Manifested on a large canvas, Transparent Female Forms is a masterpiece from American visual artist George Condo’s seminal Drawing Paintings series, capturing a group of gorgeous female nudes in a delicate state of glitching between figuration and fragmentation. Marking the beginning of what would become a decade-long preoccupation with the Drawing Paintings, this exquisite work from 2009 synergises the traditionally disparate processes of drawing and painting, rendered in Condo’s trademark style of ‘psychological cubism’ and ‘artificial realism’.

 

In Transparent Female Forms, a kaleidoscope of neon-pastel hues drizzled across a neutral ground, are superimposed with gestural improvisations that lend the work to a sense of rhythm invoking Condo’s preoccupation with music, which he studied alongside art history in university. Sensuous female figures that traverse the composition appear in and out of the picture plane: their faces adorned with elegant pearls, full lips and luscious hair are rendered with astonishing fluidity. Yet in signature Condo fashion, grotesque characters with snarled grimaces, wild-eyes, and disfigured heads loom in the background. With these juxtapositions, Condo expertly bridges the cacophonous with the sensual and the recognisable with the alien, probing at our most primitive human instincts of desire, disgust and intrigue.

 

 

“‘The Drawing Paintings’ are about freedom of line and colour and blur the distinction between drawing and painting. They are about beauty and horror walking hand in hand. They are about improvisation on the human figure and its (previously it’s) consciousness.”
— George Condo

 

A New Milestone

 

Executed one year before the artist’s inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York’s 2010 Biennial, and two years before his monumental mid-career retrospective at the New Museum, Transparent Female Forms marked both a professional and a formal turning point for the artist. Not only indexing a transition from solo portraits to canvases with several figures, this period saw Condo employing a diverse array of techniques and aesthetics. “The canvases are noteworthy not only for their mix of acrylic, charcoal, and oil pastel, almost indistinguishably integrated, but for their fusion of styles, resulting in what might be called an expressionistic surrealism or, perhaps more pointedly, an expressionistically grotesque surrealism,” American art critic and art historian (wasn’t here before) Donald Kuspit elucidated. “In comparison with the solo portraits for which Condo first became known, they suggest his painting has outgrown goofy comic-strip caricature, however sardonic it remains.” ⁱ

 

 

Drawing According to Condo

 

“I try to depict a character’s train of thoughts simultaneously—hysteria, joy, sadness, desperation. If you could see these things at once that would be like what I’m trying to make you see in my art.”
—George Condo

  

Condo’s drawings serve as a surface on which to visualise his research rather than to depict specific people, noting that ‘They’re really not so much subjects in themselves as they are observations of the emotional content of human nature, so they’re variables in that sense. They’re sort of interchangeable.’ ⁱⁱ Through his unique drawing and painting process Condo retains his signature style, claiming, ‘What’s possible with painting that’s not in real life is that you can see two or three sides of a personality at the same time, and you can capture what I call a psychological cubism.’ ⁱⁱⁱ 

 

 

 

According to the artist, “Drawing Paintings…were a reaction to the consistent hierarchy that supposedly exists between drawing and painting. What I wanted to do was combine the two of them and make drawing and painting on the same level, that there was no real difference between drawing and painting and by combining pastel, charcoal, pencil, and all these various different drawing mediums on a canvas, it would be an experience for the viewer to see that drawing and painting together can exist in one—I would say—happy continuum.” ^iv 

 

 

Engaging the Past

 

Condo studied the work of his idol, Pablo Picasso, as a young painter while living in Paris in the late 1980s and early 1990s, absorbing much of the Cubist master’s syntax—both in technique and in composition. Like Picasso, Condo sought to reinvigorate portraiture through the process of dismantling and putting back together, with the somewhat counterintuitive goal of more accurately—or fully—representing his subject. In Transparent Female Forms, Condo pays homage to the modernist master through a muted neutral palette which is reminiscent of his forebearer’s Analytical Cubist works. However, this monochromatic expanse is fractured by the prismatic hues that seem to tear through the canvas—the “psychological” side of Condo’s trademark “psychological cubism.” “I don’t want to simply look at Picasso on the wall or read about Picasso,” Condo mused, “I want to actually paint through him, I want to paint into Picasso.” ^v

 

 

 

In the present work, the composition, and the provocative poses of the female nude, as well as the Cubist fragmentation of the background at once recalls that of Picasso’s iconic Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with the tonal quality of the linen canvas being reminiscent of the earthy, fleshy colour palette by Picasso. However, the rounded, idealized indication of the nudes allude to the influence from Classical Allegory paintings.

 

 

When looking at Transparent Female Forms, references to a variety of art historical periods including Classism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism come to mind. One of the conspicuous evocations is of the iconic compositional elements of Renaissance paintings, such as Sandro Botticelli’s famous Primavera, in which the Three Graces forms a separatable part of a larger ensemble scene. Condo too renders three female nudes—perhaps the most iconic motif in Western art history—on the left side of the composition, alluding to this trope in Old Master’s pictures.

 

 

Jazz It Up

 

“Music is such a huge part of my life, without it I don’t know if I'd ever have painted anything.”
— George Condo

 

Condo approaches his creative process like a great jazz musician reinterpreting popular melodies to express their own unique sensibilities. Music, particularly jazz and classical music have been a great source of inspirations for the artist. As he describes himself, ‘Music is such a huge part of my life, without it I don’t know if I'd ever have painted anything… My favourite thing is to put on a record in the studio and to still be painting without noticing the fact that the music has stopped playing for hours and is just running through my head.’ ^vi

 

The amorphic transitional states captured in the painting calls to mind the kind of vitality, transience, and fluidity associated with jazz improvisation. Condo’s smooth, freely rendered lines, complemented by the seemingly accidental applications and superimpositions of paint vividly capture in visual terms the enlivening energy delivered by jazz music. This energy is also made palpable by American visual artist Archibald Motley Jr.’s iconic depiction of a vibrant scene of a jazz nightclub in Chicago’s South Side neighbourhood in Nightlife. Both artists’ passionate creative impulse is delivered by complex overlapping of forms and colours, as well as dark and light contrast, with distinct style reference of their periods. Inspired by American Realist painter Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Motley’s choice of colours keyed to darker shades evoke the ambience of the intimacy of the night, whilst Condo’s contemporary neon-pastel palette frames his creation specifically to our era.

 

 

ⁱ Donald Kuspit, “George Condo”, Artforum, vol. 48, no. 9, May 2010, pp. 252-253.

ⁱⁱ Ann Binlot, ‘George Condo Creates Portraits in Action,’ T Magazine, 7 November 2014, online

ⁱⁱⁱ Julie Belcove, ‘George Condo interview’, Financial Times, 21 April 2013, online

^iv George Condo, quoted in “Blurring the Line Between Drawing and Painting,” The Phillips Collection blog, May 18, 2018, online

^v George Condo, quoted in Thomas Kellein, “Interview with George Condo 2004,” George Condo: 100 Women, exh. cat., Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Salzburg, 2005, p. 34.

^vi George Condo, quoted in ‘George Condo's Muse Music’, Phaidon, 8 December 2011, online