Exhibit of the week: Paint Made Flesh

Phillips Collection

Washington, D.C.

Through Sept. 13

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Americans these days are endlessly obsessed by obesity, diets, and “body image,” said Susan Stamberg in NPR.org. In popular culture, “the nude bodies we see are airbrushed, powdered, polished to perfection.” This exhibition of contemporary figurative paintings, originally displayed at Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts, provides a sort of antidote. “Scars, bumps, blots, bulges of fat” festoon these true-to-life nudes and semi-nudes. Lucian Freud’s Naked Man, Back View dares you to find beauty or meaning in the lumpiness of its oversize subject. Jenny Saville’s Hyphen shows two ­cherubic sisters, but “puts deep, blood-red dabs around the girls’ pillowy lips.” The artist made the paintings after observing up-close the actual physical trauma caused by plastic surgery. In a sense, she’s “painting the marks made on women by society’s cruel demands.”

Visitors who come in search of lessons about society will also get a crash course in art history, said David Maddox in the Nashville Scene. During the 20th century, portraits, nudes, and figurative painting in general took a back seat, as realism “gave way to abstraction as the vital core of modern art.” But many artists continued to work in the traditional mode, even as they attempted to incorporate the lessons of abstraction into their human figures. “The background of Georg Baselitz’s Nude Elke 2 contains slashes of color that could come from one of Franz Kline’s color abstractions.” Albert Oehlen’s The Goal Kick incorporates washes of color of the kind first found in Helen Frankenthaler’s color-field paintings. “But the real father of this exhibit is Willem de Kooning,”whose haunting nudes and portraits feature “brushwork and dramatic lines” that sprang directly from the abstract expressionism.

“Intertwining recognizable images and smeared-on color, de Kooning conveys the squishy vitality of the body,” said Deborah K. Dietsch in The Washington Times. It turns out that real bodies, when you examine them closely, look something like abstract paintings. “For de Kooning and his brethren, layering wet, sticky oils on canvas allowed them to describe humanity in a way that closely approximates the body’s gelatinous makeup.” Among later painters, his methods have been pushed the furthest by Britons, including Freud and Saville. The only recent American painter whose work can really compare is Eric Fischl. His “haunting painting of an elderly man in a hallway,” based on his own father, “symbolizes the way of all flesh, as the body sags and diminishes with time.”