“Woman in a Red Armchair is one of the paintings that has most influenced me. It led me to reconsider how the human figure could be constructed –by using the methods of the old masters, and then radicalising that language by introducing contemporary images from my own imagination.” — George Condo
George Condo’s singular voice has been a cornerstone of American and European art for almost three decades. Emerging out of the dynamism of the early 1980s New York art scene, Condo developed a unique and provocative painting style, with his self-styled “fake old masters'' borrowing the virtuoso draftsmanship and paint handling of the Old Masters to depict the fantastical subjects of Condo’s imagination. Developing a reputation as the heir to Picasso, Condo’s exceptionally prolific body of work draws on inspiration as diverse as Diego Velázquez, Pop art and graffiti.
Inspired by a course on Baroque and Rococo painting during his studies, Condo spent a year studying Old Master glazing techniques in Los Angeles and upon relocating to New York worked as a printer for Andy Warhol. He exhibited at the Pat Hearn Gallery alongside radical painters such as Mary Heilmann and Philip Taaffe, and became close friends with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Over the next two decades, he explored an astonishing variety of aesthetic styles, from Mannerism to Cubism, demonstrating a limitless knowledge of art history and popular culture.
Condo’s Woman on Red Chair pays tribute to Picasso’s masterpiece Woman in a Red Armchair (1932). During the mid-1920s Picasso's representations of the female form began to manifest aggressively distorted and contorted forms, a change partially explained by the artist's changing personal circumstances. Emerging tensions in Picasso's marriage to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova coincided with the rise of the Surrealist movement and its emphasis on metamorphosis. Picasso’s ability to create a sense of spatial and emotional dislocation prefigured Condo’s brand of ‘Psychological Cubism’, showcased at its best in Woman on Red Chair. Instead of space being his sole subject, Condo seeks to simultaneously capture all facets of someone’s emotional potentialities in one moment, creating portraits of invented characters which are ‘composites of various psychological states painted in different ways’. A neoclassical beauty demurely seated with her hands folded in her lap, the face of Condo’s subject is overshadowed by a momentary spasm of the malevolent.
“Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological. Four of them can occur simultaneously. Like glimpsing a bus with one passenger howling over a joke they’re hearing down the phone, someone else asleep, someone else crying –I’ll put them all in one face.”[1]
Writing about Picasso’s Woman in a Red Armchair for the Tate, Condo explained the overriding primacy of Picasso’s pioneering spirit on his own artistic practice:
I believe Picasso’s greatest influence on me has nothing to do with his actual paintings, because they are, I think, untouchable. It is rather his way of thinking –the freedom of his approach to imagery, and its further potential. This has liberated me from the historical placement, or chronological order, of time, revealing the infinite possibilities of an interchangeable sense of time on the journey towards a new plastic form, one realised by the appearance of a presence from an original source. This process of transforming or reassembling a new image from the parts and pieces of a work’s initial material form is, I believe, key to understanding that work’s relativity and its influence in art. [2]
[1] George Condo, quoted in Stuart Jeffries, ‘George Condo: “I was delirious. Nearly died”’, The Guardian, 10 February 2014, online
[2] George Condo, ‘Picasso's Woman in a Red Armchair 1932: An appreciation by fellow artist George Condo’, Tate Etc, 7 March 2018, online
Provenance
Galerie Andrea Caratsch, Saint-Moritz Collection of Ellen and Michael Ringier, Switzerland Galerie Skarstedt, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner
Picasso once said, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." Indeed, American artist George Condo frequently cites Picasso as an explicit source in his contemporary cubist compositions and joyous use of paint. Condo is known for neo-Modernist compositions staked in wit and the grotesque, which draw the eye into a highly imaginary world.
Condo came up in the New York art world at a time when art favored brazen innuendo and shock. Student to Warhol, best friend to Basquiat and collaborator with William S. Burroughs, Condo tracked a different path. He was drawn to the endless inquiries posed by the aesthetics and formal considerations of Caravaggio, Rembrandt and the Old Masters.