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The pictures that first got Currin noticed were more edgy than reassuring--imaginary portraits of older women, angular and wind sheared, urbanely dressed and fending off, with mixed results, the ravages of time. They were simple, awkwardly painted and perfectly calculated to offend feminist sensibilities. When the critic of the Village Voice took the bait and urged her readers to boycott Currin's first solo exhibition, in 1992, bingo, a star was born! The art world may be less politically correct now, but rendering women as sex kittens or, worse, as sexless hags, is still not something male artists can get away with easily. So the wall cards at the Whitney strain to assure us that Currin fully intended to emphasize the dignity of these women. But the pictures, as pictures will be, are a good deal more ambiguous. It's hard not to notice that Ms. Omni looks a fair bit like Lyndon Johnson in drag, which may not be the most dignified way for anybody to look.
By the mid-'90s Currin had moved on to his Russ Meyer phase. In canvases like The Bra Shop or Jaunty and Mame, pneumatic women admire one another's bodacious ta-tas. Although the bodies are rendered smoothly, the faces are roughed up with a palette knife, a gesture that one assumes is meant to frustrate the viewer's enjoyment of the picture as cartoon erotica. Then something happened. Currin put aside the bad-painting pose and started to paint with genuine aplomb. His charms still rested strongly on the warmth of our feelings for the great paintings he was copying, but sometimes he could sublimate the old master references deeply enough and impose the kitsch perspective subtly enough to produce a mesmerizing formation of paint like Heartless, a woman with a heart-shaped opening cut above the waistline of her dress.
In the past several years Currin's work has taken another turn, toward genre scenes, mostly satires of the upper classes at leisure. If the follies of suburban wives are what you're looking for, then Stamford After-Brunch is just for you: a trio of young women sharing cigars and martinis in a nicely appointed living room. Outside their window, beyond their notice, the bare ruined choirs of winter loom. Three women together is a notion with long-standing cultural power. (Are they Graces? Fates? Witches?) And it's true that Currin's descriptive powers with paint are growing all the time. But is he content these days simply to tell jokes about the upper classes who buy his work?
Almost three decades after the death of Fairfield Porter, we could use a decent genre painter again, somebody who can fix a nuanced image of contemporary life that is good enough to compete with The Simpsons. (I hope I'm not setting the bar too high here.) But it would have to be somebody whose gifts extended beyond satire and irony. Currin has the technical skills. What he still seems to lack is the emotional range. For now there are wide registers of feeling that are beyond his scope. Now and forever? That's up to him.