhouse, making for an exhausting but rewarding visual experience.
Due to the limited resources of an arts institution like the Newhouse Center, there are a slew of works that might have been naturals for this exhibition that could simply not be included. The work of Jasper Johns, even a reproduction of the flags or targets, screams out for incorporation, so fundamental are his object-images to reconstructing a first, tentative bridge between antipodean figuration and abstraction in the late 1950s. Lucian Freud, never a bridger, but quite possibly the best painter of the human figure of the last three decades, also would have fit into "The Figure" perfectly, especially had he been placed near his equally accomplished nemesis, Philip Pearlstein. It is easy to guess what prevented the inclusion of these and other important artists: namely, the cost in cash and institutional power needed to leverage their canonical, seven-figure work.
Given the exhibition's natural strictures, it is a pleasure to observe the resourcefulness of both the institution and curator at work. "The Figure" sometimes makes do with the work of minor painters but nearly as often dusts off rarely seen gems from lesser-known collections. In this category is a small but powerful de Kooning drawing from the late 40s. Toothy, cross-eyed and jug-titted, the Dutchman's pinup contains a kernel of its opposite within its severely abstract and scissored breast: an homage and reluctant return to the figure. Several other wonderful works, among them paintings by Graham Nickson, Leon Golub, Joan Semmel, Alex Katz and Pearlstein, animate entire rooms like electrical generators. Another, less talked about artist, Mel Ramos, demonstrates with his snappy, B-movie-inspired canvas Devil Doll, a portrait of a woman in stiletto heels, a devil suit, tail and horns, just why he has become a darling for so many young figurative painters.
The 80s are unfailingly represented by some of the standard rear-guardists (namely David Salle and Julian Schnabel) but also by the more interesting work of Robert Colescott, Eric Fischl and Susan Rothenberg. A few rooms later, the exhibition's slant toward more recent figurative painting indicates a dramatic historical shift from past to present. Freighted with large-scale pictures from today's bright young things Cecily Brown, John Currin, Inka Essenhigh, Nicole Eisenman, Elizabeth Peyton, Christian Schumann and Lisa Yuskavage and the work of gifted, lesser-known contemporaries like Amanda Church, Sean Mellyn, Steve Mumford, Paul Henry Ramirez, Jacques Roch, Yishai Judisman and Brenda Zlamany, "The Figure" makes a deliberate choice to highlight recent figurative painting, a period marked by what critic Alexi Worth, writing in the exhibition catalog, characterizes as "an art of overt content."
Directly opposed to the rationalist, evasive bombast of 50s and 60s abstraction, purposely upsetting the corseted codes of 70s and 80s multiculturalism, much of the best new figurative painting adopts conceptual content in order to underpin a newfound, highly skillful painterliness. Exploring the limits of their talent through unassailably attractive, seductively colored depictions of often disturbing imagery, artists like Yuskavage, Essenhigh, Schumann and Currin explore general themes of selfhood, sexuality, identity and violence, while simultaneously contravening the politically correct expectations of a righteous yet morally insecure public.
Expertly tipping the applecart of right-thinking feminine identity, Yuskavage's Now You Can Dance features a naked, super-sexualized, droopy-breasted female Smurf with lobster pincers for feet doing the splits in a bright-hued space whose light is right out of a Pontorno. The full scope of the image's cruelty emerges when one reads that the painting was commissioned to be expressly inspired by the American Ballet Theater. James Sheehan, whose work I had not seen before this exhibition, paints an outdoor pool and what appear to be hundreds of bathers of various shapes, sizes and colors within an astoundingly tiny 2-by-2-inch canvas. Pasted directly to the wall, Bored activates visions of chaos and disorder both micro- and macroscopically, shuttling an essentially friendly image through tense amazement into a terrain of sheer unease.
Not, certainly, pointing a way forward in the old, progressive sense yet reopening areas of painterly delectation, the new figuration is above all a thinking, pragmatic practice, a bracing hybrid of skill and concept aimed at obtaining the artist's ultimate fantasy: having one's cake and eating it too. At once formally accomplished and iconographically complex, the new figuration looks forward and back, hedging its bets but taking, to date, repeated risks designed to both titillate and offend. This art, like no other, is very much the art of today. Its ultimate success and that of all regenerated figuration depends on two things: how skillfully and incisively it continues to query present orthodoxies and how quickly it can ken to even more fresh visual life outside the stubbornly reductive precinct of the art world.
"The Figure: Another Side of Modernism," through Jan. 14, 2001 at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, 1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island, 718-448-2500, x277.