Hasta La Ideas

Next Wednesday, New York’s New Museum opens “George Condo: Mental States,” a heavy-on-the-portraits mid-career survey that will span two gallery floors and more than 80 paintings. “Visitors are more likely to notice their modern edge than the techniques he used to produce them,” notes Calvin Tomkins, whose fascinating profile of Condo appears in the January 17 issue of The New Yorker. Among the first orders of business for Tomkins is a visit to the rented Manhattan townhouse that Condo uses as a studio. Amidst “a cheap schoolboy desk and chair and a brace of rickety tables” that contrast with the freshly purchased French antiques furnishing the artist’s nearby home, Tomkins paints a picture of Condo painting a picture—no easy task when the subject matter is imaginary people that include a nude girl, her demonic mother, and Rodrigo, a recurring character in the artist’s work who is partial to bow ties and here acts as “the disapproving butler.”

Two hours passed. The mother was looking even angrier. Her dress had turned dark green. Although her lower jaw was missing, she had a dangerous-looking shelf of feral teeth, and a weird, rectangular protrusion on the left side of her face. I asked [Condo] what it was. “That,” he said, “is an exaggerated swath of cheek,” and we both laughed. The butler wore a dress shirt, a black morning coat with black satin lapels, and a carmine cumberbund….One of his white-gloved hands clasped the girl’s left shoulder protectively. Another hand rested on her right thigh; Condo wasn’t sure whose hand it was, and the uncertainty amused him. “I like the idea that there’s something beyond the painting,” he said, “beyond what you can see. The girl has an expression that suggests she knows what’s ahead for her. The butler doesn’t know, and the mother just knows it’s not going to be good.”

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