Customer Reviews

Paint Made Flesh

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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, April 10

The Saville painting on the front page is nice, the Freud and the Fischl pics are also nice figurativ paintings(4-5 pictures all together). That's all. Pictures are very small. I wouldn't buy it again as a painter.