Nice'n Easy
Original title: Nice'n Easy
Date: 1999
Art form: Painting
Dimensions: 111.8 X 86.4 cm (44.02 X 34.02 in)
The nude female form has long occupied artists in the history of Western painting and sculpture, but no other artist has approached the subject with such panache as John Currin. The artist’s virtuoso technique, in combination with a propensity to shock, revived painting at a time when the medium had been eclipsed by video and installation art. From his earliest canvases, Currin’s commitment to paint the female nude has always recognized the entanglement between content and form. As the artist himself has said, “I think that painting has always been essentially about women, about looking at things in the same way that a straight man looks at a woman. The urge to objectify is more a male urge than a female one, and painting is one of the most personal and succinct methods of male objectification of the female”.
In Nice ‘n Easy, the luminous creamy skin of two nude women is highlighted by the velvety green background their bodies are presented upon. Their auburn hair is aloft, lifted by an unseen wind that gives the painting a “romantic,” as in relating to golden love, and “Romantic,” as in highly expressive of emotion, quality. The slighter woman on the left places her hand diagonally on the rounded belly of her companion, who looks wistfully into the distance. Currin has purposefully left the narrative ambiguous. It is unclear if the woman caught in a day dream is pregnant, especially since distended and exaggerated anatomies were a signature of the artist’s paintings of nude women up until the point that Nice ‘n Easy was painted. Small breasts, full round bellies and sinuous hips were also a signature of the Renaissance masters Sandro Botticelli and Lucas Cranach the Elder, whose canvases Currin looks to as inspiration.
