The artmarket

The art market can sometimes have a decisive influence on the way we perceive artists. That could well have happened with the American painter George Condo (born 1957), a star of auctions and fairs(1). From Shanghai to Paris, he is a global celebrity of contemporary painting. Yet that hasn’t prevented the leading American institutions from acquiring his works. If one were to focus solely on the commercial nature of his practice, one might believe he simply paints portraits that resemble Picasso-like grimaces: relatively repetitive, disjointed faces with a clownish streak. But if you visit the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris before 8 February, chances are you will come away with a different view. The institution is dedicating to him the largest retrospective ever mounted: 80 paintings, 20 sculptures and 110 drawings. It makes plain that Condo is not only an exceptional painter but that his repertoire is surprisingly vast.

Torqued faces

The exhibition is structured around recurring themes present throughout his 40-year career. “I don’t believe in the point of chronology. From my early childhood drawings to now, I haven’t changed,” he says. What remains constant in Condo’s work is his fascination with the human figure, manipulated and torqued by his brush. “My faces reflect the characters’ inner state,” he stresses. His princesses, for instance, always conceal something horrific. In The Ballerina (2002), a beautiful, pensive young woman sports interminable arms that resemble legs poised in a classical dance position.

Dark side of humanity

One section is even titled “The Dark Side of Humanity.” Here, he plays with horror, as in Mental State 5 (2000), a black canvas swarming with an infinity of ghostly faces, their darkness pierced only by large white teeth. “Some people in the world are crying for help,” he comments. By contrast, the following gallery focuses on paintings set against bright blue skies. The characters remain grotesque or cartoonish, but they call up art-historical references, especially to Magritte’s Surrealism. For Condo, there is no rupture between ancient and contemporary painting. “Cave art is still absolutely relevant,” he provocatively declares.

Dancing with Miles

In the late 1980s, he mastered the dense juxtaposition of motifs, sometimes combined with collage. A canvas like Tom and Jerry teems with a multitude of roughly scribbled figures, reminiscent of Dubuffet’s work in the late 1940s during his Saharan period. This frenetic energy is often linked to music, a domain in which Condo is extremely knowledgeable. He listens as he paints. The late jazz of Miles Davis inspired him in 1985–86 to create Dancing to Miles, a 3.5-metre-wide masterpiece. From afar, the composition, rendered in shades of brown, white and black, seems abstract; up close, one sees that an automatic gesture guided his brush to saturate the canvas.

Schonberg and Hendrix

Wandering through the exhibition, Condo points out one painting connected to a Schoenberg string quartet, another inspired by Jimi Hendrix’s posthumous album Blues. He ends the visit by recounting the disturbing experience he lived in 2019, just before the outbreak of Covid. At that time, he produced entirely black works, marked only by a few white lines and the faint outline of a figure. “It was premonitory painting,” he observes. The aftermath, of course, we know all too well.

Until 8 February. www.mam.paris.fr/fr/expositions/exposition-george-condo

(1) In 2020, one of his paintings sold for €6 million, a record price.