Figurative art takes a radical turn

By J.U-S.

FOR MICHAEL ARMITAGE, art history comes with a sting in the tail. The yellow-green foliage of “#mydressmychoice” (2014) recalls the exotic island scenes painted by Paul Gauguin; the reclining black nude assumes the same pose as Diego Velázquez’s famous Rokeby Venus. Then the viewer notices the men’s shoes intruding at the top—and considers the title: #mydressmychoice is the hashtag protesters used after men stripped and assaulted a woman in Nairobi for wearing a miniskirt.

In “Kampala Suburb” (2014), meanwhile, two men kiss beneath a frieze whose details recall the firing-squad works of Francisco de Goya and Édouard Manet. Uganda’s attempts to add the death penalty to its already stringent anti-homosexuality laws inspired the work. The disconcerting paintings of Mr Armitage, a Kenyan-born artist who divides his time between Nairobi and Britain, are among the most striking in “Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium” at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

The show brings together ten figurative artists—six of them women—for whom the body is a subject of interest and experimentation. Figures are often broken up or distorted. Cecily Brown offers only glimpses of limbs and shapes amid energetic brushstrokes. Her “Maid’s Day Off” (2005), for instance, is a teasingly playful name for an essentially abstract work. In “Casually Cruel” (2018), Christina Quarles’s surreal exploration of her mixed-race, queer identity, body parts are trapped in a hedge. “Between the drawing and the finished painting, the figure turns into something quite different,” says Lydia Yee, the show’s curator.

Mr Armitage’s art-historical references are not accidental. Ms Yee has been careful to choose artists well-versed in the Western tradition. One looks back to Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel; others to the shipwrecks of Théodore Géricault or Eugène Delacroix; and others still to German Expressionists such as Max Beckmann. “All these artists are in dialogue with that history,” says Ms Yee. For the viewer one of the joys of the exhibition is seeing what they do with it.

The last time figurative painting made headlines was as part of a wider debate in the 1980s over whether painting itself was dead. With photography on the rise, in 1981 the Royal Academy mounted “A New Spirit in Painting”, an exhibition that took issue with both powerful New York taste-makers, who insisted that, to be any good, painting had to be abstract, and others who wrote it off entirely. Curated by Norman Rosenthal, the show introduced British audiences to now-famous German painters such as Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer. Critics were unimpressed at the time, but “A New Spirit” is now considered a game-changer.

The exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery—and well as other shows such as Tate Britain’s forthcoming survey of work by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—inevitably raise questions about figurative art today. For example, how might it be different from the 1980s, when, as Mr Rosenthal noted recently, “there probably were a lot of women painters, but there seemed very few”?

The “Radical Figures” artists are clearly more diverse. Just as striking is their desire to engage with social and political concerns. The new generation wants to be part of conversations about sexuality and gender, race, the colonial legacy and immigration. Daniel Richter’s “Tarifa”, for instance, uses intense glowing colour to suggest a view of refugees in a dinghy through military night-vision cameras. Dating from 2001, the picture still disturbs. In the 1990s young artists would most likely have turned to video or photography to engage with such subjects, yet for a significant strand today their preferred medium is paint.

In the canvases of Dana Schutz, an American painter, art-historical references come thick and fast. The odd couple in “Imagine You and Me” (2018) and the tangle of legs in “Suspicious Minds” (2019) nod most strongly to Philip Guston, who stunned the New York art world in 1970 with a return to figuration. Out went the delicate abstract expressionist canvases he was feted for. In came strange, cartoonish, chain-smoking Ku Klux Klan members.

In an essay printed in the catalogue, Ms Yee quotes Guston on the reasons for his shift. “I got sick of all that purity,” he said. “I wanted to tell stories.” Directly or indirectly, those stories were about the civil-rights movement, Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon. As the Vietnam war raged, he asked, how could he spend all day in his studio worrying about whether to make a red mark or a blue?

Guston died in 1980 and, a year later, Mr Rosenthal included him in his show. There is little sign, however, that the political and social issues of the decade loomed large for most of the “New Spirit” artists. Forty years on, it is satisfying to find a group of artists at the Whitechapel using paint to tell stories.

“Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium” continues at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, until May 10th