George Condo and Glenn Brown: From parody to pastiche / transcriptions and impersonations

George Condo

I have been away and while in Athens saw a George Condo exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art. It was interesting to see contemporary art alongside a wonderful collection of Ancient Greek figurines and pottery, and Condo's work I thought stood up surprisingly well in such august company. Below are a few photographs of his drawings, of which there were quite a few on display, as well as sculpture and of course paintings.

The exhibition was housed in a particularly hard to exhibit in environment, (see paintings reflected in a mirror) but the strange personages that Condo constructs were somehow able to inhabit the spaces very appropriately. 
I have posted before on the continuing relevance of old masters. However in a post-modern world cartoonists are as important as classical painters. George Condo's drawings are typical of an artist that moves freely between influences as he searches for his own kind of truth. Therefore I thought it worth a more detailed look at how his work sits alongside images that I feel bear direct relationship/comparison to him. If you look at the drawings above it is easy to see a relationship between Condo and Picasso.

Picasso



Condo sort of riffs with elements of Picasso's way of working but adds into the mix other ways of image making that have influenced him. Don Martin was an artist I was fascinated by when I used to read MAD magazine as a teenager and I suspect Condo was too.

Don Martin

Look at the ears of Condo's 'cubist' heads and compare them to Martin's. Martin's head shapes are always elongated and his mouths are usually open too.

George Condo

The way the ear is stuck onto the side of the head in Condo's drawing above is I believe an echo of Don Martin, and when we come to look at the mouth I think Martin's cartoon work is referenced again. Not necessarily consciously but I know myself that after years of reading the Beano and the Topper as a very young boy and then being fascinated by the drawings of Jack Kirby as I grew into being a teenager, certain ways of making an image are inbuilt into my own sensibility, and I'm sure this is the case with other artists. (See my post on Hardeep Pandhal) 



Don Martin

George Condo

I can also sense the influence of other artists such as Wilfredo Lam and Gorky. If you look at the drawing above I think it shows a certain familiarity with some of Lam's early images and Gorky's drawings.

Wilfredo Lam

Gorky

It is also interesting to compare one of Lam's portrait heads with Condo's. A similar orchestration of elements is going on and the way Lam uses line to break up the image bears a direct comparison.

Wilfredo Lam

Not that this is anything new, you can go right back through the history of art and see how artists have improvised on and with the work of other artists. Even Picasso will at times go back and look at how other artists' work can be reinterpreted.

Velazquez and Picasso

Glenn Brown is a contemporary artist who has been looking at how a dialogue with older art traditions continues to be a rich vein to tap into. In a recent British Museum display Brown's work was presented alongside the Rembrandt etchings that Brown was responding to.

Brown

Brown

Brown

Rembrandt

Rembrandt

Rembrandt

Freud

Freud

Glenn Brown: After Freud

Brown

Some of the images above were photographed by myself and they were behind glass, this brings in an added issue. No matter how hard I try there will be some reflection. Frances Bacon insisted that his work was shown behind glass. In the 'All Too Human' exhibition recently at Tate Britain, I was forced to keep moving in front of Bacon's images to avoid only seeing myself reflected in them. The same of course was happening when I was trying to look at Brown's work. Is this therefore an example of the continuing ongoing process of a work's becoming? Once the artist has finished making something, it continues on into the world and changes and becomes something else with each showing. Just as the artists making these images are responding to seeing other artists' work, the works themselves are responding to changing exhibition spaces and the changes in attitude that each new generation of visitors brings to looking at the work. Brown was responding to Lucien Freud's work, I was responding to my experience of looking at Brown's responses to Freud. I thought the reflections added another layer to Brown's layers of etching overlays and made the idea more about the impossibility of ever 'seeing' what an earlier artist was getting at. As you look at the images on this blog, you will be responding to them in your own way and will bring to the responses different experiences and associations. And so it goes, one thing rubs off against another, things are in constant flux and whether these images are parodies or transcriptions, impersonations or appropriations, in the long run they will all become part of a past that is constantly receding from a future, a future that will become more and more distant and therefore will read its past with further diverging narratives, narratives that will be needed by future peoples to understand themselves but which will often draw inspiration from what happened earlier. 

One narrative will draw upon another, one story will influence another and the stories of art are very potent in a world that values art as a type of narrative trope for certain aspirations for the human condition. Condo and Brown riff off narratives that have already been retold many times and will be so again. In your own work you will already be deciding on a narrative that seems to be giving your practice meaning, as a story this can be something you shape and the more you are aware of it as a story, the more you will be able to shape it. 

See also: Drawing reflecting on art

Drawing from the old masters

Artists have always drawn from other artists. In doing so artists are both able to assimilate what the masters have to teach us, and are able to see how their own concerns are still capable of surviving the confrontation.  Glen Brown has stated that, “I want to feel like my ego is being disassembled & joined with a whole load of other artists”. There is a difference in 'drawing from' and copying and in Brown's case the images selected are transformed by a shifting language of surface marks. The image made 'after Rubens' emphasises the swirling twisting language that Rubens uses to orchestrate his large canvases, Brown reducing the 'atomistic' language to black and white swirls on grey, so that the image is on the point of melting into its own background.

Glenn Brown: After Rubens

Glenn Brown: Layered Portrait (after Urs Graf) 1, 2008

The layered portrait after Urs Graf is an etching and relies of the ability of etching to build layers of tone by creating masses of lines. In this case the technique is used to begin to erode away the original and replace it by some sort of ghost image of the former. 

George Condo has a very close relationship with the art of the past. As well as confronting masters of the Classical tradition Condo has also created images directly responding to Picasso's cubist language. 

George Condo: Society's Child

It was interesting to see that when Condo was faced with his own 'demons' after having to confront cancer recently, he returns to the fragmented language of cubism to hold onto his own pain. 

George Condo 2015

As in Brown's work, this is not copying but 'working from' or 'referring to', Condo's own visual language still of course comes through, he has a way of image making that for me also refers to a language I remember well from the satyrical magazine 'Mad', in particular the cartoons of Don Martin. 

Don Martin

The fact that Condo can refer to both classical artists and cartoonists is I feel indicative of a society whereby images are so freely circulated and available. This it is often argued, is part of the Post-Modern condition. 

Frank Auerbach: From Titian's 'Bacchus and Ariadne'

The visual dynamics of Titian's work are what interest Auerbach rather than the particular subject matter.  Again this is 'working from' rather than copying. I have like so many artists before me spent hours working from selected images in the National Gallery. Sometimes it has been because I was trying to think about composition or how an artist has invented ways to visually join two or more figures together. At other times it has been because I wanted to focus on some aspect of an idea and how this was realised by another artist, this often required working from details rather than drawing the overall image. 
Above all working from old masters reminds us that we are part of an ancient tradition. Artists have always referred back to other artists, there is a common acceptance amongst artists that this is what lies at the emotional core of their profession, and why artists sometimes refer to picking up the art baton, carrying it forwards and in turn passing it on. 
Perhaps the most important thing about drawing from other art is that you are really forced to look at it. It means that you can 'picture' the work much more accurately in your mind, and that you have had more 'real time' contact with the work. The more you think about something the more you begin to see the connections between related forms and ideas and eventually how connections may be made with the work you are doing yourself. 

Sketchbook drawings from details in the National Gallery

The drawings immediately above were done when I was making images of books and their relationship with bodily perception. By having a point of view, I was able to walk through the various galleries and select out details that helped me think my ideas through. In this case touch, sight and taste were in my mind being conglomerated with books as found in various religious paintings. There is no right way to respond to the old masters, this post is just a reminder that working in this way can be a rewarding and profitable experience, and that even well known contemporary artists have been able to make work directly out of this type of experience. 

Artists have always drawn from each other and Michelangelo was often found copying images to help his own ideas develop. See examples here

See also:

George Condo and Glen Brown
Cecily Brown