There are usually a half dozen successes in the art world every few years who can be called figurative artists. When I use that word I mean artists who both work from the motif, and whose work looks like the motif.
We now have at least three generations of English figurative artists whose success has depended on their figures being ugly, loathsome, and still looking to the layman as though these artists were skillful. I usually don't bother with them. When I have finally seen a show and realize what and where their limitations are, I forget about them. But, today, I looked at the art world for a few minutes through the eyes of a young, well trained, and thus far conventional artist. She is most excited by this sort of work, most especially when it is done by a woman. If women's bodies are invaded, their femininity or sexuality degraded, then she finds the work particularly good[cool]. I don't think this is because she is a silent masochist, but because she sees power in a woman doing this and she wants that power for herself.
I have nearly three strikes against me. I am a man, I paint nudes [although also an occasional male nude], and I am definitely over 30.. But I see power in the nude person, woman or man. While I do not believe that all nudes should be sexually impressive as their major function, it is one of the functions which interest me. The tension between the model and artist during the duration of the pose and its reflection in the canvas is an important part of most of my nudes. I am also interested in the tropes available to an artist in the painting of a nude. These do not include, for me, any tropes which care for the degradation of the model, or for the uglification of the posing figure. In the case of a specific narrative need, I could see the value of one or the other of those, but I have never chosen such a theme, and I doubt that anyone is likely to offer me such a commission[nor would I accept one].
One of the peculiarities of the situation is that each one of these artists, as they painting their paintings manages to make pictures which make no pictorial sense. There is no way of negotiating the spaces and figures in their work. One would think that someone who wished to show life as raw, and even rawer than natural, would care about the space in which their blocks of meat could exude confidence into their large, contaminated spaces. But none of these people seem to be able to do that, especially, when they are mature and should be working at their very best.
Surely Goya did it for most of his life, and the atrocities of Callot are full of vivacity, life, light and air. The prisons scenes of Piranesi are usually admired as his very finest work, Judith with the Head of Holofernes is usually thought of as Artemisia Gentileschi's finest work. The various rape scenes by renaissance and baroque masters usually leave us saddened by the fate of a classically pure and volumetric protagonist or at least a naturalistic, larger than life sized one..
I think that the current desire to make uglification the norm has a 20th century history. All of the artists who, as card carrying Communists felt that they should show their models [none of them in Russia, of course] look uglier and uglier as denizens of this wildly entrepreneurial place, where socialism is not practiced. So we got the work of Jacob Landau, Lonard Baskin, Renato Guttuso, Robert Gwathmey [with his black people in cubist cages], Bruno Caruso, Ben Shahn. These are the true formal and philosophical ancestors of out current monster makers.
So, if I were Saatchi, I would be worried about the potential for all of these artists he has supported to show up with bomb in hand, one of these days to carry out the implied terrorism in their work.
Love,
Gabriel
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