Paint Made Flesh

In Collaboration with Frist Art Museum

by Mark Scala (Editor)

In Paint Made Flesh , expressive figuration is considered as a reflection of artists' responses to such topics as identity, sexuality, and mortality, and as a symptom of a broader spectrum of social and political attitudes shaping Western culture since World War II. It features art from the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, countries that have since the 1950s produced many artists who use paint as a metaphor for flesh in all its aspects. It will also consider contemporary artists whose works move from a national to a global stage in terms of meaning and style.

The book has been developed to accompany an early 2009 exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, which will include paintings by artists like Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud, Pablo Picasso, and Julian Schnabel from private collections and museums around the world. Paint Made Flesh will feature approximately forty color plates and approximately fifty other illustrations, and four essays by major art historians.

Susan Edwards's essay "The Influence of Anxiety" considers works by American artists active from the 1950 to the 1970s, including Willem de Kooning, Leon Golub, Philip Guston, and Alice Neel, as responses to social conditions and the expressive limitations of late Modernism. Emily Braun's "Skinning the Paint" looks at the work of British painters Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Frank Auerbach, and its legacy in the painting of Jenny Saville and Cecily Brown. The title refers to the way these artists use a knife both to strip the skin or surface of the figure and to build up new layers of epidermis, comprising a metaphor for the dialectic between psychological and physical aspects of being.

Richard Shiff's "Drawn on the Body" discusses German artists such as Georg Baselitz, Markus Lupertz, and Albert Oehlen, whose gestural paint application is seen as both an extension and critique of the notion of a national heritage distinctly tied to Expressionism. The final essay, Mark Scala's "Fragmentation and Painterly Figuration Since 1980," examines ways that artists like Wangechi Mutu, Daniel Richter, and John Currin posit a transmutation of identity-personal, cultural, and sexual-that is today mirrored in images of the body. Instead of asking the question of the traditional figure "Who are we?" these artists are more concerned with the question "Who will we become?"

Genres: Art

160 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2008

Reviews

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the More Interesting and Intelligent Exhibitions Circulating

PAINT MADE FLESH is a catalogue and as a catalogue it serves as a reminder of just how outstanding was this exhibition curated by Mark Scala for the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, TN, The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York. The catalogue will stand as a fine reference book for students and aficionados of contemporary art long past the closure of the exhibition tour. In content, design, and illustration it is one of the finest sources of information about painting today.

In his masterful Introduction Scala shares his concept for curating this particular boy of artists: 'How is it possible for paint to be so vitally perverse, so rich with emotions, desires, frustrations, with layers of nihilistic fury and overripe beauty? I still shake my head at that.' 'PAINT MADE FLESH considers the depicted boy as a metaphor for the relationship between self and society as it has changed throughout the decades following World War II.' But he follows this with a series of essays that are models of art information: Susan H. Edwards writes 'The Influence of Anxiety: Painting the Figure in Cold War America'; Emily Braun shares 'Skinning the Paint'; Richard Schiff writes 'Drawn on the Body: Neo-Expressionism in Germany'; and Mark Scala concludes the written portion of the catalogue with 'Fragmentation and Reconstitution: Painterly Figuration since 1980'. The writing is scholarly but immensely readable for every level of art lover. The illustrations used in these articles include many paintings by the artist in the exhibition - and usually far better examples than the actual images that toured with this exhibition sadly. Would that all of the images been available for viewing in this excellent survey.

But the paintings represented in the show are all catalogued at the end of the book and they are offered in excellent color reproductions. There are many artists we would expect to see in this survey of PAINT MADE FLESH: Francis Bacon, Ivan Albright, Willem de Kooning, Alice Neel, Lucian Freud, Joan Brown, Francesco Clemente (represented here with a magnificent 'Self-Portrait with Two Heads'), Eric Fischl (his haunting 'Frailty is a Moment of Self-Reflection') are among those without whom this collection would be incomplete. There are wondrous artists whose output is brilliant but who are represented with less then their best paintings: Jenny Saville, so well represented in the essays here has only one piece that does not show her genius, Cecily Brown's two paintings are not at all her finest, and the inclusion of Philip Guston and Susan Rothenberg and a few others does not make goo curatorial sense. But that is a small matter when the collection does include some artists who are only now growing in familiarity in the US - the very exciting Daniel Richter (German, born 1962), Michaël Borremans (Belgian, born 1963), Albert Oehlen (a 'post-non-representational' German, born 1954), and Wangechi Mutu (Kenya, born 1972). Other artists in this show are Baselitz, Diebenkorn, David Park, Picasso, Kossoff, Auerbach, AR Penck, Markus Lüpertz, Schnabel, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, and Tony Bevan. It is a wide variety of artists and each makes a strong impact on the tenor of the exhibition - even those works that are not the among the finest of each artist: curators have limitations as to gaining access to certain paintings form museum, galleries and collectors!

In the end PAINT MADE FLESH is a fine book and one that deserves a place in every library of every art school along with those intelligently collected libraries of art lovers everywhere. Highly Recommended!

Grady Harp

[Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yay Dad!