What's wrong with this picture?

John Currin is an artist who has emerged as one of the most controversial and celebrated contemporary painters in recent memory. The exhibit, which features Currin's mid-career work, contains approximately forty paintings from the last decade, which demonstrate the vast spectrum of his art. It will be on display at The Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan through February 22nd.

In our time of overly conceptualized art, Currin's is nostalgic. Upon a first glance at Currin's work, anyone can notice the artist's successful modern innovations within the seemingly jaded and antiquated medium of oil painting. One nearby visitor gleefully remarked, "Thank God, art looks like ART again!"

Despite Currin's return to classical painting technique and subjects, there is something slightly subversive about his retrospective. The viewer feels uneasy in front of his works, but can't quite put a finger on why -- this is Currin's genius.

Fusing rich technical skill and renaissance style with contemporary subjects, Currin depicts coy women with cartoonishly large breasts measuring their bust sizes, homosexual men making pasta at home, middle-aged women trying to assert their fleeting sex appeal, and old playboys with youthful blondes clinging near.

These are scenes so quintessentially contemporary that they could have been ripped straight from American television. Despite their striking familiarity, Currin's depiction of his subjects makes viewers anxious.

Yet, there is a harmonious dichotomy in Currin's work that makes his solo show refreshing for both art aficionados and average museum goers. His paintings are beautifully rendered with transparent influence of the renaissance, classicalism and the old masters and, without overpowering their aesthetic appeal; they convey a very specific creepiness. Take for instance, "Stamford, After Brunch" which depicts WASPy women sitting on fluffy behinds, gossiping while the husbands are away. The scene is familiar and obvious, yet there is something about the women that is dramatically unsettling. You can almost feel their silly elitist attitude and hear the obnoxious laugh at the expense of the poor divorcee whose husband had been sleeping with another man.

Currin psychologically charges his paintings through moderate stylistic and figurative distortions. Just as the classical artists distorted the human form to emphasize muscular beauty, Currin distorts his figures to have specific effects on the minds of his audience. His alterations are perfectly subtle and can almost go unnoticed; the visitors at the Whitney repeatedly whispered to one another, "What's wrong with this picture?" The most controversial paintings of the exhibit are the multiple portraits of gay couples. In Two Guys and Homemade Pasta, Currin depicts homosexual males in very typical situations. However, there is an ambiguously sordid element to the paintings. This element forces the viewer to question his feeling of disgust with the paintings. Do these feelings stem from the viewers own mind? Or is it guided by the gifted brush of the artist? Either way, Currin confronts his viewers with these paintings and unlike several acclaimed artists he does so without creating works that are overtly grotesque and bizarre.

The Whitney exhibit also features several works from Currin's 1997 phase, exemplified by passive women with basketball sized breasts posing like girls from a vintage Playboy ("The Bra Shop" and "The Magnificent Bosom and Dogwood"). Throughout his career Currin has received harsh criticism from feminists because of his portrayal of women. However, the Whitney exhibit showcases pieces from the last decade that suggest Currin is far too sophisticated an artist to make his primary goal the subversion of the modern woman. There are several portraits of aging women that evoke an uncertain discomfort. Currin explores the roll of these women in society and mysteriously focuses on their sexuality in his portraits.

Many of Currin's women seem to embody a combination of passivity and sexuality that would, and do, make feminists cringe. His female nudes and other portraits don't directly belittle women or even convey any specific social commentary. They simply portray the female subject with a revamped and modernized version of renaissance ideals.

Currin's exhibit is refreshing because it is contemporary but at the same time very far removed from the modern direction of art. He seems closely tied to the ideals of the renaissance and portrays his modern subjects in comparable style to fulfill a similar agenda. Currin's greatest success is his ability to force his audience to re-evaluate his or her own views on contemporary popular iconography and culture. His exhibit offers beautiful paintings that, if given proper examination, can bring their viewers in better touch with the America of 2004.