Customer Reviews

Painting People: Figure Painting Today

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

London art historian and critic, Charlotte Mullins', extensive selection indicates just how strong the art of portraiture and the figure are in contemporary art. Particularly in light of how much drawing, and the figure in general, fell out of favour during the 20th Century.

All the big players are here: Close, Freud, Borremans, Richter, Nara etc. alongside the lesser known. The works of 80+ artists are featured, typically with two, sometimes more, representative pieces per artist, in full-colour.

The collection centres around works created in the last six years, with the artists grouped together by various themes:
The Figure Unravelled - Close, Freud, Akkerman etc.
The Urban Condition - Eggerer, Evans, Fischl...
Other Worlds - Mutu, Doig, Takano...
Folk Tales - Condo, Schutz, Howard...
The Past Deconstructed - Borremans, Brown, Xiaogang...
with all styles represented from photorealists, Neo-Expressionists, Comic-Inspired, self portraits etc.

On the copy I have the index pages appear to have shifted slightly during printing leading to the text being ghosted. However that doesn't appear to have occured elsewhere, although I'm not 100% sure about that. Also I would have preferred the details of art media, dimensions etc to have be placed alongside the piece as opposed to being collected in an appendix.

It's an interesting selection accompanied by insightful text from Mullins. It certainly provides a good foundation from which to explore the world of contemporary figure/portraiture. Although I am left with the question "Is this really the best of what's out there?" as a number of works I didn't care for. Each to their own :-)

Recommended.

This is a good overview of contemporary figure painting focusing particularly on new and emerging artists in addition to established, well known painters who are acknowledged masters of figurative work. While Close, Currin and Fischl are included, much of the book focuses on newer artists such as Anna Bjerger and Jocelyn Hobbie. The emergence of Chinese painters is not ignored, with a few also represented.

Some 68 contemporary painters are featured, divided into five categories. Additional painters are discussed in the narrative at the beginning of each style category, each with their works shown in color.

Each of the featured artists is given two pages for reproductions, all in color, and a few sentences about their work. There is also a section of biographies for each artist at the end of the book, including -- importantly -- dealer contact information. The reproductions are high quality and although they vary in size, many are full page.

While well known figurative painters such as Peyton, Yuskavage, Tuymans or Cecily Brown are included, the wide variety of figurative styles featured means that most of the book focuses on work by younger and/or lesser known artists such as Jun Hasegawa or Ridley Howard and also a carefully edited group of relative "unknowns" (but largely represented by meaningful galleries), at least to those of us who aren't able to crawl Chelsea every Saturday.

In one sense I really like this book. It has oodles of high quality images of very contemporary artists work, and lets be honest, it's hard to find good images of contemporary artists work a lot of the time. I also liked the text that prefaced each section of the book, it was well written and interesting. However, many of the artists featurerd I felt were a little sub par- that is to say, I've seen better contemporary figure painters. Some are great; Freud, Saville, Yuskagvich, Currins, but many were just not up to the level of some of the great painters featured. Plus, the text about each individual artist was very brief. Over all, i'm glad I have it, but I feel it could be a better overview of figurative painting today.

This book is a good survey of contemporary figure painting. After an introduction explaining the author's aim, namely to present those artists who paint the human figure with the idea of engaging wider themes than the mere painting of a portrait (such as implicit criticism of the violence of our society in Furnas's paintings, or the intimacy of the human being in Peyton's portraits), the author divides her book into five chapters in order to study what these wider themes are:

The figure unravelled
The urban condition
Other worlds
Folk tales
The past deconstructed.

Lavish illustrations of works by Lucian Freud, Chuck Close, Elizabeth Peyton, John Currin, Barnaby Furnas, Lisa Yuskavage, Dana Schutz, Marcel Dzama, to name but a few, are accompanied by a short text describing either the technique or the objective, or both, of each of the artists mentioned.

More an introduction than an in-depth study, this book makes for good reading and gives a fair overview of the state of contemporary figure painting, whatever your opinion is on the selected artists, of whom one may wonder if they will all stand the test of time...

This book is paired with an Odd Nerdrum book, in one of those "Better Together" promos that Amazon does. I'm not sure who decided these two books belong together. Some Amazon executive looked at the Nerdrum book, and said "here's a serious traditional realist. Let's pair his book up with a collection of cartoons."

And cartoons they are. I expected a collection of figurative works to include at least some serious works. Freud is in the collection, but beyond that, there's a load of stuff you'd see in a SoHo gallery where hype out-ranks skills. I have gone through the book three times, and have not seen a single artist I'd want to know more about.

Yes, I get modern art. I know what they're trying to do, blah blah blah, but the book was misrepresented by pairing it with a book by a realist, and further misrepresented by placing a semi-realist painting on the cover. That painting, by the way, isn't even in the book, nor does the dust jacket credit the artist. It's not representative of the book at large (I know. I know. I judged the book by the cover).

A book of figure painting would rightly include Steven Assael, Jeremy Lipking, Robert Liberace and other young greats. What it did include were over-hyped artists who can rightly be called modern artists, but not figurative painters.

I couldn't think of a single reason to keep this book, and for the first time in nearly ten years as an Amazon customer, I asked for a refund. Amazon has a very easy refund procedure, and if you've bought this book, I recommend you use it.

For those who are looking for a serious collection of figurative work, try "Strokes of Genius". I haven't seen it, but I've heard very good things about it.

Strokes of Genius: The Best of Drawing

It is so weird how someone that probably has a truly limited knowledge on contemporary painting can review a book with such a pompous complacency. If you judge the book by its cover - I am not talking about whether it is a good thing or not- you'll find that Currin's painting is quite good at representing the rest of the works inside the book when they are considered thematically. If you pursue categorizing contemporary art by considering merely its formal qualities then you'll have a hard time understanding what it's all about (probably that's why people can't find any correspondence between Currin's work and the rest). Probably that's also why this book (also as almost every other book on contemporary art) is divided into chapters on the basis of works' thematic tones. Besides all of these, a book's cover is largely designed in regard to its commercial appeal; is Currin's work "figure painting today?" yes; "is it quite sensational for being a cover?"; yes, because it is Currin.

Also a book does not have to cover the entire range of artistic production taking place in any defined period (whether it is contemporary, classic or whatever it is). So judging a book that targets such an extensive subject with reference to the absence of Steven Assael, Jeremy Lipking, Robert Liberace (whom I personally think that quite are out of the league of the artists that are presented in this edition) or anyone of your liking seems a little bit erroneous.(For instance, if it was a book on Neo-Dada I might understand someone making such a fuss if there is no Rauschenberg in it, but in this case it seems to be plain nonsense.)

Anyway;
This book does not have comprehensive writings on the artists that are included but it is quite successful in assembling a wide array of contemporary painters that gets more recognition each day by juxtaposing them to already widely admired ones. There is not so many books on contemporary painting that serves as a collection of this sort which deals with artists that otherwise might be overlooked; furthermore there are not so many books that focuses on contemporary painting at all (except the ones that concentrates solely on one artist, such as Doig, Dumas, Saville.) So I dearly appreciate any initiative in publishing on this subject even if it truly (which in this case it is not as such) sucks. Strongly recommended.

I am always interested in artists whose work includes the human figure. I bought this book without seeing the contents, but figured that with a John Currin on the cover it had to be good. It did include a good range of artists, but I was disappointed to see some of the images. It seemed like the author selected PG versions of the paintings or at least the more PG work by many of the artists.

Very current (mostly) and well presented.

Favorites; Eric Fischl, Lucian Freud, Chuck Close, John Currin,Barnaby Furnas

Steven Gefrom

Geez, a couple of the other reviewers are complaining the cover of this art book is misleading. Didn't somebody teach them in grade school you cannot judge a book by its cover?

John Currin is only one of at least a dozen artists featured in this book. So there is a lot of different kinds of painting featured here, so if you only like classical portriature or very realistic painting, you are in the wrong place! This is for lovers of contemporary art, including some of the current greats, ie Cecily Brown, Yan Pei-Ming, etcetera and so on.

While not exactly an exhaustive or investigative feature on contemporary figurative painting, it does hit up a lot of the big names right now and the reproductions are very nice. Each artists gets two or three pages. I would have prefered more. But this modestly sized book is very pretty and fun to flip through and make comparisions.

Charlotte Mullins is a highly respected British art critic and historian and her contribution to the milieu of figurative painting today is a major one. This book, PAINTING PEOPLE: FIGURE PAINTING TODAY, manages to give enough information about various approach to the figure, including the fusion of vision of artists with societal atmosphere at present to make it an immediately indispensable volume for students and art lovers and collectors. She writes very well and manages to stay comfortably away from the Artspeak that so often alienates the casual viewer. For that she is to be heartily congratulated: this book is readable even without images!

The best part of Mullins' writing is the segments she places beside the many images that generously flood the pages of this finely designed and produced volume. Readers who know the artists well may take exception to some of her 'diagnostic thoughts' about the meaning of some of the paintings, but at least she is making the attempt to pull the viewer into the paintings rather than simply posting images. Unfortunately the sizes of the paintings in this book are not listed, a factor that many seem unimportant to some, but when discussing the potency of standing in the presence of, say, the works of Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville, of Lucien Freud, size matters: the impact of the figures that are larger than life makes a difference on how they are perceived.

Anyone involved even tangentially with the artists who paint the figure may take exception to many of the artists included in this selection and be even more amazed at the paucity of the many giant figurative artists from the USA: listing the artists not included here would be an entire other book. And on the other hand, while it is informative to be exposed to the myriad types of artists Mullins does include, the quality of many of them beg indulgence with the company they keep! But here is an opportunity to study the thoughts of a well regarded critic about the current status of figurative painting, and for those of us who have been champions of figurative art for decades, this book is gratifyingly comprehensive. At least the Figure is being discussed in depth, even if too many of the artists who have devoted their lives and careers to the figure on canvas are ignored. Grady Harp, May 10