[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: December 7, 2009]
There could hardly be two more contrasting exhibits to visit in one day than the ravishing lesson in Cretan religious iconography at the Onassis Cultural Center and Paul McCarthy's vigorous debasing of the Snow White legend at Hauser and Wirth.
Scroll down for Paul McCarthy.
The curatorial impetus of the Onassis show is to illustrate the influence of fourteenth and fifteenth century iconography from the churches and monateries of Crete on the artistic development of favorite son El Greco. That local religious art should have impressed the young Theotokopoulos is hardly a startling proposition, but this exhibit helpfully shows not only the weight of the influence, but also El Greco's ability to shrug it off and find modern forms for his profoundly traditional Christian sensibility.
The gallery positively glows: these largely anonymous Cretan masters were fond of gold leaf as a background to the scenes they model in richly colorful egg tempura. Themes repeat of course - crucixifions and entombments and pietàs, not to mention the lactating Virgin with wildly stylized breasts sprouting from her shoulders in an orgy of desexualization. Perspective is largely flat, and as great attention is given to detailing buildings and landscapes in the supposed distance as figures in the foreground. Facial expressions are stylized too, taken it seems from a common stock of images. Occasionally the almost notational approach becomes silly - St George slays many dragons here, most of them the size of terriers, simply because everyone knows the story and the dragon is one of the least important features of the picture.
These remote works can be vehicles for the conveyance of emotion nonetheless. An anonymous, uncluttered mid-fifteenth century pietà emits boundless sorrow.
In the early works by El Greco shown here, painted on wood and some badly damaged, the forms of iconography suddenly take on life. Figures are individualized rather than stylized, gestures become psychologically rather than just symbolically expressive, and devices such as cherubs begin to be reduced to painterly punctuation marks. An entombment, painted by in the artist's early twenties on a piece of curved wood, explodes with animation and color. There is also an opportunity to see a great treasure from the later Toledo years shown in New York for the first time, the instantly recognizable "Coronation of the Virgin." A number of the works by the Cretan masters are also traveling for the first time. An exceptional show, and there's plenty of time to visit and re-visit: at the Onassis Center through the end of February, 2010.
Paul McCarthy, "White Snow"
I just happened to visit the McCarthy show on the Upper East Side after viewing the works by El Greco, and it's not a good pair of shows to combine. McCarthy's determinedly smutty show, though, does have its merits. Passing a warning that this is not for the children, one finds a series of large format works on paper - drawing/collages - spread through two galleries. The theme is Snow White and the seven dwarves, taken straight from Disney rather than Grimm, and a meditation on the consequences of thoroughly eroticizing the relationship of the latter with the former.
Snow White becomes a luscious fantasy figure; the rampant horniness of the dwarves is given visual expression through the addition of outsized genitalia - and rather as the lactating Virgin finds a boob growing from her upper arm, so the dwarves find their throbbing members springing from various parts of their cartoon bodies. I believe it's Dopey who has a penis nose.
McCarthy's motives are hammered home by the selection of magazine covers and pages collaged over his drawings of erethism and copulation. From Farrah Fawcett to Miley Cyrus to anonymous nude models - often seen in gynaecological close-up - McCarthy rubs our noses in the compulsive, frenetic urge of our culture to sexualize everything to the point of pornography. This would be an unremarkable message, perhaps better conveyed in a letter to the editor, were it not for the free, uninhibited vigor of McCarthy's drawing, his enthusiasm for filling every corner of the pictorial space with outrage and/or information. Ironically, a show doubtless designed to shock offers as much formal pleasure as intellectual stimulation. Worth a look, especially if you are, like, totally over the fact that people have mouths and genitals which occasionally interlock to mutual benefit.
At Hauser and Wirth through December 24.
