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Canadian Art International: Lieber Maler, male mir...

“Dear Painter, paint me…”
Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna

The relevance of figurative painting as an art form is an aged and tiresome question. At least this is the suggestion of “Lieber Maler, male mir…,” an exhibition of 18 painters from 20th-century and contemporary practice. The inclusion of only four female painters—Elizabeth Peyton, Sophie von Hellermann, Katrin Plavcak and Carole Benzaken—is an unfortunate and misleading curatorial decision, but the exhibition nevertheless conveys postwar figurative painting’s struggle and survival.

The point of departure for Lieber Maler…” is the late work of Francis Picabia, who once wrote, “The painter makes a choice, then imitates his choice, the deformation of this constitutes Art.” Picabia’s paintings from the 1940s characterize various strategies of rupture, appropriation, distortion and eclecticism that emerge within the exhibition. His unambiguous relationship with modernism (he rejected modernism and avant-gardism outrightly) may be the greatest influence of his oeuvre. Although often described as a self-indulgent and self-imposed outsider artist, Picabia had a method and poetics to his resistance. Influenced by the writings of Nietzsche, his work questioned Western aesthetics and its categorizations of beauty and ugliness, the pure and impure. Picabia rejected traditionalist painting, and the exhibition features his intentionally amateurish pornographic nudes, which have proved to be a source for new painting.

What follows directly, however, are works by Bernard Buffet, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke and Alex Katz—all of whom continued to paint figuratively, whether with resistance or not, while other genres of art making dominated. The German Kippenberger’s work has had the greatest impact (this exhibition is titled after an exhibition he mounted in 1981). His oscillation between figuration and abstraction, his attack on myths of the artist and his interventionalist-like approach to painting (hiring illustrators to make his pictures, for example) left a deep impression on contemporary painting.

Most of the 13 contemporary artists paint from popular culture but, while doing so, avoid the trappings of pop art. Their use of imagery from magazines, cinema, even literature, results in a variety of directions, influenced by a plethora of sources. Three typify the approach especially: Luc Tuymans, Neo Rauch and Peter Doig. Tuymans’s paintings (based on medical journal photographs of invalids) are a superimposition of the photographic index—a cold, scientific, non-auratic gaze—with the iconic nature of painting. His enigmatic and strangely melancholic pictures declare that this kind of image, in its complexity and criticality, can only be accomplished through painting.

Rauch is from the former East Germany and he manipulates a once-dominant socialist realism within an illustrative, sometimes cinematic style, often including his self-portrait struggling with surrounding forms of art history and communist detritus. Pompidou curator Alison Gingeras, in the exhibition catalogue, raises the question that his work is an “allegory for the lack of reconciliation between Modernism and Realism.” However, a sense of freedom and playfulness with the nostalgia and weight of history also informs his work.

Doig’s paintings are the most striking on view and they come from an urgent place of resistance—his formative years are the 1980s—exemplifying a poetic atmosphere that is shaped by the powerful plasticity of the medium. Somehow, a serenity emerges from his whirlwind of sources and influences, with visual plays on Romanticism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism and Pointillism. Doig is one of the few real masters in this exhibition, especially in the fact that the painted whole dominates his pictures rather than the figure itself.

An interesting exclusion is British painter Francis Bacon, who would have fit this grouping. Yet his absence clearly highlights a new strategy for figurative painting, one that eschews Bacon’s blunt nihilism, that declares, instead, an optimism toward and within painting. As a whole, the exhibition characterizes a freedom that is emerging from an educated relinquishment of the weight of art history.

Spring 2003

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