by Jon Lackman | 29 March 2006 | Contemporary, News
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports from a talk given last night at the New School: “Regarding his apparent obsession with enormous breasts, Currin contended that it’s not simply about sex. ‘It’s a cartoony version of a classical idea of roundness and form. It’s about roundness having a place in contemporary art.’ ‘A lot of my work is about loving other art, loving European art in particular and feeling insecure about it, feeling like I’m not the equal of those people,’ he said. Discussing his buxom Big Lady, built up with a palette knife, Currin invoked Cézanne: ‘I wanted to paint her body like the Mont Sainte-Victoire.’ Ideas for paintings have also emerged from personal experience. As he introduced The Wizard—which features a man in black gloves clutching a woman’s huge breasts—Currin said, ‘I hate saying this but it was at this time that I met my wife. I was off-balance.’ He has also appropriated dreams, TV shows, and women’s magazines (especially Cosmo). He explained that Courbet and a scene from ‘Magnum P.I.’ provided the impetus for the ‘sexy hobos’ series of 1999.
Sponsored by the Public Art Fund, Currin’s lecture also outlined his stylistic evolution from the Yale School of Art to his most recent work. ‘I wanted to be an heroic de Kooning/Pollock type artist,’ he said regarding his early abstract pictures—’tortured paintings made as a mock-depressed person.’ The jump to figural art began with images of ‘ideal girls’ drawn from his high school yearbook, and moved toward ‘late middle-aged, menopausal women’ that Currin compared to the harlequins of Picasso’s Blue Period. Critical to his development, he said, was his topless portrait of ‘Golden Girls’ actress Bea Arthur: ‘It looked so cool to have her naked that I indefinitely put off putting an outfit on her.’”
