The Un-Private Collection: John Currin and James Cuno Transcript
Peter Tokofsky, education specialist at the Getty:
Hi. I know you all have things to do on Sunday afternoon, but I think this has got to be the coolest place in LA right now. It’s been a pleasure developing today’s program and even a simple conversation takes a lot of work and a lot of planning. I want to thank Ed Patuto and Alex Capriotti and the entire team at The Broad for working with us. And then here at The Getty, Daniel and Ivy in our special events department and the AV team, who’s put everything together in our visitor service. We do want you to have a perfect experience when you come up here. Usually, these people deliver for us.
I work in the Education Department here at The Getty Museum and organize our speak series and other programs for general and academic audiences. Of course, I consider the role of an education department a vital one at a museum because we connect the content of the museum, the art on the walls and the knowledge about to a variety of people who want to learn about and with the art. Talks and conversations such as the one today are just one small piece of this effort. Today’s program merges two, I think, really outstanding speaker series between the two institutions. The Un-Private Collection for The Broad and Getty Perspectives for The Getty.
Our next Getty Perspectives talk will be in February. Sara Lewis will be here, the author of The Rise. She will speak about the importance of failure in the arts. Between now and then a lot is happening at The Getty. You’ll be hearing about it, I’m sure, in all sorts of other ways so I’ll just mention very briefly the exhibition opening coming up, Spectacular Rubens, as well as shortly thereafter a career retrospective of the photographer Joseph Koudelka, both at the museum and then over in the Research Institute. World War I War of Images, Images of War. Koudelka himself will be here to speak in November and he doesn’t do that often. We’ll also host a day-long conference inspired by his work examining walls along national borders. Speakers will include the noted Israeli intellectual Eyal Weizman, the German artists Christof Zwiener who will be in Los Angeles as the artist in residence at the El Segundo Museum of Art doing a project for the Wende Museum on the occasion of 25 years since the Berlin Wall fell. So, you can see we like to partner with a variety of Los Angeles institutions.
Before we bring our speakers out today, I want to introduce Joanne Heyler, the Director and Chief Curator of The Broad Art Foundation. She’ll say a few words. She’s been with The Broad since 1989. Helping grow the collection by 65 percent to be precise and adding more than 60 artists to this extraordinary collection, while also expanding the foundation’s lending program. It has lent to 485 museums worldwide since its founding. Of course, now she has the challenge of being the founding director of the new museum in downtown Los Angeles, which will open next year. Joanne.
Joanne Heyler, director and chief curator of the Broad Art Foundation:
Good afternoon and thank you, Peter. We’re delighted to have partnered with The Getty for the seventh in our series of art talks titled The Un-Private Collection. We created this series to provide LA audiences with unique, accessible dialogues between artists and arts leaders. Until our museum, The Broad, opens downtown next year, we’ve called on our colleagues all over the city to host our talks, like today. The support and enthusiasm here at The Getty has been great. I particularly want to thank Peter and of course Jim Cuno for welcoming us to their world renowned and extraordinary campus.
Our future museum, The Broad, will be home to two thousand works of contemporary art collected over a half century by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. And there’s more to come. It’s not unusual for at least one work to add to the collection per week, so we’re growing at a quick pace. We can’t wait to move into our public museum building and welcome you all in 2015. When we do, we, like The Getty, will offer free general admission for all. Our museum’s founders and the quintessential patrons of Los Angeles arts and culture, Eli and Edye, are here with us today.
I’m going to take a moment out of this introduction to just mention that the last 2014 talk in our series is coming up on October 11. It’ll feature artist Kara Walker in conversation with someone whose name I predict you will know if you don’t already, film director Ava DuVernay. They will speak at the Writers Guild Theater and tickets go on sale this Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. Sometimes our tickets sell out in a day or less so be sure to mark your calendars for that and go online at TheBroad.org to reserve and purchase your tickets.
Now on to today’s speakers. One of the artists whose works we’ve added to the Broad collections in quite some depth in recent years is John Currin. As most writers note, and like most of the best artists, John’s approach to painting has jammed the circuits and resists easy labels. John emerged in the 1990s somewhat out of tune with the fashions of that moment. He showed portraits of women captured at socially vulnerable stages of life – the high school yearbook photo and middle age. They didn’t seem to decode much about the specific souls of the individuals pictured but he did seem to be decoding instead the social mores around them and inviting the discomfort viewers might experience as a result.
In the years since, his increasingly complex paintings have revealed deep connections to historical precedence, reaching for inspiration as far back as the Renaissance and as near as internet pornography. He has continued to find fresh ways to put uncomfortable and fantastical imagery into orbit with bold and lush paint handling. To discuss with John the ways that classical painting infuses his work we could think of no one better than Jim Cuno, President and CEO of the J Paul Getty trust. As an arts leader, scholar and author, Jim is one of the leading voices of our time when it comes to museums, art history and cultural patrimony. He was president and Eloise W Martin director of the Art Institute of Chicago before joining The Getty. He was also director at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, Harvard University Art Museums, The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and the Grunwald Center here in Los Angeles at UCLA and also Vassar College. The Broad and The Getty are delighted to be able to bring this pair of astute observers of visual culture together today.
A couple of quick details for you. First, please silence your cell phones and note that tonight’s talk extends online to an audience who will be watching via live video steam at TheBroad.org. A Q&A will take place at the end of the program. Audience members and online viewers are invited to tweet questions for both John and Jim using the hashtag CurrinCuno. Try saying that five times fast. A mic will also be available for questions for all of you in the theater. With that, it’s my pleasure to welcome to the stage John Currin and Jim Cuno.
James Cuno, president and CEO of the Getty:
Thanks a lot for coming and of course thanks, John, for coming. Thanks Edy and Eli for coming and making this possible. We’re going to divide this up in three parts. The first part, I’m going to ask some questions of John as a way to bring us all together to a common understanding of how he’s thinking about his pictures and about his background and so forth. Then John’s going to lead us through a conversation about his pictures and their relationship to our pictures here at The Getty and what he sees in our pictures here at The Getty. Then as Joanne said, we’ll open it up to all of you and to all of those who are tweeting as we speak. John, you probably have had the experience of having your name in a hashtag. I think this is the first time I’ve had the experience of having my name in a hashtag and I’m feeling very cool about it right now.
John, you were born in Boulder, Colorado. What was your childhood like there?
John Currin, contemporary painter:
I have no recollection. I think my dad was in the Air Force there and then we moved to Palo Alto, but I grew up in Santa Cruz, California until I was 10.
James Cuno:
There wasn’t an Air Force base in Santa Cruz, California was there?
John Currin:
No. It was more of a Khmer Rouge support group at UC Santa Cruz I think.
James Cuno:
My father was in the Air Force too so I spent my life on Air Force bases. Nothing quite as exotic as Santa Cruz, I must say. Mine was more like Moses Lake, Washington. So I was going to ask what your parents did for a living. What about your mother? We know what your father did or we know something of what your father did.
John Currin:
My mom has been a piano teacher. Basically, she’s a piano teacher and furiously working and teaching piano from the time I was a baby until now. She still probably teaches a 60-hour week. But my dad is a physicist and my mom was a piano teacher. My family was mostly musical.
James Cuno:
Are you?
John Currin:
No. I think I have a good ear but my younger sister, Rachel, is very, very good. So it was always humiliating to share violin lessons and certainly piano lessons.
James Cuno:
You have one sister. Do you have other siblings?
John Currin:
I have a second sister, older sister, Sara and an older brother, Jeff.
James Cuno:
So you were more or less the middle of the family. You had the comfort of being preceded by other and succeeded by others.
John Currin:
In a way.
James Cuno:
Under what circumstances then did you first see what you thought of as art? It may not have been a work of art but you thought of it as such.
John Currin:
Well, I never went to a museum when I was a kid. But my parents, on their honeymoon I think, they had gotten framed Old Master and wonderful things in Italy. They were mostly…there’s a Gerard van Honthorst painting, Dutch Caravaggism. And Van de Velde, you know the ships in the calm harbor. I think there was a Picasso, there was a Michelangelo. You know, a head from the Sistine Chapel. And really lovely, really nice things actually. And one painting, which was I think from Paris when you go on Montmartre and you get those pallet knife paintings, there was one of those of a horse when I was growing up.
James Cuno:
So these were interesting to you?
John Currin:
Yeah. First I thought they were photographs or something. I thought they were real paintings of course. It was wonderful growing up with those. I mean that was before I became a teenager and then was interested in album cover art and stuff. You know, that was my…
James Cuno:
What about Lev Meshberg, with whom you painted on weekends?
John Currin:
Yeah. That was after my family moved to Connecticut when I was 10. I took violin lessons. I wasn’t very good but I persisted at it. We took from Russian émigrés who lived in the next town over. Lev was the husband of my violin teacher. My mom, in her way, pushed to get me lessons with him. He passed away but he was a wonderful, wonderful painter, very good painter.
James Cuno:
Figurative painter?
John Currin:
Yes. Had been from Odessa and left in the early-’70s when Jews were giving visas to leave.
James Cuno:
Under Carter I think.
John Currin:
Well, I believe was from like 1975 to whatever. Anyway, my whole high school years I painted on weekends with Lev.
James Cuno:
So he taught you how to make paint itself?
John Currin:
Yeah. I mean I don’t speak for all art schools but you often don’t get taught anything. Like, you go there and they don’t show you…I’ve done a tiny bit of teaching in art schools and I’m just amazed that the kids don’t know, they sort of squeeze out color and horrible colors too. The worst red, the worst yellow, the worst blue. It’s kind of all over the place. Anyway, Lev had it’s like you put your palate out like this. He didn’t speak much English but he said don’t use that red, that’s a bad red. You know, so I learned…it’s one of those things you kind of have to see somebody doing it to learn it. Certainly I learned more from Lev than anybody else.
James Cuno:
And you stayed in touch with him until he died?
John Currin:
From time to time. I started feeling like that he wouldn’t approve of what I was painting and he wouldn’t like what I was…he thought I was good. When I was a teenager he thought I was good but I had good color and I was going to be a real painter. He said, “You’re going to be the first American colorist.” There’s no American colorists. You know, we went to museums from time to time. Anyway, it was a real gift. I mean it was a total weird privilege to have Lev.
James Cuno:
You once said that you read every David Sylvester interview with Francis Bacon and in high school that you loved Bacon’s work. How did you come to know about Sylvester and Bacon in high school? That’s not a common experience for most people.
John Currin:
How would I have known about Bacon? You know, I don’t recall the first time I saw those but I mean, they were just the coolest thing. The funny thing is, is then he was considered kind of borderline schlock, at least when I went to art school in the early-’80s. I don’t think he had the reputation in the art world then that he has now. I may have seen…
James Cuno:
At Yale maybe? Were you anywhere near Yale?
John Currin:
No, I was doing Bacon rip-offs in undergraduate school.
James Cuno:
But I mean were you close enough to Yale to see it at the Yale Art Gallery?
John Currin:
No, not until I went there for grad school. I guess I must have just checked him out at the library or something like that. I started doing pastel versions of Bacon paintings. You know, I think I might have seen actually Last Tango in Paris. Last Tango in Paris, the credits they have Bacon paintings. Anyway, I was reading the Sylvester interviews. It was clear to me that he’s gay and he’s an alcoholic and he has this weird, rough life. I just thought I’m so boring compared to Bacon. You know, I’m totally not intense like Bacon. It was an important thing to realize that I’m not going to be that kind of an artist, that my angst doesn’t present the same way, you know.
James Cuno:
Not with screaming Popes and things like that.
John Currin:
I guess I was content with smiling girls.
James Cuno:
So you finished high school in Connecticut?
John Currin:
Yes.
James Cuno:
What made you want to seek advanced training in art among all the other things you might have done?
John Currin:
Well, you say all the other things you might have done as if there were things. I mean I was good at math I guess. Oh, I went Carnegie Mellon University partly to placate my father on that score, although that said, both my parents, actually maybe especially my father, were supportive of my being an artist. It was really kind of a random decision to go to Carnegie Mellon. I got in there and apparently there was an art school there so I went there.
James Cuno:
Any particular teachers there that were important to you?
John Currin:
Yeah, a guy named Jim Denny who was very young. He was 28 when I was there. He still paints in New York City. I just ran into him again for the first time in like 25 years a year ago or so.
James Cuno:
They have an extraordinary museum, as does Yale, when you get to Yale, have both these great, wonderful museums. Did the museums play a part in developing your historical consciousness of the painting and painters?
John Currin:
Oh, yeah.
James Cuno:
As well as just being there. I mean you have such a clear historical sense of things and a curiosity about a range of things.
John Currin:
Well, when I went to college it was the first time I would just go to a museum over and over and over again and become, especially the Carnegie Institute. You know, you just know where the paintings are. I think that’s important for any young artist. I don’t know. Maybe not. But for me it’s looking at paintings over, and over, and over, and over and over again is crucial.
James Cuno:
With whom did you study at Yale?
John Currin:
Mel Bachner, William Bailey, Jake Ritho those are the ones that are most important to me.
James Cuno:
Was there a cohort of students with whom you identified?
John Currin:
Yes.
James Cuno:
Who were they?
John Currin:
Lisa Yuskavage Richard Phillips, Sean Landers, Matthew … yes, we were very lucky to have a tight circle and I think it was a lucky, lucky year to go there.
James Cuno:
Did you have a particular project as your sort of culminating project for you MFA? Is that how it works?
John Currin:
Yeah. It was ripping off de Kooning and Julian Schnabel I think was my thesis. I was making, or rather, I got into Yale making de Kooning rip-offs and then I finished out Yale making Schnabel rip-offs.
James Cuno:
Do you still have the pictures?
John Currin:
My parents have a couple of them. Sadly, there came the day where I had to get them out of their basement, so I got them out and I was going to store them and they’re gone now.
James Cuno:
What did you do in the first years after Yale? Did you go right to New York?
John Currin:
Well, Lisa Yuskavage and Matthew Levinstein got this place in Hoboken where I slept in the hallway there in the studio. I really kind of hit bottom. That was when I think I hit bottom and that’s when I realized I needed to change what I was doing, that the manner of my painting had to change and it wasn’t me. It was in Hoboken with a tear rolling down my cheek that I decided I need to start a journey into figurative painting. Because it was like I had always had disdain for the figurative painters in grad school, you know, that that wasn’t good painting. It was after being alone for the first time in my life, painting alone, that I realized the kind of New York school painting was not for me, that I wasn’t the right kind of person to do it.
James Cuno:
It just didn’t mean anything to you.
John Currin:
I think it meant something to me but it meant something to me as a persona, as the type of guy I’d like to be but I’m not that kind of guy.
James Cuno:
How many years was that Hoboken interval?
John Currin:
It was nine months and then I moved to the Lower East Side in New York, which was really fun because that was where all my friends from school had studios literally on the same hundred foot section of the same block. So, it was a real kind of wonderful Bohemia actually that lasted for two years.
James Cuno:
You once said that you aren’t engaged with contemporary artists the way that Donald Judd was, for example. You raised the example of his rivalry with Robert Morris. Does it mean that you’re more engaged with the work of earlier paintings and therefore not of your peers, especially early figurative paintings? That’s one part of it. Then the other part of the question is you once said that there’s so much figurative painting out there that you can’t rival it and that, in your words, part of what makes figurative painting so interesting is that it’s a losing proposition.
John Currin:
Okay. I think in Donald Judd’s…you know, yeah, I guess it always kind of put me off, the idea of rivalries with contemporary artists. It just seems like petty and awful. You know, I hate when someone says they’re ripping me off as if…if you’re doing anything good you can’t be ripped off. You know, I don’t think there’s such a thing as an idea that exists independent of the artwork. So, I guess in terms of contemporary art I think maybe one of the reasons I was drawn toward my genre or style or whatever is that it was somewhat different from what other people were doing and maybe I didn’t have to compete therefore. I liked the idea of everybody thinking it was dumb and that smart people don’t make those kind of paintings and that I wasn’t under pressure then to prove my smartness. I think that storm may have hopefully passed, but I think at the time there was great pressure for artists to be smart in the late-’80s, early-’90s. It’s always good to be smart but I don’t think it’s necessary if you’re a painter, especially if you’re dumb like a painter. It may be a liability.
I guess the second part of your question was what?
James Cuno:
You said part of what makes figurative painting so interesting is that it’s a losing proposition.
John Currin:
Yeah, that’s kind of what I mean. You know, you can’t…I mean now we’re about to show my work next to Old Master, so it’ll demonstrate that proposition.
James Cuno:
So we’re going to switch a little bit just as we anticipate you coming to talk about your pictures and talk about the technical aspect of things. How do you begin a painting?
John Currin:
You mean technically?
James Cuno:
Where do you start?
John Currin:
I have the canvas already done. Hopefully it’s been drying for years. You were asking whether I get an idea and I do, but you know I have a whole bunch of canvases and then I just kind of go around and measure them and think this one’s vaguely the right size for this. You know, then hopefully the kind of canvas that I stretched on will be the right texture, but it often isn’t. I often have terrible problems because I picked the wrong thing. It’s not methodical actually. I used to try to always work from drawings and then grid them on to my canvases. Now I’m working, I think, a little more. You’ll see now I have a different method. I usually start a painting in a very optimistic frenzy.
James Cuno:
We talked a little bit backstage and I asked you then and I’ll ask you now because your response was so interesting, do you prepare your canvases yourself?
John Currin:
As I was saying, I used to stretch them and then I hurt my thumb doing that. I was also too cheap to pay somebody to do it. Then I finally realized I maybe ought to. So, I have them stretch them and glue them and then I prime them because I make what I think is a wonderful primer and do it my way.
James Cuno:
We talked about the importance of priming and getting it right, that may not be understood by everyone here. So could you talk a little bit about the importance of priming?
John Currin:
Well, it’s going to determine…I mean it’s the first skin of the painting. It’s how much are you going to fill the weave. How much chalk am I going to add to it? It’s going to absorb in a different way. That said, I’m always screwing it up and it never turns out the way I wanted it to. I hate seeing somebody else’s whatever it is on my painting, let me put it that way. Even if they did a perfect job it would drive me nuts seeing somebody else’s personality in the priming.
James Cuno:
Is this something that Lev Meshberg introduced you to, this kind of care and precision?
John Currin:
As I remember, he kind of didn’t care about that kind of stuff as much. You know, his paintings are like that thick, so it wasn’t…you know, he wouldn’t have been…he’s like the kind of guy…he didn’t use deodorant. I don’t think he would be picky about that kind of thing. He had a huge beard. He looked like Rodin, you know?
James Cuno:
What kind of paints do you use? Do you make your own paint at all?
John Currin:
I tried and that was like two geeked out for me to actually start making my paint. Sometimes you get really into this kind of thing and then you just realize this is stupid. You know, it’s like I’m going to spend three hours making yellow. I don’t know. I was just actually looking at a Courbet still life. I’ve always had this thing about yellow. I don’t like the cadmium yellow. I always like chrome yellow instead of cadmium, which are real bright, chemical looking yellows. They weren’t really available to painters before 1870, 1850. So I thought it’s tacky. It’s like a polyester shirt or something to use those yellows.
Then I looked at a Courbet and it’s filled with chrome yellow and chemical yellows. I’m starting to realize this whole thing about being genuine and authentic is ridiculous. I’m not conscientious and methodical enough to work that way.
James Cuno:
What about brushes?
John Currin:
Well, we don’t have enough time. You shouldn’t have asked me that question. The idiots at Fish and Wildlife have banned the import of sable brushes. They’re destroying…all I can say is if you have two hours I will rant about that, but that said I don’t actually use sable brushes that much. But now that they’re banned from import I want to use them. That’s one indulgence of mine. I buy a lot of new brushes and I throw them away pretty quickly.
James Cuno:
Your surfaces are often so ravishing that the brush work is so important.
John Currin:
Thank you. One thing that’s also changed is I’ve simplified my medium of what I use when I paint a lot. I only use linseed oil and turpentine now. I used to do this thing where I’d get balsam and different resins and try to make magic potions and stuff. Sometimes they’d work and sometimes they wouldn’t. I never was able to make it do what I wanted.
James Cuno:
I think I asked you this earlier but I think the audience would like to hear this. What makes a painting a certain size?
John Currin:
Well, when I first started showing in New York, those high school girl pictures, the one consideration was I wanted them to be medium sized, not tiny, not huge but medium. You had seen a lot of very large paintings and you had seen a lot of teeny-weenie paintings, but it just seemed like nobody was making that…it was like 30 inches by 34 inches seemed to be this magical size. So, I was interested in that as a way of just they look different if they’re that size. This is a big painting in real life, it’s a fairly large painting but I’ve never been able to make a painting much bigger than that.
James Cuno:
Do you have thoughts about frames and how a picture should be framed?
John Currin:
Yeah, I like elaborate frames. I used to love the frame that was on the Demoiselles d’Avignon this ugly white enameled frame. For a while, I would always tell people to frame my paintings in ugly, white enamel frames. Then I just realized that everybody hated them. Now I like historical frames, I like Italian frames.
James Cuno:
Do you have thoughts about how your picture should be seen? With what other kinds of pictures or other kinds of things? When they go off out into the world do they take on another life because they’re now in some other environment of which you don’t have control. But would you like your pictures to be seen a certain way?
John Currin:
I mean I don’t like them on white walls, I guess, as much. I enjoy seeing my pictures in people’s houses. I like seeing it with furniture and junk around it and that kind of thing. I don’t know if I love seeing them in a gallery. It always seems a bit harsh.
James Cuno:
Too antiseptic or something.
John Currin:
And also white isn’t a very good background for oil paintings.
James Cuno:
You paint in different ways that is at the same time, in the same year pictures will look different one from the next. Some more finely finished and some more loosely finished, brushed and so forth. What determines the extent to which a painting is the more finished kind and the one that’s more loosely?
John Currin:
That’s something I’ve been thinking about in a specific way the last couple of years. I started realizing a lot of times when I would paint I’d have this voice in my head just berating myself. Just you suck, this sucks. Like you jerk. It’s like you made some mark and it’s like that sucks. I started hating myself. It kind of occurred to me that you need to love everything you do. You need to love your physical…you need to love your body, metaphorically speaking in a painting. I think I do a lot of times but then I’m terrifically critical of it at other times. So, I tried to make paintings in which I accepted the parts I couldn’t finish, the ugly parts, the maybe poorly done, try to love them all like your children or something. Later, when we’re showing, I’ll explain that more clearly. It was about accepting the way I paint, because I think that’s always been an emotionally fraught process for me.
James Cuno:
One last question before we then go into having you talk about your pictures. It has to do with the conservation of your paintings now that you’ve got paintings going out in the world for the last 25 years or so. Do you have thoughts about how you want them to age?
John Currin:
I have a good story about that. I had a painting…I was brought into a conservator to look at a damaged painting. It was a painting of a butt and it was all cracked up, these radial cracks around it and everything. It turns out that someone had stayed at the collector’s house and spanked somebody with the painting. They spanked somebody with this butt painting. It had gotten all these radial characteristics.
James Cuno:
You’ve got to be more careful who you’re sending pictures to.
John Currin:
Sort of a forensic files examination of it revealed that this had happened. But otherwise, you know, I haven’t had many bad…there’s one painting where I painted the lips in over…there’s certain colors that if you paint it on you really shouldn’t paint anything else on top of it. So, it was the lips and this girl in bed and they cracked along the thing. But it looks cool. I like it and it kind of looks good. But otherwise…I mean I will say this, when I show in a museum and they say we’re very concerned about the candle power here and we have to put shades over the windows. I’m like that’s stupid. Paintings will yellow without light. They actually look worse if they’ve been in the dark. Generally, don’t spank anybody with them and treat them like human beings I think is the main thing.
James Cuno:
Tell us about the next pictures.
John Currin:
We’ll come across that in a bit.
James Cuno:
Can we go forward to the next one?
John Currin:
This is called Heartless. I vaguely took the image from a Cosmopolitan magazine. Francesco Scavullo used to do the photographs for Cosmo. I had been making very angsty kind of paintings of middle-aged women that I thought of them as like Blue Period Picasso. They were desiccated and unpleasant. Then I was going to have a show in Los Angeles as it happened and I thought I should make something happy for Los Angeles.
James Cuno:
Desiccation doesn’t play well here.
John Currin:
[Heartless] So, I came across these Cosmo images. This one is important to me because it was the first time that I had discovered a technique of underpainting, of painting the flesh in like blue-gray and figuring out the forms, the light and the forms and shapes and things like that and then letting that dry and painting flesh over that. It had the effect of hiding all the labor of finding the form. You know, it has an odd ease to it and it is in fact easier to paint that way. I was just amazed. You can’t really see it but that shine on her forehead when I was doing it, I was weeping with joy because I had been trying to get that kind of temperature thing in a painting for a long time and it was just so easy when I did it this way.
James Cuno:
Tell us what about the temperature thing.
John Currin:
[Heartless] Like warm to cool. I remember I was looking at a Velasquez in New York, The Little Infanta head that they have at the Metropolitan. It just has this strangely colorless presence. I mean it looks real but it doesn’t look like he had a color on his palate and he painted that color. You kind of can’t identify it. I was looking at it and looking at it and then I realized he painted it in black and white and then just kind of swished on some pink over the flesh. So, it’s just a combination of light and dark and also opacity and transparency that produces the color rather than a mixed color.
James Cuno:
That’s true with skin as opposed to fabric because skin has color coming up through the skin and fabric is flatter.
John Currin:
[Heartless] I mean you can paint fabric that way but the flesh is…and there’s wonderful examples of directly painted flesh all through art, but in this case it was a way of really constraining the color and not having red, yellow and blue all over the flesh but having it really narrow. Especially for me, it was the idea of not showing the labor, not showing the struggle for the form. It would look like it had always been there.
James Cuno:
How many layers of paint might there be on this canvas?
John Currin:
[Heartless] In the flesh, two. The demanding underpainting technique…no. It makes it way, way easier. It’s funny, you paint these things in black and white and they appear to be…they have a kind of incredibly realistic presence then but weird. Then you put the color on and they look less realistic but they look alive. It’s always a really joyous moment when I’m finally happy with this form and I can put the color on.
James Cuno:
This picture had a life in which it was just blues and blacks you were saying?
John Currin:
[Heartless] Yeah. It looked really weird too. It was like a bluish mannequin or something like that. Then I just painted some flesh. It took about an hour. It was like this magic presence.
James Cuno:
Do you know at the Met the grisaille painting?
John Currin:
Yeah.
James Cuno:
That’s sort of what I understand you to be saying this picture once was in the sense before you put the color on top of it.
John Currin:
Yeah. It wasn’t as good but it looked like that.
James Cuno:
Do you want to go to the next one?
John Currin:
[Gold Chains and Dirty Rags] Yeah, next. No. I’ve always loved Pontormo and I’ve always loved that group of mannerists of Pontormo, Bronzino. I think I was thinking a lot about paintings like this.
James Cuno:
The form or the figure?
John Currin:
[Gold Chains and Dirty Rags] In just the idea of using big circles that you then hang realistic form on. You know, big cones and spheres and things like that. Then I imagine he set that jacket up on a mannequin and made this lovely, incredibly vivid and realistic clothing rendition. But you know, I love that it’s made out of…I mean the mannerism is spectacular and also that painting in particular has this wonderful geometry between the staff and the light and the forms.
James Cuno:
And a fantastic salmon color down there on those trousers.
John Currin:
[Gold Chains and Dirty Rags] Yeah. But I’ve always been impressed mostly with that cream of the shirt and that incredible elbow. Just this big, big slug coming out at you.
James Cuno:
Let’s get back to your pictures. Next.
John Currin:
[Gold Chains and Dirty Rags] I think this one was directly…I was thinking about Pontormo with this one. It was a little picture in a Sears catalog or something of a model, so I just think I took…I mean literally like this big so I could barely see the face. I think those hands are my hands in the mirror and then just kind of made up drapery. Again, painted with this new way that I was very excited about.
James Cuno:
So you said your hands as you saw them in the mirror. So the model’s right hand would be the sort of mirrored image of your painted…
John Currin:
[Gold Chains and Dirty Rags] Right. The hand that’s on the pocket that was always the hard one to paint because you have your paint brush. The left hands are always really easy because I can go like that. Let’s go to the next one.
James Cuno:
That’s a leotard.
John Currin:
[The Producer] That was from…it does look kind of like a leotard, doesn’t it. The blue. That was from a Sears catalog as well but I changed his jacket. It was like a hunting jacket but I changed it into this kind of luxurious King Louis kind of material.
James Cuno:
At least on the screen it has that sense, that’s why leotard came to mind, of pastel. Does it in flesh have that sense of pastel?
John Currin:
[The Producer] You know, it’s an odd color. In that case, you can’t really see it up here but in that case I did actually paint that in layers, the blue. It was a weird color. It was a blue/black. Like an ultramarine and black. It’s not a Prussian blue like it looks there.
James Cuno:
Does it have a softness of pastel and the furry bits?
John Currin:
I think I was trying for more Velasquez, Venetian kind of sparkle under the glaze kind of look.
James Cuno:
What about the subject of these things? These were single figure pictures, these are opportunities for form and for color.
John Currin:
[The Producer] Well, this was in a group of paintings of only men that I did actually in LA as well. This one’s called The Producer. On one hand, it was like the gay show I guess, but I was interested in painting men. I’ve always had…I’ve always been uncomfortable painting men and thought it would be interesting to make various kinds of male couples and these mannerist, Pontormo or Bronzino things.
James Cuno:
So the sources other paintings or images in magazines.
John Currin:
[The Producer] It’s a combination of my own…I take stuff from my own face. Those are my hands and that kind of thing. But let’s see. The guy in the Sears catalog wasn’t doing a Venus pose, but it was…the format came from the magazine.
James Cuno:
Do you ever work from models?
John Currin:
Yeah. Now I work mostly from models.
James Cuno:
Okay. Next. Aert de Gelder.
John Currin:
Oh, yeah. I always loved this guy but I always thought it was kind of only me. Actually, I was walking through the museum with my wife yesterday and she went right over to this and said, “Oh my God, that’s a beautiful picture.” He really is…and there’s something to be said about him is that Aert de Gelder, it’s very hard for a painter to look at somebody like Rembrandt. Like you go to a museum and look at the Rembrandt, like you have an insane Rembrandt here. But I just find myself so intimidated and you can’t learn anything from the big geniuses but you can learn a whole lot from their students or from the next rung down. He’s a student of Rembrandt. There I think you can take away a lot. Maybe you can’t really see it here but the weird…there’s a very strange color of that white. It’s like red and white and black. He uses a lot of black, yet they look weirdly fresh and lovely, not so brown as they would appear here.
Anyway, I was happy to see you had an Aert de Gelder. I think I prefer approaching Rembrandt through this than through the actual Rembrandt. Rembrandts I like to look at of course, but I just feel so bad about myself after I’ve looked at them.
James Cuno:
Next.
John Currin:
[Jaunty and Mame] This is my facile…also, I had been working almost exclusively in this mode of like a single figure and I got interested in the problems of two figures. In this case, I was also thinking about Boucher, the Rococo that would have the same face on every figure and the same kind of body. I thought it would be funny if I made my own sort of tribe of figures. In this case, they would have these enormous breasts and their faces were made with a palate knife, which I was also interested in for my enthusiasms about Courbet but also the idea that the face…the funny thing about palate knife is you can’t perfect it. You can’t…
James Cuno:
Blend it.
John Currin:
[Jaunty and Mame] You can’t blend it. The more you touch it the more it’s going to get messed up. So, I thought that was an interesting metaphor for sort of loving something to death, ruining something by giving it too much affection. I just felt like I was damaging these the more I worked on them. So for me, the breast to the face was important…and the breasts would be painted like a Florentine mannerist. Like a Pontormo sleeve and the faces would be this disaster of palate knife.
James Cuno:
Other than a visual relationship, was there some conversation that occurred between these two women?
John Currin:
[Jaunty and Mame] The truth is, it was from Hustler magazine I think. It was one of these things where they would have…you know, porn magazines in the ’90s, half of that they would have their clothes on. So it would be this elaborate narrative setup of ‘they’re in the bra shop’ and ‘she has to measure her first.’ I just thought it was compelling. It seemed to me a latter day version of these funny genre subjects that you see in Fragonard or reading the love letter, that kind of thing. I only made two of this particular bra shop stuff. They’re out of order. The measuring and then paying for the bra. But it was also, they were important to me…it was the first time I really, really worked hard and long on a painting but had worked intensely for like six weeks on a painting.
James Cuno:
What about humor in your work? Do you see them as funny?
John Currin:
Of course. I mean that said, they get solemn. They can’t stay funny but I did like the idea that the painting was kind of ruined from the outset by the breasts, that there’s no mandate anymore to be like Francis Bacon or like Rembrandt. You kind of ruined any possibility for seriousness. Then the other things that are serious can sort of percolate. You know, it is one thing to have the jokey idea of it, but if you work on it for two months you’re not sitting there laughing for two months. It becomes a…I thought they were actually rather solemn in the end. I mean that happens a lot. They go from being funny to being very sad in some cases.
James Cuno:
What about kitsch? Do you recognize them as having a relationship to kitsch? If so, is that some comment on the condition of our lives?
John Currin:
My parents had that famous book, kitsch. It was like a European, mostly Marxist essays on kitsch. You know, that it is capitalism is ruining our lives and ruining our culture. I guess I am interested in kitsch with the idea of it just being an oil painter in the midst of this garbage pile of contemporary life. It doesn’t lend itself to oil painting. It doesn’t seem to lend itself to oil painting. You know, I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately with respect to Poussin as well. It occurred to me…I mean I kind of got over my upset about this by thinking about Poussin. You realized Poussin looked around himself in 1620 and just thought this sucks. It’s all been ruined. So, he would paint Arcadia from what he thought of Greece looking like. I love the idea that Poussin thought that his world had been ruined. That it was always the contemporary life is always a disappointment and that there was a golden thing from before.
I think that leads me to embrace the particular ugliness of kitsch in paintings. Also to sort of redeem it. I mean that’s exciting to me.
James Cuno:
Do you expect your public to engage in the subjects of your paintings or do you want them to look at the forms and colors and paint?
John Currin:
Well, I think all of that. I mean I think that said, the painting from Aert de Gelder, it’s like some unpronounceable name giving a sword, giving the sword to David.
James Cuno:
That’s exactly what it is.
John Currin:
I looked up the subject on Wikipedia. It’s like David was being pursued by somebody and he goes to this guy to get a…it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to know the story. To me, the story is making a painting of two people, one of whom has their face turned away from you and they’re exchanging something. This insane sword, in real life it’s beautifully done. To me, that is the subject. Now, that said, it’s not just an abstract painting. I mean there’s space, there’s a narrative but I don’t think it’s important to know the specific narratives. It might deepen your understanding of the painting but that’s not why you make a painting.
James Cuno:
Let’s continue.
John Currin:
[Daughter and Mother] I mean partly you can approach that by just the title. This is called Mother and Daughter. I thought mothers mess up their daughters. You know, so I think the combination of the title and just the obvious subject and that thing with the palate knife on the face. I don’t know. I didn’t do a good job on the irises. Anyway, that’s as close as I would get to a narrative is in the title I think.
James Cuno:
Do people ever ask for particular subjects? Do they commission you for pictures?
John Currin:
They have before but I’ve rarely done it. In one case, a friend of mine who’s a collector had asked for me to do a portrait of her. I did do a portrait but I did it in a very…I think she likes the painting but she’s sideways and there’s a still life on her head but that’s the closest I’ve come to a portrait of somebody because I was asked.
James Cuno:
Are there always sources behind the paintings?
John Currin:
[Daughter and Mother] I don’t remember what this one was. I think maybe I made this one up. I’m not sure. If there was a source it would have been ads in the back of Cosmo or that kind of thing.
James Cuno:
Mother’s Day cards.
John Currin:
It would be like cosmetic ads.
James Cuno:
Next.
John Currin:
I mean obviously that’s Lucas Cranach. I’d always love…there’s a book I read. I read a book of The Nude by Kenneth Clark, which is just a masterpiece. Reading that book started getting me interested in painting nudes for their own sake. He has a lovely description of Cranach and sort of links Cranach to non-western traditions in the nude. Like one of these dancing girls from Cambodia or something. Anyway, after I got married I kind of came back and was in a state of bliss. I thought it would be nice to make these ethereal nudes out of my head, only from circles and lines. You know, not have models. If you go to the next one, please.
[The Old Fence] These paintings came about but they were also…I mean obviously Cranach was an influence but I think more than Cranach was Hans Baldung Grien In fact, the post of the right hand figure is taken from a small drawing of Hans Baldung Grien. Then the faces I think I got them mostly from models in magazines. Can we go to the next one?
[The Pink Tree] The figure on the right is I think Leslie Anne Warren, who has this great, toothy smile. But I got very interested in making that sort of Michelin Man stomach on the right and these lovely breasts. I don’t know, just making it all up out of my head.
James Cuno:
[The Old Fence] [The Pink Tree] Were these seen as pairs, these two paintings?
John Currin:
They were in the same show, yeah. I made them at the same time.
James Cuno:
Do you ever paint on ivory, on hard surfaces or is it always on stretched canvas?
John Currin:
Always on canvas. This one does have the feeling of like it was done on a piece of marble or something. But I really only paint on canvas and I usually stain it pretty dark.
James Cuno:
So you lighten.
John Currin:
I paint dark to light.
James Cuno:
What color is that dark?
John Currin:
It’s usually a reddish brown.
James Cuno:
Why do you do that?
John Currin:
I always find it very difficult to paint on pale canvases because also whenever you paint dark on light it makes it hotter. It increases the saturation. A brown painted on white will look like bright orange. So, I find it easier to kind of come from coldness to warmth. By the same token, if you paint something light on something dark, no matter what it is it’ll look cold. If it’s yellow it will look bluish or greenish.
James Cuno:
Degas often painted dark to light. He couldn’t understand his peers, Monet and so forth, painting…
John Currin:
Well, that started in David’s Academy was painting dark on light, painting on white canvases. It’s hard to do. I mean the impressionists were the best at that. I’ve just never been able to handle it. Next.
James Cuno:
Gentileschi.
John Currin:
This is one of my…I guess it’s amazing that this painting is in this museum. He’s one of my favorite painters and his daughter is one of my favorite painters. They had a show of Orazio and Artemisia in New York five or ten years ago, which totally blew my mind. The draperies and the weirdness of the realism. He’s a magical painter and incredibly gifted. Technically, these are the best.
James Cuno:
But anchored by a clarity of composition.
John Currin:
Yeah. I guess this one is interesting also. These kind of almost dogmatic red, yellow, blue structures. You know, the subject of this, Lot and his Daughters, and Lot is such a pathetic…it really is a shameful figure. I always love Joseph in the rest on the flight to Egypt and various things. It’s always the old man who has somehow been cuckolded by God. They always have his feet doing something awkward and I think that’s true of this painting too. I like images of the humiliated old man, I guess. Let’s go to the next one.
This is a humiliated young man. I’m fond of this with my own. A number of times I’ve tried to do these red, yellow, blue color structures, which sometimes is the easier way to do it. But somehow, when you’re intending it, it’s impossible. I always come across it by accident because I went through 100 different colors for his coat. Then actually I didn’t have that knee. I couldn’t figure out what to do in that corner and that’s when I thought of bringing that knee up like that, which is pretty odd but I’m fond of it. That was me in the mirror with my knee up.
James Cuno:
This is beginning to introduce a fascination you’ve got with Courbet I think and the blondeness of that male figure.
John Currin:
He’s like a Joe Heffernan impersonator or something.
James Cuno:
But there’ll be more Courbet coming up but we should keep going. We’ve got a couple more minutes and then open it up to the audience.
John Currin:
[Patch and Pearl] Let’s move it. This is another red, yellow, blue. You know, I had done a show of pornographic inspired paintings and I thought it would be good to have some pregnancy in the same show and do a kind of right wing, pro-life narrative with hardcore pornography in it. So, I had these pictures of Europeans having sex and then pregnant women and then kids in the show. Anyway, the pregnant women I thought it would be funny to just make them pregnant by adding this medicine ball in the center. I mean my wife was…it was also…you know, I was a father and my wife was basically constantly pregnant. We’ve got a lot of kids. I also wanted to get the feeling of the surprising aspect of pregnancy. This is really happening.
James Cuno:
No going back on this one.
John Currin:
And just how shocking it is actually.
James Cuno:
At first glance, it looks as though the torso has been turned so the bottom is looking to the left and the torso is looking to the right. As opposed to a stomach it looks like it could be a bottom.
John Currin:
[Patch and Pearl] These are models from a Sears catalogs with just a ball added in the middle. I also thought much like the big breast, I thought it would be funny to make paintings in which seemingly everyone in this strange land is pregnant. Everybody’s pregnant. Next.
[Bent Lady] You know, this is another painting that was, after having seen the Gentileschi show and I also had a studio near the Chelsea Market, which sells flowers so I had an endless supply of roses. I got interested in painting things from life and introducing still life elements into my paintings and painting…I like using ads and that kind of thing and kind of remote sources. But I thought it would be interesting to combine that with something on the table that I paint from life.
That’s Courbet. You don’t have any figurative Courbet’s I don’t think. He’s my biggest hero really I think in the end.
James Cuno:
There’s a fantastic portrait that he has of his sister with a big bouquet of flowers. We have the figure and the flowers, just as you had in the previous painting that you had up.
John Currin:
Yeah.
James Cuno:
Not here.
John Currin:
Next, please.
James Cuno:
[Thanksgiving] That has a sort of Courbet-ish moment, although she’s a bit freer. Now, we have to stop for a minute because when you see these kinds of pictures, among all the sources one might think of, Norman Rockwell becomes one such source. Do you ever think about Rockwell and do you want to sort of regain…
John Currin:
[Thanksgiving] I mean I thought about Rockwell in terms of turkeys. It’s like the Rockwell turkey, it’s like that scene in The Godfather when that gangster in the white jacket is walking through Little Italy. That is kind of how I thought of the Rockwell turkey. It’s like I’m going to be Robert De Niro and kill him in the hallway or something. You know, this painting…the turkey and the flowers, I had these manneristic pictures of my wife, Rachel, sort of three ages of Rachel or something like that. Rachel was also pregnant. I started the painting when Rachel got pregnant with our first child. Actually, the funny thing is, is the painting took nine months and she had our first son days after I finished the painting. I didn’t intend it to become this nightmarish depiction of pregnancy. It’s a big turkey instead of a baby. But it kind of…I think in the back of my head maybe that was happening.
So, you know, I had been working on this painting for a while and I had a made up turkey in my head. I thought it has to be a gigantic turkey. There are no such turkeys that are that shape. You can’t find one. So, I went to ____ (77.25) and got the biggest turkey I could find. I had the shape there already on the canvas and then I just put the turkey out and fit it into the shape that I had. It was one of the most wonderful moments I’ve had as a painter was painting that turkey. Something was happening that day and I was very happy with the way that the turkey turned out.
James Cuno:
Was it like the three graces with turkey?
John Currin:
Yeah. By the way, you said the white flower was really weird too. I had gotten this white flower from Chelsea Market and it lasted like a month. I painted the flower like a month after I had it in water. It was like a super flower that wouldn’t die.
James Cuno:
But is there a source behind this painting?
John Currin:
Yeah.
James Cuno:
Is there a Renaissance picture behind this?
John Currin:
Two things, it was a little clipart thing of a granny feeding…you know, I don’t know if you know what clipart is but it’s really low budget drawings that they sell. Then there was a painting in the corner, a Vermeer painting on the wall and I dimly remembered it. Turns out it was my _________ (78.41). I had that in the back of my head for this. Next.
We probably don’t have much time.
James Cuno:
Probably another five minutes or so.
John Currin:
I put this in because it’s a masterpiece. Unfortunately, in the slide here you can’t see the shocking aspect of the color. But it’s a totally surprising painting. Just the idea of this idyllic impressionist wonderland with a bright blue one-legged man in the corner. That kind of sums up Manet is kind of an impressionist but also he’s like Goya or something.
James Cuno:
He is like Goya and he’s important too.
John Currin:
[Portrait of Chewy] I loosely associate the next painting…Portrait of Chewy it’s called. I had this painting of a pretty, nude model sitting in a chair with my little dog, Chewy, who died last year. But Chewy just had walked over to her and sat in the corner, that little black dog down there. I made this probably maybe even the same still life as in Thanksgiving. I didn’t like…it was just too much like a study nude, like an art school painting. So, I covered it over with this made up figure that’s invading your space a little bit. I didn’t intend for her to be bald but I put off putting the hair on. A lot of times I will make a bald head and then paint the hair on. Then I realized the bald head was just fantastic at the top of the painting. It’s called Portrait of Chewy because of the dog, not because of the woman. Next.
[Anna] This also got me…when I had kids your concentration is just gone forever. I had this idea of distractions and paintings. Like you can’t see…this inane still life in front of this inane woman. I thought of it as kind of a self-portrait in my mental state. Also bananas are always comedic in paintings. Also, the funny thing is it became this kind of puzzle of how I was going to have her gray streaks popping out of the top candle. You know, how I would fit the shapes together even though they’re being kind of violently imposed on the painting. Next.
Again, more still life stuff. I was also interested in kind of bad drawing as well.
James Cuno:
[Nude on a Table] Is Mantegna behind this painting?
John Currin:
[Nude on a Table] Well, it would seem so but it is a rip-off but not of Mantegna It’s of Annibale Carracci but that twist and the circling back of the arm was kind of taken from that pose. Next.
This is Guido Reni who’s really one of my favorite artists. We should move fast probably. I was really, really into Guido Reni. Let’s go to the next one. [The Conservatory] This is my painting. The idea of grays and lavenders and these kind of weird secondary colors in a painting. I’ve always been interested in Veronese but I can’t do that kind of bright color. I think Guido Reni is another artist that uses instead of red, yellow and blue, kind of orange, purple and green.
James Cuno:
In pictures like this of yours I’ve always seen ____ (83.00).
John Currin:
When I was still making my Schnabel paintings and stuff in art school it was Christian Schad was on my mind the whole time. That’s kind of what led me out of abstract was Christian Schad. Next.
This is a beautiful, beautiful painting I’d seen years ago. I think it’s called the eternal feminine. Just the idea of this blob of woman, like the nipple is like nine inches away from where it should. He’s like make a woman out of paint. Then the guys with the horns show up and the pope is there blessing her. It looks like media or paparazzi or something on the other side. I just love this idea of…there he is painting. Just the idea of that’s what happens when you paint a nude woman. It’s like the heavens split open and the chorus starts. Let’s go to the next painting, please.
[The Women of Franklin Street] It’s not from that painting but this is the same source material, this kind of Danish pornography, which is basically a lot of unattractive people having sex in really ornate European interiors. So, I loved that middle figure and this model, the model for the face and the middle figures, this odd model from Sears catalogs who has a very lovely face. It reminds me of Greek chorus boy, those weird smiles. You know, I don’t know, just something about her. Then I had live models pose for the two other figures. Then we used our weird bed. I kind of constructed this whole thing.
James Cuno:
You have that van Eyck globe.
John Currin:
Yeah, I thought of that as the male presence or like…I thought of the crockery as kind of a graveyard or skulls at the bottom of a cross, kind of a sinister presence. I wanted to have something like an angelic presence in the globe.
James Cuno:
We should do one more and then we might have some tweets that we have to address.
John Currin:
Can we just run through the next few paintings then? That’s called The Christian. That’s Jack ____ (85.53) and then what’s my next one? That’s Rachel. These are the paintings I’m working on now. Next, please. Next. Next. Oh, God. This is Dosso Dossi my favorite painter in the world and my favorite painting in the world. I mean Dosso Dossi is like my PlayStation avatar name that’s how much I like him. Next.
That’s a beautiful painting. Next.
[The Storm] This is my painting. I had made all these porn paintings and I did a show of them and then I had a lot that hadn’t worked out. My kids are growing up and they’re starting to notice that this is what dad does and everything. I felt bad about it and I couldn’t let them in my studio and all that. I thought I would kind of re-task those paintings by covering up the bad parts with more classical things. So this is a painting from four years previous. Then I had numerous models pose for this squishy nude in the front. Next.
Beautiful painting. I can’t say anything about it. It’s gorgeous. Next.
So that’s continuing with my…the bit I was saying about how I had to learn to love myself and my paintings, love my marks and everything, part of that was to accept the horrible parts of the painting underneath and end up loving…it turned out some of those crusty awful parts turned out wonderful in these paintings.
James Cuno:
Is this a re-tasked painting then?
John Currin:
[San Remo] Yes. It was a horizontal painting. You can’t see any more what’s happening, but it always reminded me of a psychiatrists’ office or something. Next.
Sorry about that one. This was…I would have models and really try to make a magnificent painting in the front. Is that the last one of mine? I think it might be. Let’s go back to Hot Pants maybe.
James Cuno:
So hot Pants was the very first one and also 10 in.
John Currin:
There we go.
James Cuno:
We have some tweets here and one is from artist F. Scott. You would have thought Fitzgerald would have been the last part of that name. It’s F. Scott Hess. Sorry. He says that visual arts training and the traditional skills are systematically and often institutionally denigrated. Do you agree?
John Currin:
That that’s what happens?
James Cuno:
Yeah. So in other words, students who were as inclined as you were to be interested in this.
John Currin:
I think he’s right. I think sometimes it’s for good reason because I think there are academies…I mean the sort of conservative art academies also…you know, sometimes when you go into those people there’s lots of very earnest people but it’s just dead. There’s something heartbreaking about these perfectly made, realistic nudes and that kind of thing. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m not sure that a kind of rigorous technical instruction can survive. I think you have to kind of find it on your own. I’m not sure that it can be systematically taught. Gerhard Richter said something interesting in one of his journals. Nobody knows how to do anything anymore and that’s the way it ought to be. Because that’s the way it is, that’s as it should be.
James Cuno:
You said something earlier maybe about Lev himself or maybe about someone else that what you benefitted from most was someone who was a kind of model of a painter, not necessarily what they painted and how they lived their life as painters.
John Currin:
I mean his studio was like what you would think…it had a parrot in a cage and it had moldy, old books. It was beautiful. It was just in an attic in a little house. But it was the first time I had seen a painter’s studio. I just thought I want to do this.
James Cuno:
One last one from here. Someone asked, John, does your success tell us that illustration is increasingly acceptable as an ingredient in fine painting?
John Currin:
Yes. I mean I think pop art is a great example of that as well. I think that our…personally, if you look through a 1950s magazine and you see this Phillips 66 ad with the guy with the gas thing and his face is shiny. You’re just like wow. They’re amazing. Or pulp book covers. It’s a kind of uniquely American art form and I think it probably reached its kind of triumph in pop art.
James Cuno:
Okay. Maybe we should have the lights up a little bit on the audience so we can see hands. Don’t be shy.
Male Speaker:
Question about technique. You were saying you work from dark to light often.
John Currin:
Yes.
Male Speaker:
What would you say the value of your canvas would be to begin with? Like 60, 70 percent dark.
John Currin:
I mean sometimes as dark as the brown shorts and probably more like the light part on the brown shorts.
Male Speaker:
So on the warmer side of dark.
John Currin:
Yeah, on the warm side. You sometime see Goya paintings where he would paint on bright orange. I tried to do that and I couldn’t do it. It made everything turn pink in the painting.
Male Speaker:
When you’re working that gray tone in the skin you were mentioning, were you working on that under tone?
John Currin:
Well, I put that on the red. For figures I would paint that on red on brown.
Male Speaker:
Thank you.
Male Speaker:
I’m interested in the relation between your work and pornography. Some of the images we’ve seen here today aren’t as extreme as some of the other paintings that I’ve seen you do. I’m interested in how you, as the artist, think about pornography either politically or…I mean we were talking about this earlier. Some of your images, if a kid had them in his lunchbox in Georgia he’d be expelled. On the other hand, there are a lot of famous artists that would have never had the freedom to paint this explicitly in the past. So, is your relationship with pornography about freedom of speech or are you commending on pornography or what?
John Currin:
I’m not commenting on pornography. I mean I’m not trying to make a point about…I don’t think I was ever trying to make a point about capitalism or commercialism or degradation or anything like that. I think the reason…I mean there’s one simple explanation really is…I mean it’s a bit embarrassing. When we first got a computer and it was after September 11 that I really started realizing you can look at the news on the computer. It’s like once you start looking on the Internet for source material instead of old bookstores and magazines and stuff there’s just an ocean of pornography. Most of what’s on the Internet is pornography. You run into a hell of a lot of pornography. That’s part of the reason is I started seeing more. Then really for me, it was…the images that I used in my paintings were evocative of Europe and I’ve always been interested in Europe socially but also European painting and the manners of European painting. I thought there was an amusing synergy between the pornographic image and the idea that these would be my opportunity to paint very pretty French paintings.
Also, at the time, I was interested in the Danish stuff because that was the time of the controversy over the Muhammad cartoons from Denmark. I felt it was…so yes, it actually was a freedom of speech issue in my own head. I don’t expect people to see this. I was upset that those cartoons were not being published in newspapers. I was interested in Denmark. I was interested in Europe from the end of the Second World War to like the ’80s and this idea of a sort of aimless, liberal or rather socialist utopia sort of running up against extremely harsh and conservative and intolerant creeds. So, that’s what it evoked for me.
Also, the pornographic images evoked for me my life before having children. It was a little bit of a funny view of my…an exaggerated view of my liberty and freedom before the responsibilities of parenthood. Also, the kind of lightheartedness of life in New York City before September 11 versus after September 11. That’s my…again, I would stress that I have no expectation that anyone would be able to read that in the painting. It’s just motivation.
Male Speaker:
Hi, John. Thanks for being here today. I had a question. I really enjoy the entrances and exits in your paintings. I think about artists like Vermeer for instance, with the red and blue there. You create these rhythm tensions for the viewer’s eye into the paintings. I was just wondering if you could speak to that process and some of the weight in the paintings.
John Currin:
I mean one thing I think…one type of image I’ve always been interested in is the Annunciation where the angel kind of comes in sideways and you have a three-quarter Madonna and he comes in to tell her the news. I always found that spatially interesting that the Madonna and the angel inhabit completely different spatial universes. I have often been interested in…also just because I grew up seeing cubist paintings and modernist paintings where the real space is made a combination of illusions and then very shallow cubist space. I do think I structure my paintings without even intending to on a kind of more of a cubist manner than like Alberti and Window Italian…like I don’t paint a room and populate it with figures. It would be that shape between the brown shorts guy and the blue hot pants guy. That sort of dagger shape, I’m interested in that sort of thing. That’s a big part of the way I structure the paintings.
Female Speaker:
I’m interested in your thoughts on success and achievement. You mentioned several times that you felt bad compared to the Old Masters but how do you feel now?
John Currin:
Bad. I mean it’s not that I feel guilty. I feel somewhat unworthy seeing my work around Old Masters. On the other hand, they’re dead and I’m alive so that’s a big advantage. You know, I think the way you…let me put it this way, I don’t know if this answers the question about success. Success is great. It’s better than not having it but I’ve often thought the way that history moves is that artists will make a kind of vulgar version of something that came before. Tiepolo made kind of a goofy, vulgar, even though they were spectacular versions of Veronese. He was obsessed with Veronese.
One thing I’ve always found interesting to think about is that Veronese was roughly the same time distance from Tiepolo, as Tiepolo is from us. So, I think that there’s certain strings that go through art history like from Rembrandt to Van Gogh to Renoir or from Velasquez to Goya to Manet. Where there’s a kind of constant vulgarization that then has its own half-life and becomes classic. While I do think my paintings obviously look kind of burlesque and silly compared to Old Master paintings, I think that will change. If they’re not forgotten that will change over time. I think there is a kind of silliness to being alive. There’s a kind of ridiculousness to existing rather than it being…that there’s a ridiculousness to painting what’s around you. There’s something and it’s unavoidable and that just sort of will fade away over time, that feeling of silliness. So, I have felt very unworthy and sort of guilty about how I’m not as good as anybody from the 18th or 19th or 16th or 15th century.
That said, I live in this world and I try to make the most beautiful thing I can, which kind of comes back to the question about academies and technique. I mean there are people with way better technique than I have but somehow there’s no joy or beauty. I would choose that over technical sophistication. Also, we live in a society and culture that doesn’t really value manual achievement. Which I don’t mean to say that that’s a terrible injustice. It just doesn’t happen in the realm of painting. Extreme technical achievement happens in the realm of biotechnology and electronics and computer programming. In a way, I don’t want to be too good. You need to reflect your culture. So, I don’t want to become too esoteric in my methods.
That said, it’s always surprising how astonishing Old Master paintings are in the flesh. I just feel that I’ve made some very beautiful things and that their relative roughness will soften with time.
James Cuno:
John, few artists are as generous with their time and as articulate with their answers to questions as you. You’ve been very, very kind this afternoon. I know there’s a couple of other people that had their hand up. Let’s take one more.
Male Speaker:
You mentioned you have discovered a blue/gray underpainting technique that made painting easier for you. I believe it was a painting of Anna where you were dealing with distraction and your mental state. Is there any analog to the underpainting discovery for your emotional state that you’ve discovered?
John Currin:
Do you mean…can you ask it again? Sorry, I didn’t quite understand.
Male Speaker:
I was wondering if you’ve discovered anything about your emotional state or psychology that is analogous to the discovery of your underpainting, which made painting easier for you.
John Currin:
Like I said, that kind of self-help feeling of trying to love. I mean the paintings where I have figure over these pornographic things was about accepting the kind of ugliness and roughness of the painting I was imposing a figure on as it’s me, therefore it’s good. Or it came from me, therefore I have to love it. I must say that the underpainting thing, I felt like I didn’t have to show my effort, which was a great…imagine a guy doing a guitar solo and he’s going like this as if it’s really hard to do, as if it’s physically hard for him to do. I kind of thought I hate that in painting when you can see the guy going like this. I wanted it to be completely serene. It’s just the way things happened, that it’s perfect ease and relaxation, even if it’s not and often it isn’t. I suppose the same thing applies to performers, to Liza Minnelli or something like that. There’s always this thing I find funny with singers. They’ll saunter over to one side of the stage and they’ll look like they’re about to trip and then they’ll catch themselves. I’ve always looked for something like that in painting as well.
Male Speaker:
Very good answer.
James Cuno:
One more.
Male Speaker:
You could probably answer yes or no. with your success, which is fantastic. I lecture about you in my classes. I mean you’re now known as a modern figurative painter. Do you think you’d ever have the freedom to go back and hybrid some of that earlier abstract expressionist stuff on the same canvas?
John Currin:
I thought about that. The paintings I’m doing now where I have these…I actually lied a little bit. Not all of those paintings are old ones that failed. I started making new failed paintings to go underneath. When I did that I realized I can kind of paint any way I want. I can paint in embarrassing…I can do secret abstract things and little cubism things. I found that that was kind of the closest I’ve come to getting back to my old pretending to be de Kooning kind of painting. That said, I feel I have to frame it metaphorically speaking, I have to present it as a figurative painting but it’s a cliché but it’s true that all painting as a large, abstract component. I think it’s not so much a principle of painting, whether it’s abstract or figurative as much as it is how a particular person, what they need emotionally from the experience. I think that’s ultimately what drew me to figurative painting. I needed the happiness of making an illusion, the delight of making the illusion of a form and especially the illusion of light falling on something. It just gives me joy. I think you will always have to follow your joy to make art. Otherwise it’s not worth anything.
James Cuno:
With that, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking John Currin.
John Currin:
Thank you.