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拍品专文
A pearlescent skull gapes next to a smoking candle in George Condo’s Vanité Composition (1991). The objects rest upon a stony surface before a backdrop rich in Old Masterly darkness: the setting divides into richly worked sections of grey, white, brownish black and navy blue, recalling a Colour Field abstraction. To the left, Condo has nested a replica of the composition in miniature within the picture plane. As Simon Baker writes, ‘Vanité Composition is an almost impossible mise en abyme’ (George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, London, 2015, p. 55). The effect is achieved not within a single canvas but by combining four separate panels: a hallmark of Condo’s ‘combination paintings’, which he worked on between 1989 and 1992. Self-referentiality is, as such, built into both the work’s construction and its potentially infinite regression.
As its title suggests, Vanité Composition plays with the genre of the vanitas, which first emerged in the sixteenth century. These allegorical still lifes contain a variety of objects representing death and earthly pleasure as they remind the viewer of the brevity of existence. Skulls were an powerful way of conveying these messages. While the vanitas was especially popular during the Dutch Golden Age, artists including Gustav Klimt, Georges Braque, James Ensor, and Gerhard Richter continued to explore its themes and motifs across the centuries. This long and layered past would have appealed to Condo, for whom art’s history remains ever present and ripe for plundering. He was particularly engaged with Old Masterly tropes during the 1980s and early 1990s. The cartoonishly yawning cranium seen in Vanité Composition reappears in works such as Contaminated Skull (1992, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) and Still-life with Skull and Snowman (1992).
Condo painted Vanité Composition while living in Paris, having moved there in 1985. He would remain in the French capital for ten years, living on the Rue de Condé, just to the north of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Condo had long admired French literature and art and had papered the walls of his teenage bedroom with posters of works by Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso. Both titans of Modernism used skulls in their still life paintings, and the present work seems as much a nod to Condo’s French heroes as it does to the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Yet Vanité Composition is very much Condo’s own creation, an amalgamation of his many intellectual and formal interests. ‘I don’t want to just paint someone else’s painting’, he has said. ‘The idea is to take all the information from every painting I like in history and put it back in an original way’ (quoted in ibid., p. 14).
As its title suggests, Vanité Composition plays with the genre of the vanitas, which first emerged in the sixteenth century. These allegorical still lifes contain a variety of objects representing death and earthly pleasure as they remind the viewer of the brevity of existence. Skulls were an powerful way of conveying these messages. While the vanitas was especially popular during the Dutch Golden Age, artists including Gustav Klimt, Georges Braque, James Ensor, and Gerhard Richter continued to explore its themes and motifs across the centuries. This long and layered past would have appealed to Condo, for whom art’s history remains ever present and ripe for plundering. He was particularly engaged with Old Masterly tropes during the 1980s and early 1990s. The cartoonishly yawning cranium seen in Vanité Composition reappears in works such as Contaminated Skull (1992, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) and Still-life with Skull and Snowman (1992).
Condo painted Vanité Composition while living in Paris, having moved there in 1985. He would remain in the French capital for ten years, living on the Rue de Condé, just to the north of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Condo had long admired French literature and art and had papered the walls of his teenage bedroom with posters of works by Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso. Both titans of Modernism used skulls in their still life paintings, and the present work seems as much a nod to Condo’s French heroes as it does to the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Yet Vanité Composition is very much Condo’s own creation, an amalgamation of his many intellectual and formal interests. ‘I don’t want to just paint someone else’s painting’, he has said. ‘The idea is to take all the information from every painting I like in history and put it back in an original way’ (quoted in ibid., p. 14).