Model Daria Werbowy and George Condo with George Condo's Young Girl with Blue Dress, 2007. Photo: Mario Testino (Image published in American Vogue, December 2007) © Mario Testino - Daria Werbowy & George Condo, American Vogue, December 2007
Painted in 2007, Young Girl with Blue Dress showcases one of George Condo 's unmistakable muses. With her face constructed from a mysterious, colorful agglomeration of forms stacked one atop the other, with one eye goggling and the teeth of her upper mouth displaced in a rictus grin, this picture is filled with the unique energy that informs Condo's greatest paintings. In Young Girl with Blue Dress, Condo has used Old Master techniques and subject matter to create an image that is at once timeless and contemporary.
George Condo Young Girl with Blue Dress, 2007
Condo's artistic career began in Boston, but he soon moved to New York and became friends with young contemporaries such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring while also briefly working in Andy Warhol's famed studio. Already fascinated by the pictures of the Old Masters, Condo took a very different path from his New York-based friends and instead moved to Paris for a number of years. Condo gained his incredibly wide visual erudition via his immersion in European culture, evident in Young Girl with Blue Dress, which has echoes of folk art and old portraits, while also referencing—and mocking—Pablo Picasso's Cubism in the forms of the face and the faceted upper torso.
The stylized elements of this painting are further thrust into relief with the contrasting textures of the figure's hair—as naturalistic curls juxtapose the smooth shine of the subject's top head, with what looks like a corrugated vinyl pipe reminiscent of one of Fernand Léger's Cubist pictures.
Pablo Picasso Woman Sitting, 1940-1941. Collection of Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland De Agostini Picture Library / M. Carrieri / Bridgeman Images
Condo has described his depictions of grinning, demented, delirious subjects as ‘psychological cubism," often featuring an expression that "goes between a scream and a smile," as is the case in Young Girl with Blue Dress. Condo has explained, in his interview with Time Out from 6 February 2007, that this "reflects simultaneous emotions or conversations with the conflicting voices in your head." In Young Girl with Blue Dress, the artist pushes his viewer's expectations to bold extremes by tapping into the canon of female portraiture and gleefully undermining it. Notions of female beauty have been blown out of the water, replaced instead by an image that is arresting, humorous, angst-ridden and irreverent.
Condo has managed to take the pulsing energy, insight and iconoclasm of friends Basquiat and Haring and channel it through an image painted in traditional oils-on-canvas, breathing new life and relevance into an old medium.