The Body Kitsch:

The problematic nude and the paintings of John Currin

In order to define what I mean by the body kitsch, it is important to acknowledge the

problems of talking about kitsch in the broad context of art criticism. It is an

ambiguous concept, which can delineate both ‘false’ or ‘dishonest’ art, as well as

simply ‘bad’ art. I would like to challenge the association of kitsch with so-called

‘bad’ art, both morally and aesthetically, as well as focusing on what the ‘dishonest’

qualities of kitsch that correspond to imitation, allusion and repetition might mean in

terms of Currin’s nudes. As Baudrillard stated, “To the aesthetics of beauty and

originality, kitsch opposes its aesthetics of simulation”1. In response to this I will look

at the problematic association of originality with ‘authenticity’ and worth. Not only

will I look at Currin’s work in terms of representing the female nude as a fetishistic

icon, I will also explore his use of kitsch as a purposeful artistic device. Kitsch in this

respect is the framing of a subject (the nude) as a known sign; an ostentatious

representation of a classical theme for ironic or disruptive purposes. This also

corresponds to a more postmodern appraisal of kitsch as a deconstruction of image. In

this context I will also consider the role of kitsch in terms of its contribution to the

ongoing conversation of the nude within the artistic canon, and of its importance in

exploring alternative narratives of reality, imagination and memory rather than simply

as a tool for nostalgia or parody.

What makes Currin’s nudes kitsch? In painting the female nude, Currin follows a

long-established tradition in the art world, and occupies himself with part of the

classical narrative of art, or as Baudelaire once put it, “The nude – that darling of the
1
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage, 1998
artists, that necessary element of success”2. For several centuries, the nude has been a

standard of artistic practice. It stands historically as a consideration of physical

harmony and temporality and continues to be revisited and adapted to carry a myriad

of alternate and conflicting allegorical meanings. McCarthy, in his essay on the

subject titled after Baudelaire’s assertion, concludes “That most overworked of

subjects…the nude refuses to go gently into that good night of irrelevance and

oblivion”3. The nude is a persistent theme in art, presumably because, as the fashions

of art practice fluctuate and evolve, that basis of human physicality remains. “The

body is the source of our deepest pleasures and traumas; our experience of the world

is set by the way we experience our bodies”4, a truism especially in the physical work

of painting the body, where the artist must coax flesh into being from where it wasn’t

before: a true creation in the Frankenstein manner. Of course, when the term nude is

used now, we envisage the female body unless informed specifically otherwise.

Although only since the late 19th Century has mastery of the female nude been seen as

the most important of tasks for the artist, the rise of the art market and the fall in

importance of history paintings meant that more female than male nudes were being

painted5. Tastes for heroism and martyrdom were replaced with those for sensuality

and titillation. Since industrialisation made artistic reproduction more accessible, and

therefore more of a commodity, this tendency persisted and became the norm. (This

was by no means the only decisive factor in the use of male/female nudes by artists. I

should also point out that during the 19th Century, artists studying at European artistic

academies would not have had a chance to draw a female nude from life simply

because women of any sort were precluded from the institute, whether as students or

2
Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1846’, in Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions,
trans. Jonathan mayne, London: Phaidon press, 1965, p.119
3
David McCarthy, ‘The Nude’, The Nude In Contemporary Art, Herlin Press, 1999, p.41-42
4
Leslie Bostrom, Marlene Malik; ‘Re-Viewing the Nude’, Art Journal, Vol. 58, 1999
5
Linda Nochlin, ‘Body Politics’, Representing Women, London: Thames and Hudson, 1999, P. 218
models.) Currin himself focuses almost exclusively on the female nude, though there

are exceptions in the pornographic phase of his work. In a progressive Western

culture, his singular nudes are problematic for being violently sexual and yet

somehow blank, for being familiar and yet unnerving. They are strange for being not

studies of a naked female body at all, but studies of the nude itself as an artistic

standard. It is, as Sontag would argue, not woman, but “woman” in quotation marks –

“Being-as-Playing-a-Role”6. A jumble of limbs and orb-like fat deposits that serve as

buttocks, hips and breasts. Compositionally we are reminded of, amongst others,

Ingres “woman” in quotation marks, ‘La Grande Odalisque’ (Fig. 1), with her too-

long back, strangely angled and with a foot that appears to be coming out of nowhere.

Currin’s nudes are deliberately anatomically inaccurate in order to be art historically

accurate. The aesthetic link between Ingres’ nudes and Currin’s can be seen in

Picabia, whose later works perhaps come from the most obvious aesthetic lineage as

that of Currin. In the 1940s, Picabia began to paint nudes sourced from popular

culture, recycling images from soft-porn and magazines to create bad taste paintings

that were dismissed as regressive and, therefore, kitsch. By not only referencing, but

also recycling the past, Currin immediately makes his bodies kitsch, in terms of what

may initially be seen as a superficial imitation of conventional art practice. Currin

makes no life studies but draws from the imagination and popular culture,

occasionally using his wife’s features and parts of his own body. In talking about a

Frankenstein-esque creation we capture the essence of the way Currin works. He

appropriates parts from an alter-reality of selfhood and other, using imagination and

the stock resources that art history itself presents: a plethora of female bodies draped,

veiled and reclining coquettishly in order to be reproduced by the artist as his

realisation of beauty. Perhaps it is this that offends contemporary sensibilities:

6
Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, Against Interpretation, London: Vintage Books, 2001, p.280
Currin’s refusal to justify his wide-eyed, big-breasted paintings of women with a

satisfactory postmodern artistic statement of intent. He is not critiquing the artists

whose work his own resembles, nor is he critiquing the advertisements or

pornography from where he draws inspiration. Simply, he says, “I often find good

compositions in advertising,”7 and indeed his nudes are formally, centrally composed

in an affected way. They remind us perhaps more of the calculated composition in

stock photography of smiling, happy women used in advertising to manipulate us to

feel a stock emotion.

Currin uses similar sources for his nudes as Picabia once did, but I would argue that

rather than creating a deliberately disposable image, he conversely uses the

retrogressive aspects of kitsch to present us with a further evolution of the

problematic nude. By problematic, I of course refer to those nudes that have provoked

controversy or derision in the art world and in a larger sociocultural context too. The

most obvious of these nudes is Manet’s ‘Olympia’ (Fig. 2), the scandalous portrait of

a prostitute. It is an oft-quoted painting in terms of the nude. Specifically, it placed the

nude in a contemporary context, by presenting a prostitute as the subject rather than a

historically, or in the case of Ingres, ethnographically justified model. Manet also

allowed her an outward gaze that many saw to be defiant and challenging (in contrast

to the classical preference for passiveness and coy sensuality) that drew attention to

the nature of the now notorious male gaze of the artist and viewer. Importantly,

‘Olympia’ also served to highlight the problematic nature of differentiating nude from

naked8, something that was certainly inherent to the controversy surrounding the

problematic nude in the 19th Century. Interestingly, Currin himself once remarked on

7
John Currin, John Currin Ouvres/Works 1989-1995, F.R.A.C. Limousin, 1995, p.45
8
Linda Nochlin, ‘Body Politics’, Representing Women, Thames and Hudson, 1999 p.
this phenomenon in Manet’s work as being in itself false and affected. Rather than

seeing the gaze of Manet’s ‘Olympia’, or that of the similarly controversial nude in

‘Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe’, as direct, confrontational, shocking, he surmises that it is

simply Manet’s own self importance that stares out at us. “Even their self assertion

he’s taken away, even their ability to look back at you he has claimed with a brush”9.

This certainly has a basis in the historical paradigm of male painter and female model,

with the model serving only as inert substance onto which the artist applies his own

ideas of beauty and meaning – in short, himself. Manet’s nudes, despite the

problematic nature of their gaze and of their modernity, were still shown in

sympathetic, justificatory settings that invited a narrative reading. If we remove the

clothed men from Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe, we are left with a bathing scene that

echoes long-established norms in figurative painting of the nude both ‘at toilet’ and in

nature. Olympia is a prostitute: a modern counterpoint to countless ‘Odalisques’ that

portrayed erotic (ethnicised to soothe 19th Century sensibilities), concubines-in-

waiting. “Identifying narratives are genetic accounts of the provenance of artworks…

Manet is explicitly working in the historically established genre of nude, making a

modern, revolutionary statement by populating that genre with contemporary

figures”10 What is interesting is to consider the argument of falsehood in Manet’s

authorship of the contemporary, defiant nude. If we take into consideration the 19 th

Century public’s outrage over Manet’s supposedly unskilled approach to painting

Olympia, then is it not pertinent to discuss how by representing the unchallenging, the

inert nude, alongside of a (by contemporary standards) classical stylistic approach,

Currin is subverting the figurative painting and as such is using kitsch in a

challenging, rather than naïve way?

9
Currin, p.39
10
Noel Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics, London: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.108
Alongside Manet, the artist who had arguably the most significance in re-viewing or

evolving the nude outside of an art historical justification was his contemporary

Gustave Courbet. No discussion of the nude would be complete without at least

mentioning ‘L’Origine du Monde’ (Fig. 5), Courbet’s painting of the spread legs and

genitalia of an anonymous woman (that is reprised, in true kitsch style, in Currin’s

‘Purple Bra’ (Fig.6)). This is an example of how Courbet blurred the distinction

between nude and naked, by presenting the female body in an overtly sexual, certainly

not classically justified, way. By rejecting the allegorical idea of the nude and

painting instead only what he sees, what is tangible to him, Courbet establishes a

norm central to the manifesto of Realism: that of timeliness rather than timelessness,

and, significantly, of ‘honesty’. It is the rejection of the classical ideal in favour of a

brutal, contemporary clear-sightedness. This severance from the artistic standard of

associating high art with classical art proposed a new artistic standard that continues

to be widely acknowledged today: the extolling of the virtues of ‘truthfulness’. Here, I

would argue, the attributes of ‘truth’ and ‘timeliness’ come together and are

inseparable from one another within the modern aesthetic. “The people I paint don’t

exist,” Currin states, “The only thing that’s real is the painting”11. Currin paints

fiction, a seemingly backwards step in the face of the demand for representation, and

an overarching theme that defines his work as kitschy by nature of being culturally

and historically irrelevant. “All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain

an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory”12 Baudelaire proposed.

However, where Courbet once attempted to retrieve painting from the tradition of the

eternal, Currin somehow avoids representing anything but the painting itself, creating
11
John Currin, Interview with Rochelle Steiner, John Currin, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003, p.77
12
Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1846’, in Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons and other exhibitions, trans.
Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon Press, 1965, p.117
a sort of static internal landscape that is outside of everything else. It is not

representative, but rather carries its own non-dynamic ‘truth’ of painting as object,

and of fiction. I would argue that this particular truth, though not representative, is not

meaningless but instead other - It is doing what the naturalistic painting cannot do,

perhaps, in representing the half-truth of memory and imagination. “By its relation to

truth,” Adorno says, “Art is knowledge…as knowledge, however, art is neither

discursive, nor is its truth the reflection of an object.”13

In her book on the subject, Celeste Olalquiaga talks of kitsch as being “The

commodification of the souvenir”14, and I see Currin’s nudes as being a commodified

art historical souvenir. French for ‘remembering’, the souvenir has the power of

iconicity without having to carry its own inherent meaning and, therefore, becomes

kitsch. Upon the souvenir, a mundane object, we may attach a loaded personal

significance that is separate from its mnemonic value. Though the nudes may remind

us of particular paintings, as kitsch, they have an exchange value outside of anecdotal

meaning. They exist in and of themselves, just as a tiny replica of the Eiffel Tower

has its own kitsch value exclusive to its use value as a representation of the Eiffel

Tower. As a souvenir it is an object that is physically representative of something

other than itself, a fact that is barely indicative of its own worth when considered as

an item of kitsch. Therefore Currin’s appropriation of the nude is insignificant in

terms of its figurative qualities and highly significant in terms of what it uniquely

presents to us in terms of inauthentic experience. Again, it is pertinent to talk about

the stock images used by advertising, a form of visual culture that uses repetition in

order to demand a fixed response. As an example of this, consider a woman eating a

13
Adorno, ‘Paralipomena’, Aesthetic Theory, p.362
14
Celeste Olalquiaga, , The Artificial Kingom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience, New York:
Pantheon, 1998, p.80
bio-cultured yogurt. The vacant eyes and beatific smile that immediately spring to

mind are meaningless in the context of the product, just as they are in the context of

Currin’s portraits, where he uses this strange but recognisable ‘non-emotion’ to full

effect, reminding us of values that are not physically palpable. This is an example of a

culturally over-connotated work, something that mimics the ‘universal’ language of

advertising and, by doing so, becomes disjointed and foreign. I would liken this to the

phenomenon of the uncanny, a term explored by Sigmund Freud as “In reality nothing

new or alien but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and

which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression”15. We

may feel ourselves to not only be liberated but also somewhat desensitised to the

image of the female body. However, it is also accurate to talk of alienation through

the process of repetition. What we may recognise as disturbing in Currin’s work is a

reflection of the female body reproduced ad nauseum to manipulate from us a certain

stock response: of freedom, of sexuality, of a certain joie de vivre that is meaningless.

To encounter the meaninglessness of the nude’s exchange value in Currin’s works

means to perceive a threat that is already existent and which we may continue to

perceive after the encounter – by seeing the body presented in an anonymous style,

we may consider the anonymity of the commodified body. We may also perceive the

latent body politics that reside in the personal, through association with an image that

is neither political nor personal.

The kitsch has the power to contain within it the fictional concept of time as

possessable entity. This fetishistic quality can be related to the human capacity for

nostalgia, and for morbidity – something less apparent in, but arguably intrinsic to, the

notion of kitsch. Rather than signifying naivety, I believe the use of kitsch in Currin’s
15
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, London: Penguin Classics, 2003, p.63
work is an intelligent and thoughtful way of presenting the nude that also makes sense

in a larger art historical context. By presenting the body as unreal, in every sense, and

as inaccessible, Currin acknowledges the engagement of art with beauty and mortality

in a cartoonish fashion. His works suggest a preoccupation with non-ironic subjects of

life and death. There is a disarming incongruousness in approaching large themes in a

banal way, of being purposefully retrogressive in order to create a discordancy

between work and viewer. In their stillness and in their excess of so-called ‘bad taste’,

the nudes become failed commodities that simply cannot represent human fears and

emotions. The work represents its own truth: that which can belong to neither the

artist nor the viewer, “All it has ceased to be – a virtual image, existing in the

impossibility of fully being”16. The nudes are the central image in a Momento Mori in

a triptych in which their aesthetically displeasing and emotionally uncomfortable

counterparts of birth and death have been intentionally ignored. It could be argued

that this is the necessary appropriation of what is good and beautiful in life by art, and

especially by kitsch. The kitsch is the acknowledgement of an artistic standard

whereby we allow ourselves to indulge in the non-space of the artwork in order to

ignore the ugliness of reality. For Currin, the act of painting fantasy and beauty comes

naturally, and this is why his work participates in the grand narrative of art history

whilst simultaneously standing for all that is kitsch: the refusal of the ‘now’ and the

eternal for something paradoxically and infinitely more complex. “Lately I’ve been

interested in failing to make something exciting”17, he states, an admission which

associates itself with the melancholic nature of the kitsch. In considering this, I would

suggest that his lifeless nudes have more in common with a pressed flower than of the

artworks that he makes allusions to. It is kitsch in more ways that being a superficial
16
Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience, New York:
Pantheon, 1998, p.28
17
John Currin, John Currin Ouvres/Works 1989-1995, F.R.A.C. Limousin, 1995, p.45
reproduction of conventions. On an entirely separate level it accesses the part of

kitsch that relates to an obsession with collecting and preserving objects of instability

for the purpose of sentiment. In this sense it is an object in pure engagement with

itself: meaningless except as a glorification of the non-experience. It is a futile

gesture. “Kitsch is nothing if not a suspended memory whose elusiveness is made

ever more keen by its extreme iconicity”18 – it is easy to recognise and to emotionally

validate kitsch and yet hard to elucidate on the need to do this.

If we are to return to the idea of ‘truthfulness’ and ‘authenticity’ as markers for

determining the worth of contemporary work, let us consider the value of the

appropriated subject and of reproduction in this context. Criticism of mimetic practice

in fine art assumes a correlation between originality and value that is tied up in the

aesthetic, and which not only relates unoriginality to ‘bad’ art practice, but also

proclaims originality as perhaps the only significant merit in art. In the paintings of

Currin the nude is explicitly presented in a faux-classical way. It draws on cliché in an

apparently flagrant disregard for the conventions of artistic progression. It is kitsch

because it neither reinterprets its theme nor alludes to anything outside of itself:

Currin’s nude is not superhuman, deified or carrying any allegorical social critique.

She is not any particular woman, but rather an appropriation of the painted woman.

Currin’s ‘Purple Bra’, which as I previously stated is an appropriation of the notorious

‘L’Origine Du Monde’ by Courbet, is interesting in that it appears to take as its source

an amateurish self-portrait, which is a playful way of skewing ideas of authorship and

of the much-cited gendered gaze. The nature of using a photograph as the source of a

painting explores ideas of reproduction. In this case, Currin appropriates the artistic

gaze, allowing for contemplation of his role as translator of image and of the
18
Celeste Olalquiaga, Kitsch, New York: Pantheon, 1998, p.28
importance of interpretation. Our gaze is filtered through the gaze of the artist, whose

gaze in turn has been filtered through that of the subject herself. We can only

hypothesise on the nature of this photograph, but let us suppose for the time being that

it is a ‘found’ source: an amateurish pornographic self portrait entered into the public

domain by an anonymous woman. This complexly reinterprets Courbet’s original

work and establishes an independent authorial intention beyond the critical

supposition of repetition and imitation. It also questions the concept of originality. If

we are to consider the importance of originality in art proclaimed by some sectors of

art criticism, whereby works are “Ostensibly appraised in terms of their novelty” 19,

then we must consider a hierarchy of artistic value in which Courbet’s Origin ranks

automatically higher in worth than Currin’s ‘Purple Bra’. However, Courbet used the

traditional model of artist and muse in order to paint the Origin and therefore it could

be argued that the image is only as truthful as the subjective gaze, which in itself is

loaded with gender politics and the notion of woman performing for some role to

which Courbet assigned her with. Currin’s use of photography accesses this and,

despite the criticism of his work as being sexist or exploitative, the fact that he works

not from models but from secondary sources and the imagination means that what he

is objectifying simply doesn’t exist. It is the charade of femininity: a drag act.

The notion of gender role as social performance is explored in Judith Butler’s thesis

‘Gender Trouble’, and I would suggest that Currin’s nudes are interesting as examples

of this performance. Keith Seward notes Currin’s term ‘realist drag’ and hypothesises

that one of the meanings that could be attributed to this phrase is one of gendered

performance in his paintings, “Not a ‘man’ and a ‘woman’ but two people of

19
F.N. Sibley, ‘Originality and Value’ in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol.25, No.2, Spring 1985,
p.169
indeterminate sex acting like men and women”20. This brings us back to Susan

Sontag’s ‘being-as-playing-a-role’ and to consideration of the nature of these nudes as

artificial constructs of meaning. “Consider gender,” Butler suggests, “As a corporeal

style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative.”21 We have

already considered Currin’s use of the body as a figurative illusion of subject, but let

us also question the illusory nature of the nude itself. To again use Ingres’ ‘La Grande

Odalisque’ as an example, do we consider this a study of anatomy? Of course not. In

its decidedly distorted proportions, this is not an objective study of woman, but rather

the sensual representation of a certain gendered idea of femininity that requires the

artist to take certain liberties with physical truth in order to be truly figurative. The

body is presented as a performance of something intangible but socially recognised

and the canvas is a stage upon which this performative act can legitimately occur. It is

‘realist drag’ that insists on being recognised for something it is not, a phenomenon

that is easily comparable to the nudes of Currin. Their proportions, too, are played fast

and loose with: a pair of breasts set too high on the torso, hips and arses so wide as to

suggest a frightening über-fertility. By being over-feminised, these bodies take on a

certain monstrousness that is nevertheless beautiful. A sort of ethereal quality, and a

voyeurism, is transformative in taking a Frankenstein-esque jumble of parts and

translating them into a recognisable example of conceptual, rather than true, gender.

The difference, arguably, is that the drag act of Ingres’ Odalisque is that of woman

performing femininity for aesthetic and sensual purposes. It is questionable in

Currin’s work as to what this performance is in aid of. It is certainly not sensual. They

burlesque the tradition of the gendered body, and, while occasionally captivating, are

just as often cartoonish and silly. However, the same could equally be argued for
20
Keith Seward, John Currin Ouvres/Works 1989-1995, F.R.A.C. Limousin, 1995, p.39
21
Judith Butler, ‘Subversive Bodily Acts’, Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity,
London: Routledge, 1999, p.77
female impersonators who cross the broad spectrum from non-camp transvestism to

outrageous drag acts. The very notion of performing gender allows an exploration of

theatricality, from deception (in the case of what I would deem the ‘transvestite’

nudes such as ‘Honeymoon Nude’ (Fig. 3)) to parody (the camp ‘drag’ of ‘The Old

Fence’ or ‘Three Friends’ (Fig. 4)). Although these paintings are from the same

period, nudes against a black background, they are good examples of to what degree

the body is reinterpreted by Currin to reflect a specific aesthetic sensibility. In the

former, we see a slightly ethereal portrait of his wife Rachel, in what is perhaps the

‘straightest’ portrait in the entirety of Currin’s ouvre. The proportions are skewed, but

not in a preposterous way – rather it suggests a debt to the artificial eroticism of

Mannerism. In the latter, however, we see the full extent of Currin’s ability to play

with anatomy and composition to create a ridiculous caricature of the Three Graces.

Their poses are nonsensical, completely unrelated to each other, and painted for

compositional purposes in spite of everything else; blithe smiles painting their faces

as they mimic harmony in an excruciatingly incongruous way. The argument that

“Great art and great Kitsch are often very close, so close that it is difficult to draw a

sharp line between them,”22 is pertinent here. Currin’s ‘realist drag’ is only a

contemporary examination of the same performative femininity as is seen in ‘La

Grande Odalisque’, whose added vertebrae and asymmetric limbs served as theatrical

a purpose as Currin’s own mutated angles and globular curves.

I would like to finally reiterate some ideas in Currin’s work that have led me to

identify the notion of the body kitsch. In looking at Currin’s depictions of women, we

see a surplus of compositional deftness and of technical skill and an apparent deficit

of meaning. The paintings read like an art history joke, and naturally garner criticism
22
Karsten Harries, Meaning of Modern Art, Northwestern University Press, 1979, p.76
for being disingenuous and of being ‘disposable’. This is exactly the sort of thing that

I would argue makes a representation of the body kitsch. It is an excess of style over

substance, of a supernatural fleshiness that bears little resemblance to its subject. The

conscious refusal to impart content along with form creates a meaningless procession

of signs without language. However, I believe that rather than producing a hackneyed

pastiche of all that has come before him, Currin appropriates the nude and

problematises it by disruptively using the classical style, which is associated with

sincerity and of high art, to portray the body in an insincere way, and as kitsch. The

body within this context becomes confusing because it is neither one thing nor the

other; it is an illusion of form and subject. Currin’s paintings are determinedly kitsch

in that they are superficial imitations of an artistic convention, but his nudes are kitsch

entities on a more complex level. They are not simply unrepresentative but resolutely

disconnected from what they represent. As souvenirs on the very basic level of being

figuratively mnemonic, by being iconicised and over-beautified, they fail at reminding

us of anything. They also inhabit a space separate from reality and of time. By being

non-dynamic they can no more be a part of their own narrative than they can be a part

of ours, and therefore, we cannot identify them as being timely or historical, despite

their aesthetic nods to nudes of the past. In re-viewing the nude as contemporary and

of having a timely meaning to impart, Manet and Courbet also re-establish the past,

by allowing a consciousness of tradition. Currin conversely, through the body kitsch,

allows us to think progressively by presenting a work that presents itself as a

preservation of generality and anonymity. He works with a model that we are over-

familiarised with, that of the nude, and in doing so allows space to question that over-

familiarity and the tradition of the feminine body as commodity. I believe that in

bringing together the shards of art historicism, whilst resolutely retaining an untimely
space within his work, Currin presents the body as a vessel onto which external and

non-essential values are projected, an example of which is the ‘realist drag’ of gender

politics. “I think that’s what the function of representation is,” He states, “To give the

painting the illusion of a subject.”23 The juxtaposition of Currin’s use of form with its

apparent lack of content create a body kitsch that is demonstrative of an entrenched

model of femininity and beauty, allowed to exist only as a representation of all that, in

reality, it fails to be.

23
John Currin, John Currin Ouvres/Works 1989-1995, F.R.A.C. Limousin, 1995, p.39
Fig. 1 La Grande Odalisque, 1814
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Oil on canvas 91 × 162 cm
Musee Louvre, Paris

Fig. 2
Olympia,
Francis 1863
Picabia
Edouard
Femmes au Bull-Dog, 1940-1942Manet
Oil Oil on canvas 130.5
on cardboard 106 x x76cm,
190 cm
Musée
Centre d'Orsay,
Pompidou, Paris
Paris
 Honeymoon Nude, 1998
Fig. 3 John Currin
Oil on canvas 116 x 91 cm
Tate Modern

Fig. 4 Three Friends, 1999

John Currin
Oil on canvas
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Fig. 5 L’Origine du Monde, 1866
Gustave Courbet
Oil on canvas 46 x 55 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Fig. 6
Purple Bra, 2006
John Currin
Oil on canvas
Gagosian Gallery. New York
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