Word: painterly
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DESIGNING WOMEN: Painter John Currin knows how to sell his vision of art and trash...
...soft, pillowy porn, then working them into more conventionally scaled nudes and lately scattering them into satires of life among the well dressed and well fed. His art-history references come from all over--Botticelli, Mantegna, Courbet--but a favorite is the nudes of Lucas Cranach, the Northern Renaissance painter whose high-waisted women with elongated limbs step toward us with strange, awkward footsteps...
...Boom Room." It's just hard not to think of it that way, and not only because so many of Currin's paintings are of women with breasts so large you want to yodel from one to the next. (It's a safe bet that he's the only painter of note ever to rate a review in Juggs magazine. A rave, of course.) But there's another kind of boom boom that Currin also brings to mind these days. It's the steady pounding of hype. At 41, with a measure of talent and no shortage of sheer cunning...
Currin can make an easy target, a balloon just waiting for a pin. In interviews he doesn't hesitate to name himself as the best artist in Manhattan or to theorize in his lofty, jejune way. (One of his latest conclusions is that American painters have never manifested "the will to make a masterpiece"--which would have come as news to Jackson Pollock, to say nothing of the thundering landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church.) But whatever his merits as a thinker, as an entrepreneur Currin is doing fine. With his wife Rachel Feinstein, a sculptor whose high forehead and pert...
Gauguin is more to us than a great painter. He's our ultimate escape artist, the stockbroker who hightailed it to the breadfruit and warm surf and nipples of the South Seas, where his palette and his libido flourished, the man who said no to civilization and really meant...