“They were pretty misogynistic images,” says John Currin. “I can’t deny that.” The 60-year-old American painter is recalling his first solo show 30 years ago. It consisted of pictures of nude, middle-aged women whom he unpleasantly described in the show’s press release as “old women at the end of the cycle of sexual potential, between the object of desire and the object of loathing.”
Some critics balked at this description, among them the Village Voice’s Kim Levin who wrote: “Apart from that, they’re awful paintings. Boycott this show.” And yet he has made a fortune from painting women’s bodies, from, as Levin put it “starry-eyed ingenues, mega-boobed bimbos, society matrons, and full-bellied old-masterly nudes” – . In 2008, even as a financial crisis clobbered the west, his 1999 Nice ’N Easy, depicting two Renaissance-inspired nude women against a black background, went under the hammer at Sotheby’s for $5.5m. There’s money to be made from painting women’s flesh.
