The Frist's Paint Made Flesh exalts the art of the figure
by David Maddox
The art world is full of tedious death announcements that usher out one set of artists, styles or media to give the next thing room to seem fresh. It also leaves space for curators to come back, find neglected connections, and make the case for a different narrative. Mark Scala has done that with contemporary figurative painting at the Frist Center, creating a show that will travel to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. after it closes here.
Scala assembled paintings from some of the major artists of recent years, paintings that taken alone are a pure pleasure to encounter. Beyond that, the selection makes a case for what painting can be, and what it can say about the human condition.
During the years after World War II, representational painting in theory gave way to abstraction as the vital core of modern art. It was followed in quick succession by pop art and minimalism that seemed to banish the expressive gestures of abstract painters like Jackson Pollock; after that, painting itself was assumed to give way to mixed media, video, performance or pure concept. Of course, artists all along made paintings of the human figure, and this show makes the case for that practice.
The show opens with a canvas by Pablo Picasso, an important precursor to abstract painting who himself never abandoned figures. But the real father of this exhibit is Willem de Kooning, who developed the keys of his style in the early '50s. Represented here by a painting from 1966, de Kooning was one of the Abstract Expressionists, using their seemingly improvisatory gestures to rough out aggressive images of female figures. From de Kooning and others active in the early '50s, Scala traces the development of figurative painting through the decades and through several national and regional groups, focusing on (but not limited to) German, British and American painters.
While it is easy to see this exhibit as a counter-argument to abstraction, the painters here incorporate its tenets. De Kooning's brushwork and dramatic lines fit perfectly well with his friends who painted abstractly. Richard Diebenkorn switched between abstraction and figuration using much of the same geometry and color palette—it was hardly a step at all for him to take out the figures and give full play to the structural geometries found in his figurative work. The background of Georg Baselitz' "Nude Elke 2" contains slashes of color that could come from one of Franz Kline's color abstractions, but in Baselitz' case a figure emerges out of the abstract slashes. In one of the most recent paintings, Albert Oehlen's "The Goal-Kick" swims with washes of orange, yellow and green that seem impossible without Helen Frankenthaler's works built from pools of thin paint.
Many of the painters in this exhibit share de Kooning's dramatic brushwork—they show a very "painterly" quality, meaning the hand of the artist is visible in the handling of paint. Paint cakes up in Joan Brown's portrait of a girl; it gets scraped off the surface in Arnaldo Roche-Rabell's "We Have To Eat," and angles across Frank Auerbach's "Portrait of David Landau." By contrast, it would be hard to imagine a painter like Ed Paschke here. A key figure in Chicago, Pashcke was interested in bodies covered with tattoos and mediated electronicially, so you would think his work would fit in. But he deployed a flat painting style, like spray paint, that applied pigment without affect. The painters in this show express themselves richly and directly through brushwork that announces the presence of the human hand.
Painterliness in service to the human form leads to a specific realm of aesthetic experience summarized in the exhibit's title, Paint Made Flesh. Paint as a medium finds a ready metaphor in flesh—it makes up the corporeal substance of art. Flesh and paint share characteristics of wetness and messiness. If the connection were not tight enough, many of the works here include representations of blood—splatters in the corners of Wangechi Mutu's "Squiggly Wiggly Demon Hair," the vivid red lines through which Tony Bevan outlines a face, or the little drops of red under Jenny Saville's left eye in the monumental picture of herself and her sister.
Through the correspondence between paint and flesh, paintings uniquely express qualities of human existence—solid but permeable, heavy but fragile. The physical human characteristics that come out in painting echo our psychic and spiritual life, nowhere more strongly than in some of the British painters. Lucien Freud sculpts bodies out of paint in such a way that their mass and shape develop a melancholy voice like Rembrandt. Francis Bacon formed the ultimate images of cataclysm for the 20th century out of tricky systems of mutated shapes. Saville's giant dual portrait makes her and her sister seem like children, naked, plump and vulnerable, even at this size. Under such magnification, blemishes and pocks emerge from the translucent skin, showing latent but inevitable decay.
Human vulnerability as brought out by painted skin links this show to one of Mark Scala's earlier curatorial efforts, The Fragile Species, a show of local artists that found a common thread in their concern for human frailty. With the freedom to draw widely from the work of leading artists, in this show Scala goes further to present the relationship between flesh and paint as one of art's most important means for examining human existence.
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