Under the Knife: ‘Paint Made Flesh’ at Phillips

Roaming the galleries that comprise “Paint Made Flesh,” the Phillips Collection’s new survey of figurative painting from 1952 through 2005, it’s hard not to think about Michael Jackson. Prior to his sudden death last month, the former pop star had transformed his once-handsome face into something like a mannequin’s through a series of elective cosmetic surgeries.

The self-crowned King of Pop’s habitual self-mutilation handed obit writers a literally on-the-nose metaphor for his long, sad decline. Jenny Saville, whose larger-than-life-sized self-portrait “Hyphen” is featured prominently in the Phillips show, is famous for depictions of plastic surgery patients. But then artists have always seemed to feel their mortality more keenly than other people. The 42 paintings that comprise this exhibit are particularly to human vulnerability and decay.

“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, and resolve itself into a dew,” moaned the vacillating Danish Prince Hamlet.

Melt? Molt, more like. The mortal vessel passes through many stages on its return to dust, and “Paint Made Flesh” gives a good look at most of them. The skin we see is almost invariably bloated, scarred, obscured, or hyper-rendered to a degree that makes the viewer recoil in horror.

But then you turn back.

Organized by Vanderbilt University’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the show takes a stab at reclaiming the latter half-century — “a time when everyone was considering abstraction to be the critical forerunner,” according to Phillips associate curator Renee Maurer — for figurative painting. Thus, the existential horrors of the nuclear age are applied to the artists’ depiction of the body.

Many of modern painting’s great formal agitators turn up to wield the scalpel: Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, Alice Neel, Willem de Kooning. Their contributions are divided into four categories: American Art 1952-75, Neo-Expressionism in Germany and the United States, British Painting, and Figure Painting Today. Nearly all of the paintings are loans, most compiled by Frist Center curator Mark W. Scala from museums and private collections all over the United States.

Maurer has added three paintings not included in the Frist version of the exhibit. She’s paired John Currin’s 1999 “The Hobo” with another piece by the Colorado-born artist, “Nude with Raised Arms.”

“[Nude] is a compliment and a foil to ‘The Hobo,’ because it’s a year earlier, and it really shows Currin’s debt to Northern Renaissance painting, along with his need to merge it with contemporary culture,” she says.

Maurer also added “Death and the Girl,” an expressionistic painting by Maria Lassnig made in 1999, when the Austrian artist was 80 years old. Despite her vast body of work, Lassnig is only now being given her due in the U.S., in Maurer’s view.

“[Lassnig] engages her own senses and depicts them on her skin,” Maurer says. “She then engages you, the viewer, as you look at the palette she applies to render her skin. So it’s an interactive experience.”

Maurer’s third addition is an untitled 1968 painting by Philip Guston. Guston’s work can also be seen in a dedicated exhibit at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building through mid-September.

Many of the pieces are significantly larger than is typically seen within the Phillips’ intimate halls, making them appear all the more visceral and raw. “There were some challenges for us just because of the vertical height of many of these pictures,” says Maurer.

The ceilings are short, you see. Like life.