Lost Among the Figures

By ROBERT HUGHES

At the Whitney, confused reflections on the body aesthetic

The aim of "Focus on the Figure," a show of some 50 paintings that opened last month at the Whitney Museum in New York, is to put in perspective the developments in American figurative art over the past two decades. It begins with Pop art, with its images of commercial representation; it takes in artists like Alex Katz and Larry Rivers, makes a bow to de Kooning's women, and then sets up some large-scale American realist art from the '70s, contrasted with the perverse and gritty fantasies of Chicago School artists like Jim Nutt and Ed Paschke. From there, it goes to the various neo-and pseudoexpressionist variants that fill the galleries today. It is a weak anthology with some good art in it; in terms of coherent art history, it is a shambles. The curator, Barbara Haskell, has neither thought her subject through nor wangled enough space to display it properly. Yet the show eerily mirrors much of the current confusion over what the "figurative" tradition in modern American art may be, where it lies, and what its relation to abstract art is.

In the 1960s abstraction was all, and figure painting was out of style; the code phrase for this was "historically impossible," as though history itself--rather than a group of curators, critics and dealers--were engaged in majestically dictating what should be seen. In the 1980s, bored half to death by the austerities of minimalism, a now much larger (though not necessarily smarter or wiser) group of art consumers wants recognizable images and fictions of involvement; so we are inundated by painting that makes reference to the human figure. This is "historically inevitable." Impossible, inevitable: it only goes to show what a flighty tart that old muse of history can be.

There is, however, a strand of painting that tends to miss out at both ends. It employs the human figure neither as a cooled-out sign linked to the imagery of mass media--like Katz, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Robert Longo--nor as a generalized hieroglyph for "expressionist" feeling, as in de Kooning or the new German painters. Such painting wants to inspect and describe the body as a real object in the world, in all its resistances, its actualities, its peculiar landscapes of pit and pore and hair. It wants to move outward from that to see its social relations and, perhaps, its allegorical uses, but it is invariably tied to some conception of realism. This is the painting that always gets condescendingly rediscovered when people talk about "realist revivals."

The best of it is done in Europe, by artists like Lucian Freud or Avigdor Arikha. But it has some formidable practitioners in America: Alfred Leslie, Philip Pearlstein, Gregory Gillespie and Jack Beal, plus some lesser ones also represented in the show--Alice Neel, for instance, who draws in a woefully clumsy fashion, but is at least interested in painting writers, collectors, her fellow artists and drag queens as real creatures in social space. Mannerisms abound in this company. Some of them are recognizably "modern," like Pearlstein's photographic cropping of the figure, done to set up an enhanced tension between the waxy-skinned bodies and the edges of the canvas. Others have to do with marks of the past. One thinks of Gillespie's immaculately tense quattrocento surface; Beal's stubborn use of Baroque allegorical forms, clothed in blue denim; or, most convincing of all. Leslie's defiantly magniloquent homages to Caravaggio and David, with pink, corn-fed flesh licked by brusque, sweaty highlights. Such painters really do "focus on the figure" instead of generalizing about it. They have younger progeny too--but they are not in the show.

Instead, Curator Haskell shies away from an extended consideration of realism and concludes the show with a wobbly, panning shot over the horizons of SoHo and 57th Street. This last part is a mess. It contains one genuinely interesting artist, Susan Rothenberg, whose stripped, ineloquent drawing and gracelessly outlined shapes convey an anxiety about the difficulty of depiction that slips from pathos into something verging on fright. Rothenberg is trying to salvage a way of presenting the human figure that owes nothing to mass media, that comes out of painting alone, abstract painting included. Her effort lends images like The Smoker, 1978-79, their peculiar intensity as unconventionalized, small signs for extreme states.

But against Rothenberg's dogged involvement with the figure, Haskell has seen fit to include the garrulous decor of Robert Kushner's sequin-and-cartoon hangings, the stylish Chirican pastiches of Jedd Garet, some fatuously inept fight scenes by Richard Bosman, and a mass of other superfluities. The muddle is enough to suggest Haskell had only a vague idea of where the exhibition was heading, so that too many contradictory "directions" got pitched in. The show takes on a flatly promotional cast in the final room, which presents as the climax of American figuration the work of the two most hyped small talents of the moment: Julian Schnabel and David Salle.

Salle likes to contrast styles of representation--a nude on one color panel, done in a washy, True Romance manner, set against quotes from a comic book or geometric abstraction on another. It is pale, knowing and rather flaccid stuff. To call it a cross between late Picabia and early Rosenquist makes it sound better than it looks, but those are the sources, along with a bit of art-school conceptualism. If Salle is unoxygenated, Schnabel huffs and puffs. He does clogged, slimy paintings on velvet and thick rhetorical ones covered in broken plates--an idea he got from the benches of Gaudi's Gueell Park in Barcelona. Both kinds are full of pseudo intensities, fictions of violence and markers for a "profundity" that is not there. Schnabel quotes the human figure but has no curiosity about it; it is just one more conventional sign.

Haskell, apparently, takes this complacent mime of expressionist anxiety for the real thing--"no wonder," her text exclaims, "that art for art's sake has come to seem irrelevant." In fact, there was never more of it around, and this show is drenched in it. This suggests a skein of disclosures about our present entropy, but uncovering them requires a hardheaded attitude to fashion--and above all, a properly argued dismissal of modernist pieties about abstraction vs. figuration. The Whitney offers neither. Back, then, to the drawing board.

--By Robert Hughes

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