There's quite a lot of nudity in the work of Nicole Eisenman but it's, for the most part, neither gratuitous nor is it intended to titillate. I didn't know much about the artist beforehand but the current Nicole Eisenman:What Happened exhibition at the Whitechapel piqued my interest so I took a trip up there on Thursday and I didn't regret it. I liked her work. At least most of it. Almost all of it, in fact.
Spring Fling (1996)
It's perhaps not a surprise I was only vaguely familiar with her because the Whitechapel show is her first major UK retrospective. She's waited a while for it. The American artist was born in Verdun, France in 1965 (her father was stationed there as an army psychiatrist) and moved to New York state five years later. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design before moving to New York City in the late eighties where she became part of a vibrant community of artists, writers, and poets
In this milieu, she found her own style. Though she mostly paints, she also draws, sculpts, animates, and makes prints. Her themes, as I discovered at this exhibition, range from the political to the personal. She explores her queerness, she critiques US politics and environmental issues (she's got, as Glen Quagmire would accuse Brian the dog in The Family Guy of having, a "textbook liberal agenda), and she even offers pointed comment on how her own career is going.
That runs the risk of her art being a bit dry, a touch academic, but Eisenman has enough of a sense of humour in her work to make sure that never happens. Look at the sad, hangdog, face of the humiliated artist who one can only assume is an exaggerated and cartoonish version of the young Eisenman.
The Humiliation of Being an Artist (1996-2011)
The exhibition is laid out in, roughly, chronological order and, old fuddy duddy that I am, that's the way I tend to like it. So we start with Eisenman's work as a radical young firebrand in the 1990s. She used a mix of pornography, comic books, and Renaissance art to attack patriarchy and conventional ideas about gender and sexuality and she soon got enough attention that her work was shown in Amsterdam and Munich as well as her home town of New York.
Some works, like 1994's Hanging Birth, are intentionally grotesque. Others, Lemonade Stand for example, less so (though both these works are in the same mournful shade of blue). The Foos Ball Trilogy of 1994 contains A LOT of naked bodies and when you look close at some of Eisenman's naked tableaux you might see people doing things that you would not want to see in real life. One that stuck with me was a bloke with his dick on a chopping board and someone bearing down on his, er, chopper - with a chopper.
Hanging Birth (1994)
Lemonade Stand (1994)
Foos Ball Trilogy Part 1. Sinking Ships (1994)
Foos Ball Trilogy Part II. Rescue (1994)
Foos Ball Trilogy Part III. Game Preparations (1994)
But almost as soon as she started to make something of a name for herself she began to fall out of favour. Or she perceived herself to being falling out of favour. It at least gave her a new subject to paint. Her own lack of success. Or, perhaps, her own insecurity as an artist. 2004's From Success to Obscurity is blunt - but it's amusing and well done.
The artist is a thick skinned monster, Obscurity, who has received a letter from 'Success' and is not enjoying reading it one little bit. Elsewhere, the artist (who we perceive, almost always, to be a cipher for Eisenman herself) has transformed into a werewolf (or were-artist), is being lowered down into a freezing sea, or is being spoonfed the tasteless medicine of commerce. There's even a painting where it seems as if the rat race of the art world has been transformed into a swimming pool and thrashing swimmers/artists are competing not to win the race but simply to stay afloat.
From Success to Obscurity (2004)
Commerce Feeds Creativity (2004)
Fishing (2000)
Were-artist (2007)
Swimmers in the Lap Lane (1995)
These works, to me, aren't self-indulgent or navel gazing. They're self-aware and full of humour, full of life. It's fine to talk about yourself, or make art about yourself, as long as you understand that you are a person in the world and the world does not revolve around you. I have a friend who regularly uses Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Hell is other people' quote and, to me, that seems to suggest that he isn't aware that to everyone else in the world he is, we all are, 'other people'.
I'm not even sure Sartre meant it in the way my friend uses it but I digress. We all have to find ways of coping and artists, and existential philosophers, are no different. For Nicole Eisenman, something she found hard to cope with was President George W.Bush's tenure as US President (of course she couldn't have known at the time that compared to Trump he'd look both sane and liberal) and the 'War on Terror'.
On top of that there was the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and many of us still aren't out of and, of course, the ongoing, climate emergency. Her art shifted away from looking inwards at herself and how was she perceived and out towards society, towards America, and towards the whole world.
The work she made at this time looked back to 20c expressionism and artists like Max Pechstein and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the sort of artists who had been labelled 'degenerate' by the Nazis. Eisenman's parents had once lived in Vienna and with her father being a psychiatrist she was obviously drawn to this world. She's even painted herself on her dad's couch. Mum gets a look in to. That's her in Seder, a work based on Eisenman's memories of family Passover meals.
The Session (2008)
Coping (2008)
Sleepy Bar Room Kiss (2011)
Beer Garden with Ulrike and Celeste (2009)
Beer Garden with AK (2009)
Eisenman even includes herself, which seems like a rarity, in her beer garden paintings of the late noughties. She saw beer gardens as the places where her and her friends would go to "socialise, to commiserate about how the world is a fucked-up place and our culture's obsession with happiness". That'll sound familiar to anyone who lived through the dying days of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism, the uncertainty of the War on Terror, or, indeed, now.
Yet the bold and bright colours don't render these works depressing. There is hope in the despair - even if much of it seems to be found at
the bottom of a beer bottle. The Triumph of Poverty was inspired by a lost Hans Holbein painting from 1533-34 and
Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Blind Leading the Blind. All the different scales of the people in it, and the child with an empty bowl, remind us of deprivation and inequality from the middle ages on to Dickens and to the present day yet, for me, it was hard to get past the observation that when I hear people talk about '
front bottoms' what you can see in this painting is not normally what comes to mind.
The Triumph of Poverty (2009)
In 2012, Eisenman was invited to show her work at
Studio Voltaire in Clapham and she chose to show a piece called Jewellery Tree which included a tin foil medal based on one of Lord Nelson's medals as well as a crushed British beer can and some flatbread. It ended up being displayed in
London's
National Gallery and, now, a small part of it (it's too delicate to travel in its current state) it stands on a plinth halfway up the stairs to the upper floors of the
Whitechapel gallery, a kind of palate cleanser that is both part of the What Happened exhibition while, at the same time, being at a slight remove from it.
Jewellery Tree (2021)
In fact, it's such an outlier (and is, apparently, so fundamentally different to its earlier incarnation) that it has been given the year
2021 rather than 2012. As ever, Eisenman was flipping and flopping between the personal and political and while, in her work, she considered her own standing as an artist she also looked at not just who made art but where art was made.
Drawing classes and anatomical studies give way to a series of works about screens which reminded me of the great American artist
Philip Guston (whose
Tate Modern show I'm going to on Friday all being well). These works focus not on groups as before but solitary people, or sometimes couples, and how they spend their downtime. Mostly looking at screens of various sizes but sometimes flying drones, lying on couches, and, if we're lucky, cuddling up to someone with great boobs.
The Drawing Class (2011)
Achilles Heel (2014)
Weeks on the Train (2015)
Selfie (2014)
Breakup (2011)
Long Distance (2015)
Morning Studio (2016)
Contrast the tenderness and intimacy of 2016's Morning Studio with the dejection and sadness of Breakup. I think these are a great series of paintings that really capture how much of our life is lived on and though screens these days and people who seem to suggest we just put our phones, our laptops, and our televisions down don't seem to understand it's not that easy. Obviously,
we can and we should get outside, interact with nature, and meet people in real life but much of life HAS to be lived online these days, it's the way of the world, and people do choose to initiate, and end, even their most important relationships via phone or
social media.
Why wouldn't someone make art about that? Although it seems that sometimes even Eisenman, who seemed to be full of ideas, wasn't quite sure what to make the subject of her art. She once said "when you can't think of what to draw, draw a head" and she certainly drew, painted, and sculpted a lot of heads. The section of the exhibition devoted to her heads had a LOT of heads in it but it wasn't my favourite part so I've not included too many. Oh, and I've included a work called Soggy Titties too because, at heart, I am still a puerile teenage boy who giggles at such things.
Soggy Titties (2008)
Econ Prof (2019)
They're alright but in a show of such high quality they didn't stand out. They are, however, a last little bit of
humanity before the final section of the show takes us down a path the curators have called The Darkward Trail. Yes, we've reached the present day and as you're presumably alive now and living in it you'll know that it's not going very well.
For Eisenman, at least for Eisenman's art, things started to go bad back in 2011. Obama was in office but it wasn't Obama she was concerned about. It was the rise of the extreme right Tea Party and how they ingratiated themselves into the Republican party, a chain of events that eventually ended up with
Donald Trump winning the
2016 election.
In this most recent series of works all manner of local and everyday horrors lurk. Nature is debased,
trees are destroyed for profit, a piper sends his supposed friends to a watery grave, goons with torches search for undesirables - very possibly
immigrants - in the desert, and, in the final circle of hell of a Dantean inferno of our current lived reality, a man in red MAGA hat shines a blinding light in the
eyes of reasoned debate. A final triumph of lies and suspicion over truth and trust.
Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass (2017)
The Darkward Trail (2021)
Tail's End (2021)
Dark Light (2017)
Guston, I can't help thinking, would be impressed. He would have recognised a kindred spirit and a fellow traveller and perhaps he, like
me - and I think Eisenman, might have realised that though we, the whole world, are looking down a barrel of a gun at the moment (a gun held by the likes of Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi,
Rishi Sunak,
Sunak's new buddy Giorgia Meloni, and Viktor Orban - as well as many others) there may still be hope. It's to the curators of Nicole Eisenman:What Happened's great credit that they end with hope. Even if it's only a shred of hope that we may one day live in better times. Or at least our children might.
It's the last work you see in the actual exhibition but when you come out there is one last piece and it is, quite correctly I think, available to everyone to see free of charge (the exhibition wasn't expensive but it wasn't free). Maker's Muck is a self-portrait of sorts but you won't see anyone who looks remotely like Nicole Eisenman in the whole messy ensemble. It's a collection of materials and tools that can be used to make art and I think Eisenman is saying to us that we shouldn't hold back, we should go out, we should create, we should get together with others, we should raise our voices, and we shouldn't allow the rise of the very selfish and the very cruel to happen. Not at least without a fight. Do what you can to stop them. Paint, write, sing, protest. Agitate, educate, organise. Don't let the bastards grind you down. Nicole Eisenman nearly did - but she's come out fighting. More power to her elbow.
The Abolitionists in the Park (2021-22)
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