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拍品专文
George Condo’s The Executives and their Wives presents an impressive array of art historical influences which converge into a singularly compelling image. The large-scale canvas showcases a seemingly discordant collision between abstraction and figuration, wherein classically-derived female nudes contrast with the sartorial exuberance of their husbands, all painted in Condo’s iconic visual language. The many internal paradoxes within this picture epitomize the best of the artist’s oeuvre, which attains a sort of ‘psychological’ cubism, rendering a number of parallel psychological states within his self-described oppositional beings.
From the beginning of Condo’s mature practice in the 1980s, the artist has sought out different symbols, techniques, and motifs practiced by European Old Masters, reconfiguring these various artistic languages in a thoroughly contemporary mode. Reversing the iconic motto of the Viennese Secessionists, ‘to every age its art, to every art its freedom (Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit)’, Condo references art from every age, his work abridging centuries to discover a freedom which he felt was lacking in the historically-inattentive artistic atmosphere from which he emerged.
The Executives and their Wives belongs to a long history of multifigure voyeuristic paintings which exhibit female nudes around a group of fully-clad men. This tradition originates with Titian’s early masterpiece Pastoral Concert, now at the Musée du Louvre. In this work, two arcadian youths engrossed in lyrical production sprawl against a grassy knoll, flanked by two voluptuous female nudes. Édouard Manet rekindles this iconography in another famous masterpiece, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), with the nude woman now directly confronting the viewer with a searching stare. Condo updates his nude from his luscious antecedents, depicting the women in a more modern mode—reminiscent of the elongated eroticism in Amedeo Modigliani’s nudes, while all three figures’ compositional positioning and direct stare bear tribute to Pablo Picasso’s famed female figures. Condo applies the same tonality attained by layers of warm hues built up with whites and oranges witnessed in Picasso’s work, yet the artist modifies the emphasis from Picasso’s Cubist focus on presenting all angles of the women’s bodies at once while abstracting their faces, lingering instead on capturing their direct, emotive faces. In another unexpected deviation, Condo draws upon a further strand of art history in his figure furthest to the right, whose disproportioned body consisting of an unnaturally slim torso bookended by enlarged erogenous zones recalls the anatomical exaggerations present in the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf.
Condo contrasts the alluring yet unsettling figurative beauty imbued in his female figures with highly abstracted men, whose open toothy mouths, bulging eyes, and crazed disposition remind of an altogether different art historical heritage, coming instead from a concoction of Willem de Kooning’s Women paintings, Picasso’s abstracted portraits, and Francis Bacon’s distorted profiles. Here, Condo presents contradictory signals, these titular executives seeming to simultaneously scream and smile, their expressiveness contrasting with that of their demure wives. Condo draws further inspiration from Bacon in his exploitation of background—the figures reside amid an ambiguous backdrop color-blocked by deep oranges, turquoises, and blues dissected with white linear elements, referencing Bacon’s fluorescent orange backgrounds segmented spatially through black lines. However, Condo intervenes with this antecedent in the lower left corner, where the darkened background becomes an obscurant foreground covering the figures.
Underlying the totality of this composition is Condo’s facility as a painter, orchestrating a choreography of brushstrokes varied in touch and texture against a masterful palette embracing the exciting interplay of unexpected color relationships. The artist’s technical virtuosity lures the viewer away from seeing what is within the picture plane to observing the fact of pigment on canvas, recalling Clement Greenberg’s assessment that “one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture” while “one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first” (C. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collective Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4, University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 88). Typical of Condo’s practice, the artist vacillates between tradition and modernity, employing ancient motifs for modern purposes.
George Condo is one of today’s most celebrated figurative painters. Utilizing mimesis and meaning to pursue subjects in the tradition of William Hogarth, he depicts the transcendent aspirations of high culture whilst simultaneously insinuating a landscape of decaying beliefs and failing mythologies, depicting what curator Ralph Rugoff describes as “debased archetypes in which we no longer believe” (R. Rugoff, “The Mental States of America,” in George Condo: Mental States, Hayward Publishing, 2011, pg. 19). In the present work, Condo exposes the corporatized sexism still lingering into the twenty-first century, where the titular “executives” are all rendered male, appearing as lecherous voyeurs which bring to mind depictions of the biblical Susanna and the Elders. Here, Condo weaponizes art historical references against these debased archetypes, reconstructing art history as an interpretive lens through which to engage with the present.
From the beginning of Condo’s mature practice in the 1980s, the artist has sought out different symbols, techniques, and motifs practiced by European Old Masters, reconfiguring these various artistic languages in a thoroughly contemporary mode. Reversing the iconic motto of the Viennese Secessionists, ‘to every age its art, to every art its freedom (Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit)’, Condo references art from every age, his work abridging centuries to discover a freedom which he felt was lacking in the historically-inattentive artistic atmosphere from which he emerged.
The Executives and their Wives belongs to a long history of multifigure voyeuristic paintings which exhibit female nudes around a group of fully-clad men. This tradition originates with Titian’s early masterpiece Pastoral Concert, now at the Musée du Louvre. In this work, two arcadian youths engrossed in lyrical production sprawl against a grassy knoll, flanked by two voluptuous female nudes. Édouard Manet rekindles this iconography in another famous masterpiece, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), with the nude woman now directly confronting the viewer with a searching stare. Condo updates his nude from his luscious antecedents, depicting the women in a more modern mode—reminiscent of the elongated eroticism in Amedeo Modigliani’s nudes, while all three figures’ compositional positioning and direct stare bear tribute to Pablo Picasso’s famed female figures. Condo applies the same tonality attained by layers of warm hues built up with whites and oranges witnessed in Picasso’s work, yet the artist modifies the emphasis from Picasso’s Cubist focus on presenting all angles of the women’s bodies at once while abstracting their faces, lingering instead on capturing their direct, emotive faces. In another unexpected deviation, Condo draws upon a further strand of art history in his figure furthest to the right, whose disproportioned body consisting of an unnaturally slim torso bookended by enlarged erogenous zones recalls the anatomical exaggerations present in the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf.
Condo contrasts the alluring yet unsettling figurative beauty imbued in his female figures with highly abstracted men, whose open toothy mouths, bulging eyes, and crazed disposition remind of an altogether different art historical heritage, coming instead from a concoction of Willem de Kooning’s Women paintings, Picasso’s abstracted portraits, and Francis Bacon’s distorted profiles. Here, Condo presents contradictory signals, these titular executives seeming to simultaneously scream and smile, their expressiveness contrasting with that of their demure wives. Condo draws further inspiration from Bacon in his exploitation of background—the figures reside amid an ambiguous backdrop color-blocked by deep oranges, turquoises, and blues dissected with white linear elements, referencing Bacon’s fluorescent orange backgrounds segmented spatially through black lines. However, Condo intervenes with this antecedent in the lower left corner, where the darkened background becomes an obscurant foreground covering the figures.
Underlying the totality of this composition is Condo’s facility as a painter, orchestrating a choreography of brushstrokes varied in touch and texture against a masterful palette embracing the exciting interplay of unexpected color relationships. The artist’s technical virtuosity lures the viewer away from seeing what is within the picture plane to observing the fact of pigment on canvas, recalling Clement Greenberg’s assessment that “one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture” while “one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first” (C. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collective Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4, University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 88). Typical of Condo’s practice, the artist vacillates between tradition and modernity, employing ancient motifs for modern purposes.
George Condo is one of today’s most celebrated figurative painters. Utilizing mimesis and meaning to pursue subjects in the tradition of William Hogarth, he depicts the transcendent aspirations of high culture whilst simultaneously insinuating a landscape of decaying beliefs and failing mythologies, depicting what curator Ralph Rugoff describes as “debased archetypes in which we no longer believe” (R. Rugoff, “The Mental States of America,” in George Condo: Mental States, Hayward Publishing, 2011, pg. 19). In the present work, Condo exposes the corporatized sexism still lingering into the twenty-first century, where the titular “executives” are all rendered male, appearing as lecherous voyeurs which bring to mind depictions of the biblical Susanna and the Elders. Here, Condo weaponizes art historical references against these debased archetypes, reconstructing art history as an interpretive lens through which to engage with the present.