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Lot Essay
A tangled profusion of faces and bodies fills the canvas of George Condo’s In the Brothel (2007). Condo works in both oil paint and pastel: his dance between painterly and graphic registers complements the polyphonic energy of the picture, which flickers among Cubist, Neo-Classical and Abstract Expressionist modes in the signature style he has called ‘Artificial Realism.’ Riffing on the palette and structure of Pablo Picasso’s 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the work represents a close conversation with Condo’s great artistic hero. Black lines silhouette the figures against the sky-blue ground, which is heightened with lilac blushes. Loose strokes of peach illuminate nude skin, while red lines scaffold the composition. In the foreground is a nude woman with her back to us, stretching acrobatically in fishnet stockings. She merges with two frontal female forms, overlapping in a medley of limbs and grasping hands. The picture gathers in density around the women’s faces, which are combined with the multiplied features of Rodrigo—a dastardly, bow-tied valet who appears in many of Condo’s canvases—to form a prismatic mosaic of toothy grins, red lips and staring eyes.
Condo has been engaged in a creative dialogue with Picasso for over three decades, restaging the Spanish master’s ideas in his own startling, comic and psychologically acute portraits of the human condition. ‘Picasso forced others into new directions, that was one of his greatest influences’, he has said. ‘… In relation to Cubism, I want to see a human face from four different perspectives and four different emotional perspectives. I want to get into their head’ (G. Condo, quoted in D. May, ‘Portrait of an Artist: George Condo,’ Vanity Fair, November 2017, p. 44). The present work’s imbroglio of smiles, frowns, screams and stares exemplifies Condo’s kaleidoscopic approach, creating a tapestry of seething, simultaneous mental states.
In the Brothel’s affinity with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—perhaps the foundational masterpiece of modern painting—is more than skin-deep. Before the critic André Salmon renamed it for its first public exhibition, Picasso had more plainly called the work Le Bordel d’Avignon (‘The Brothel of Avignon’). It had also been known as Le Bordel Philosophique (‘The Philosophical Brothel’), a title later used by Leo Steinberg for the 1972 essay which remains one of the painting’s most famous interpretations. The French word Bordel is often used non-literally to describe a mess, or a state of disorder. The term is as apt for Picasso’s clashing of Iberian, African and Old Masterly visual influences as it is for Condo’s own hectic amalgamation of idioms—Picasso’s among them.
Condo’s ‘brothel’ foregrounds the erotic dynamics of Picasso’s work, which shocked viewers with its radical, shattered perspective and the women’s direct, confrontational stares. Preparatory sketches for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon show that Picasso originally planned to include two male figures, who are absent from the final painting. By enmeshing the cartoonish, menacing Rodrigo within the scene, Condo brings the male gaze back into the picture. A Breton-striped sleeve to the picture's right might even belong to Picasso. More prominently, Condo also implicates himself: it is no coincidence that Rodrigo rhymes with ‘alter ego.’ Like all of us, he is tangled up in a complexity of sightlines, received histories and ways of seeing. In its playful patchwork of style, motif and expression—by turns deftly drawn and beautifully painted—Condo’s painting testifies to the wide-ranging power of his philosophical eye, and the endless, protean possibilities he finds in looking at the past anew.
Condo has been engaged in a creative dialogue with Picasso for over three decades, restaging the Spanish master’s ideas in his own startling, comic and psychologically acute portraits of the human condition. ‘Picasso forced others into new directions, that was one of his greatest influences’, he has said. ‘… In relation to Cubism, I want to see a human face from four different perspectives and four different emotional perspectives. I want to get into their head’ (G. Condo, quoted in D. May, ‘Portrait of an Artist: George Condo,’ Vanity Fair, November 2017, p. 44). The present work’s imbroglio of smiles, frowns, screams and stares exemplifies Condo’s kaleidoscopic approach, creating a tapestry of seething, simultaneous mental states.
In the Brothel’s affinity with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—perhaps the foundational masterpiece of modern painting—is more than skin-deep. Before the critic André Salmon renamed it for its first public exhibition, Picasso had more plainly called the work Le Bordel d’Avignon (‘The Brothel of Avignon’). It had also been known as Le Bordel Philosophique (‘The Philosophical Brothel’), a title later used by Leo Steinberg for the 1972 essay which remains one of the painting’s most famous interpretations. The French word Bordel is often used non-literally to describe a mess, or a state of disorder. The term is as apt for Picasso’s clashing of Iberian, African and Old Masterly visual influences as it is for Condo’s own hectic amalgamation of idioms—Picasso’s among them.
Condo’s ‘brothel’ foregrounds the erotic dynamics of Picasso’s work, which shocked viewers with its radical, shattered perspective and the women’s direct, confrontational stares. Preparatory sketches for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon show that Picasso originally planned to include two male figures, who are absent from the final painting. By enmeshing the cartoonish, menacing Rodrigo within the scene, Condo brings the male gaze back into the picture. A Breton-striped sleeve to the picture's right might even belong to Picasso. More prominently, Condo also implicates himself: it is no coincidence that Rodrigo rhymes with ‘alter ego.’ Like all of us, he is tangled up in a complexity of sightlines, received histories and ways of seeing. In its playful patchwork of style, motif and expression—by turns deftly drawn and beautifully painted—Condo’s painting testifies to the wide-ranging power of his philosophical eye, and the endless, protean possibilities he finds in looking at the past anew.