When John Currin rose quickly to prominence in New York during the middle 1990's, his early works of large breasted crudely painted women created a storm of outrage among many critics. Along with Lisa Yuskavage and Elizabeth Peyton, Currin shot to the forefront of a movement inspired in part by Hockney and Alex Katz. Yet unlike his contemporaries, Currin has taken a series of steps towards proclaiming himself as both a serious and thoughtful artist of his day.

To understand Currin fully, you must start with a couple of artists practicing a generation before him. In many ways both Hockney and Katz typified the high art of "bad painting1." Both artists were very young on the eve of postmodernism. The art world had for years previously been concerned with the Greenburg/Duchampian ideals that championed forms of abstraction or a progressive lineage. The figurative style that these two artists grappled with were at the time seen as taboo, or against the grain. Painters were more concerned with splattering paint onto the canvas and talking about how this represented their souls malcontent or an intellectual belief.

In the 1960's, Hockney created a vast number of quick drawings and paintings based themselves perhaps on outsider art and Mattise to some extent. These works thrived on childish techniques that contained the raw essentials of a definable narrative. Hockney's responsive drawings in many ways show the terrible pressure put onto young artists to conform with their times. The quick loose jagged mark making that you can find in a Hockney work is very representative of De Kooning. Only Hockney was bringing these drawings back from pure abstraction, the opposite direction De Kooning had traveled in.

As part of a young group of artists emerging out of London grappling with the figure, these artists sought not realism, but an emotional raw effusion of tactility. The punk movement of the 1970's, the pared down chords and hard driving messy style of the Ramones would be a good analogy to what these artists were attempting to capture, only it was with pen and a paint brush instead of a guitar.

Currin has come a long way over a decade that has seen his art morph from simple portrature to paintings such as the one above that play with the figure, composition, color, photo based painting, and the application of the paint itself.

An iconic swimming pool painting by Hockney, early 70's

"a neat lawn" by David Hockney, 1967