Willem de Kooning, the Dutch-American painter of lurid, owl-eyed women, declared in 1950 that “flesh was the reason oil paint was invented.” Using that famous sentence as its cornerstone, “Paint Made Flesh” gathers 43 figurative paintings by artists from the last 50 years, including de Kooning, Picasso, Philip Guston, Francis Bacon, Jenny Saville, Eric Fischl, and John Currin–most of them “painterly” painters. But the show’s purpose is not just to revel in the physicality of oil and acrylic.
Consider the name of the show, “Paint Made Flesh.” It echoes the phrase “Word made Flesh” from the gospel of St. John and thereby reminds us of what happens after the Incarnation: the Crucifixion. As inferred by this title, flesh is presented here as weak and transitory, subject to time, war, sickness, fear, even the cosmetic surgeon’s knife.
