Currin creates buzz at Whitney

Deemed "this season's major conversation piece" by The New Yorker, the John Currin retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art tries hard to be provocative, and it succeeds to the extent that it parades existing stereotypes and recognized taboos.

Currin's paintings of extraordinarily big-breasted women have received a great deal of attention. In "The Bra Shop," Currin depicts two women with huge breasts, one measuring the bra size of the other. Whereas the paint on their faces is raised and thick, slopped on with a palate knife, their breasts are perfectly smooth orbs and their bodies are flawless.

In another series, Currin takes on a different male obsession — models. With names like "Crippled" and "Heartless," Currin's paintings exploit a familiar conception — that models don't have souls. The subject of the latter, with her enigmatic smile and beautifully textured dress, subtly motions to her chest, where the shape of a heart is cut out of her dress, exposing her skin. The former looks like a model in a magazine advertisement, her hair windswept and her smile wide, beckoning the viewer with her laugh. Only in the corner of the painting does her cane protrude, creating an unlikely and scathing image.

The first room of the exhibit is filled with unflattering, caricatured portraits of middle-aged women. "Ms. Omni" is a classic New York type, a Park Avenue socialite, whose biography one can easily deduce: divorced, wealthy and emotionally cold – except to her purse-sized dog. She's bony, sagging and yet strangely elegant.

Twelve years ago, Kim Levin, the art critic for the Village Voice, urged her readers to boycott Currin's first solo gallery show. Citing the press release, in which Currin referred to his own work as "paintings of old women at the end of their cycle of sexual potential . . . between the object of desire and the object of loathing," Levin dismissed Currin's "awful" paintings as misogynistic, sexist and ageist.

She has been justifying her remarks ever since. In her recent review of Currin's Whitney show, Levin concedes that Currin doesn't have issues with women, but is "an equal opportunity employer of the mocking image."

Yes, there is the painting of a gay couple depicted in stereotypical fashion as a pair of domestics operating their new kitchen appliance with delight. Currin also turns his mocking eye away from women with his paintings of older men in seventies attire, flanked by bugeyed blonde ingénues. However, these few male cameos are overwhelmed by walls and walls of parodied women — the old, sagging socialites; the models; the women with dirigible breasts; the faux Northern Renaissance nudes.

"John Currin" is at the Whitney through Feb. 22nd. Student tickets are $9.50 with Student ID, except on Friday evenings when admission is "pay what you wish." The museum is located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street.