THE TELEGRAPH
31 DECEMBER 2001
JOHN CURRIN - A HEAD FOR FIGURES
Ever since the early 1990s, John Currin has been creating controversy with his busty cartoon blondes and kitsch classical references. Now he has become one of New York's hottest painters.
New York's meat-packing district has become the art centre of the western world. Since I was last here almost every shopfront has been transformed into a cool white gallery space. Or so it seems as I cross the street to the corrugated-iron-clad building where John Currin's studio, and that of his wife, the avant-garde sculptor Rachel Feinstein, are located.
All the locals look vaguely famous, and then I notice a particularly shiny black SUV whooshing towards the East Side. The driver, a red-haired woman with ivory skin, seems familiar. Ah yes, it's Julianne Moore, just one of many famous names who make up this hipper-than-hip neighbourhood.
Although Currin himself could not exactly be described as famous, if his reputation within the contemporary art scene is anything to go by, he soon will be. His classical yet kitschy, sincere yet ironic brand of figurative painting has seen him alternately labelled a modern-day Balthus, a Norman Rockwell for the art insider, a contemporary Goya even. He is, as Hugh Davies, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, recently said, 'the best painter of his generation'.
Currin's eagerly awaited exhibition, which opens next month at London's Serpentine Gallery, will feature 40 or so of his works, dating from the early 1990s, when he first emerged on the New York art scene, to the present day.
Currin fans will already be familiar with some of his characters; the watermelon-breasted blonde bombshells measuring themselves up for bras, hunched over walking canes or being looked at longingly by one of his 'human billy goats' (as the critic Waldemar Januszczak once aptly described his male characters, which look eerily as if he has simply applied beards to women's faces).
Then there are the less grotesque, but no less unsettling nudes, with their elongated Cranach-like limbs, protruding bellies and Chiclet-perfect teeth. And, of course, the portraits of his beloved wife and muse Rachel, whose Titian hair and slightly eagle-ish features have dominated his canvas ever since he first met her nine years ago.
John Currin and the glamorous, party-loving Feinstein (who has a tattoo under one arm of a vagina with ants crawling out of it) are the Golden Couple of New York. As a fashion writer friend of theirs explains to me: 'Imagine Jay Jopling and Sam Taylor-Wood and then multiply that by 10, that's the kind of effect they have when they walk into a party.'
Of course, not everyone is a fan of John Currin. Even before his first 'proper' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997 (before which figurative painting was almost too unfashionable to show), Currin was stirring up controversy - infuriating Left-wing intelligentsia types with his deliberate art-history referencing, the overt perviness of his subject matter and his undeniably white heterosexual male take on the world.
Take Kim Levin, the Village Voice critic who, in 1992, upon seeing Currin's work for the first time at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, invited the public to boycott his work because she found it so reeking with misogyny. Or Richard Dorment from The Daily Telegraph, who in 1998 scathingly wrote that 'if Bill Clinton was an artist he'd paint like John Currin'.
Indeed there's a whole slew of critics who still believe Currin's work would be far better suited to the railings of Bayswater Road than the walls of a museum. But therein perhaps lies the peculiarly unsettling, and ultimately sophisticated allure of Currin's work.
You're never entirely sure what he really means when, for example, he tells a journalist how he sometimes thinks of his brush as his 'male sex' (as he did in 1993, a homage perhaps to Renoir, who said exactly the same thing more than a century ago). Or where those humanoid characters of his belong; why his white-bread preppies guffawing over a glass of Chardonnay or his cheesy gay couple happily making pasta in the kitchen have such a capacity to wrongfoot.
'That's why his work is so very complex and so shocking,' offers Rochelle Steiner, the chief curator of Currin's Serpentine exhibition. 'He creates a superficially "normal" context, whether it be a Fragonard painting or a vintage pin-up, and synthesises it, putting an edginess on it which immediately makes the viewer ask, "Hey, what's going on?" He is the master of the double-take.'
The doorman has already warned me that Mr Currin is always late, and sometimes doesn't even turn up at all, but just 20 minutes off schedule, he suddenly appears in the doorway, a tall, elegant yet surprisingly Tiggerish figure of a man in Levi's and a button-down shirt.
Having been a fan of his work since I first saw it at the ICA almost eight years ago, meeting him in the flesh is a little unsettling. It's like meeting a relative you never knew you had, or seeing one's baby for the first time - and I realise how autobiographical his work was before he met Feinstein.
Apologising profusely for the delay, he leads the way into a rickety tradesman's lift up to his studio, a large dusty space dotted with jars of paint-encrusted brushes and vases of very dead flowers.
According to Feinstein, who is at home in bed with the sniffles, Currin is not really happy unless he's spending seven days a week in the studio, without having to think about food or the telephone or other people. But because of their imminent move to a new loft and the fact that Feinstein is six months pregnant, Currin has not able to concentrate on work quite as much as he would like.
Tacked to the near wall are a sea of pastel sketches and torn out pictures of people whose expressions interest him. 'This one in particular,' he says, gesturing enthusiastically towards a prim-looking woman in a flowery dress, who looks like a character from a John Updike novel. 'I like that look of advanced disappointment mixed with a sprinkling of blame, like it's your fault she's there, or something.'
On his desk is a dusty copy of Revolver by the Beatles, one of his favourite albums, along with everything Led Zeppelin ever produced. Although Jarvis Cocker is a great friend (they met after Cocker commissioned him for the cover of Pulp's This is Hardcore album), he describes his taste in music as 'not very progressive at all'.
It reminds me of a comment he once made about how people should be able to enjoy art the way they might enjoy a box of chocolates or a cute puppy.
'There's a level of entertainment that is necessary in art,' Currin shrugs, 'and sometimes that means making a pretty picture with pleasant things in it. The art world has become so philistine, so unable to look at a painting without having to discern all these messages within it. That's kind of why I'm sceptical about contemporary art.
'I like painting sexy pretty girls and as soon as I accepted that and stopped trying to skilfully dodge the cliché, my art immediately became better.
'What's wrong with starting out with a cliché anyway?' he adds, bounding towards the far wall where his latest work is hung. 'Look at Karen Carpenter, the ultimate cliché, but look what a great singer she was!'
He shows me a work in progress, a large canvas of another woman of a certain age, dressed in a blue gardening smock, and bent over in front of a rose bush. 'Yeah, I like this painting,' he murmurs absentmindedly. 'I like the way her posture is so unnatural and the way she looks 40 but is probably somewhere nearer 30.'
It's not nearly as oppressive, as muddy in colour as some of his earlier, pre-Feinstein work, but at the same time there's something about her Stepford-Wife-like expression which evokes the same uneasy feelings of that parallel universe of his.
To the chagrin of his exhibitors, Currin is famously non-prolific. At the moment he is agonising over his latest Feinstein-based oeuvre, a smaller portrait in which she wears a row of capital 'R's round her neck, and which, since he plans to give it to Feinstein as a present to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, will not even be for sale.
However, when he does finally finish Bent Lady, as he thinks he's going to call it, it will probably sell for anything between $150,000 and $200,000 - a price collectors such as Steve Martin and Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse are only too happy to pay.
And that's just the primary market. His 1993 piece Ms Omni, a heartbreaking portrait of a New York society matron well into menopause (which he painted by looking at his reflection in a window and stuffing balloons up his shirt - something he almost always used to do when he painted women) recently fetched $650,000 at auction.
'Can you believe I first sold it for $2,700?' groans Currin cheerfully. 'I guess I needed the money at the time, but God, I wish I'd kept that fucking painting. Think of the Puff Daddy loft I could have now if I sold it now!'
The middle son of a physics professor and a piano teacher, Currin was born in 1962 in Boulder, Colorado, but his memory does not really kick in, he says, until the family moved to Santa Cruz, California, and then on to the preppy enclave of Stamford, Connecticut.
He describes his childhood as 'something like The Ice Storm, but with far, far less freedom'. Forbidden to go to parties or 'listen to loud rock music', Currin spent a good part of his teenage years playing video games, watching movies at home with his father (whom he respectfully describes as the smartest person he ever met), and fantasising about 'getting my hand on the tit of this really cute girl in my class'.
All that repressed desire, he says, 'having to flesh out the idea in my head because it was never going to happen for real,' has been a huge influence on his work. 'Boredom and not being able to go to the hop or get my hand on this girl's tit definitely helped me dream.'
It was a Russian music teacher friend of his mother's who initially taught Currin how to draw, but it was a school trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he first encountered the works of El Greco, that first convinced him to become a painter. To this day his favourite way of spending an afternoon is to hang out at 'the Met' studying the techniques of underpainting and sequencing employed by Tiepolo and Canaletto.
However, he becomes quite apoplectic whenever anyone brings up 'that Old Master thing'. 'I mean,' he splutters, 'the comparison is never gonna work out for me, is it? That's a level of craft that nobody is ever, ever gonna achieve.'
In 1987, when Currin first came to New York, having recently graduated from Yale, the hot artists were Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons (a personal hero of Currin's) and the abstract artist Sherry Levine. Conceptual art, in other words, was in, figurative art embarrassingly out, and Currin was struggling, holed up in a tiny studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, exhibiting here and there in fringe group shows and painting houses on the side in order to eat.
'It was very tricky,' confirms Lisa Yuskavage, a friend from Yale, and one of a group of artists who helped spearhead the revival of figurative painting in the late 1980s. 'Here we were, taking our cues from Europe, when really, as American painters, we were supposed to reject it. Although I think all along John has been quite ambitious, it was definitely a kind of a hot coals period for him.'
'That was my whole schtick, living in this garret, being this miserable guy,' says Currin. 'But as soon as I met Rachel, I stopped being miserable. She completely undermined my ability to be sad.' And, he happily admits, transformed his whole attitude to work.
In fact, had the couple not met in 1994 - at a group exhibition in which a 22-year-old Feinstein, a performance artist at the time, was dressed up as Sleeping Beauty, and spent most of the evening crouched inside a styrofoam gingerbread house - there is no doubt Currin would be a very different painter indeed.
Although it was he who proposed to Feinstein, after the couple had lived together for three years, it was she who persuaded him to get married (on St Valentine's Day, 1998) in an Amazonian theme park near her childhood home in Coral Gables, Miami, complete with crocodile pit, parrots riding bicycles and maids of honour dressed up as synchronised swimmers.
It was also Feinstein who persuaded him to get out more, and that socialising and grand parties - or 'insider trading' as she coyly calls it - were actually helpful rather than detrimental to one's artwork.
All in all, Feinstein, with her papier-mache faux-Rococo sculptures, and her habit of doing the grocery shopping in baby-doll make-up and mink slippers, could not be a more perfect foil to Currin, or a better muse for his work, but even this sometimes bothers him.
'I worry that I'm selling my romance with Rachel - how good can it be for her career to be known as Mrs John Currin, after all? On the other hand, since I refer to her and defer to her in everything I do, since I've used her persona for so long in my work, what's the point of trying to separate?'
'John always used to feel bad about asking me to be in a painting,' says Feinstein when I speak to her later on the telephone. 'But actually, since he has people virtually knocking down the door asking him to paint them, I've always taken it as a compliment.
'And besides, he's such a big influence on my work, too. It was such a magical otherworldly experience meeting him; there is not one single day of my life that he doesn't influence me, whether it's buying a shirt or working on a new sculpture.
'It may sound cheesy,' she adds, 'but John knows how to convey my soul in a picture. Something about the way he does my eyes, the way he makes the lids a little heavy.'
'Oh God, I love that melancholy happiness thing she's all about,' says Currin fondly, fishing in the back pocket for his wallet for a photo of her as a pre-teen which he always keeps on him.
'See, it wasn't like she was always pretty. In fact she was quite weird looking until she hit 16 or 17. So she still has the soul of an ugly girl, which for me makes her beauty even deeper.'
If Currin sounds a little sappy, naive even, then it's probably because, not far beneath the provocation and intellectual hypothesising, he is. As Andrea Rosen, Currin's New York exhibitor and one of his earliest champions, puts it, 'People think of his work as ironic, it's actually deeply sincere.'
Jarvis Cocker, who first saw his work in 1995 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, agrees. 'I was having a slight nervous breakdown at the time,' he tells me, 'but when I saw his paintings I felt this real connection. When I realised we had the same initials and the same birthdays - he's exactly a year older than I am - it was even more of a link.'
Before I leave, Currin hands me an autographed book of his drawings, including what he calls the Jackass Series, a set of cheesy stock photos from the 1970s of muscly male models and pretty blondes in their bikinis. Currin has 'tampered with' all the women's faces so they look as if they're in tears.
They totally fly in the face of all those misogyny charges, but then as Currin says, 'people really don't say that about my work any more. It used to be somewhat misogynistic I suppose, but only because I was getting a kick out of the perception that I was misogynistic.'
A few weeks later we speak on the telephone. Although Currin is finally happy with the picture of Feinstein, he now has to complete what he calls the 'turkey' painting, a big Thanksgiving scene (with Feinstein, naturally, in there somewhere), which will be one of the works on show at Sadie Coles HQ, later this September.
'I've been trying to find a way to get the background less important than the foreground, and it's driving me nuts,' he says, adding that he has been trawling round junk shops trying to find a chandelier, because if he doesn't paint from a real one it won't look convincing.
'I've found one online, but it's $18,500,' he explains.
Currin is as chatty and pleasant as ever, but sounds slightly less expansive than when we last met, his stutter a little more pronounced. Perhaps he is preoccupied with his forthcoming fatherhood. 'I don't know if it's going to be good for my work or not,' he declares uneasily.
'What I'm scared of becoming is one of these people like Ronald Reagan who basically loves his wife to death and just likes but doesn't love his kids, which in a way is the creepiest of things.
'At some level I know it's got to be kind of cloying the thing I have with Rachel. I don't want people to blow chunks when they read about how happy we are. But the point is after nine years I think I still am madly, madly in love with her and it's going to be hard seeing her love someone more than me.'