Nicole Eisenman: What Happened – Whitechapel Gallery salutes the bold ‘Bad Girl’
by James Brewer
A vignette in the corner of one of Nicole Eisenman’s self-assured and politically acute paintings is a touching expression of her fellow-feeling for humankind.
In her 2008 canvas Coping she depicts stoic men and women wading waist-deep through filthy floodwater, while in the background drinkers look on from a pub. A woman in the mid-ground cradles a dog above the waterline… and just visible is a green-eyed cat benignly rescuing a budgerigar.
Whitechapel Gallery is presenting the first major UK retrospective of Nicole Eisenman’s paintings, drawings, installations and sculptures that often lay forth queer and feminist concerns.
Nicole Eisenman: What Happened brings together in four of the London gallery’s main rooms more than 100 works from the three-decade career so far of the artist. She was born in 1965 in Verdun, France, where her father was stationed as an Army psychiatrist, and lives and works in the US. Many of the exhibits are seen in the UK for the first time.
Nicole Eisenman was a ‘Bad Girl’ – she first showed in Britain 30 years ago for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in a series entitled Bad Girls along with five other British and American artists: Helen Chadwick, Dorothy Cross, Rachel Evans, Nan Goldin, and Sue Williams.
Mark Godfrey, curator of the new show, has ranged to start with examples of what he calls her early lesbian, sexy, funny, patriarchy-challenging themes, taking the imagery of comic books and animated television series like The Flintstones in a chaotic constellation of imagery. Later, we see her large-scale paintings responding to a tumultuous period that encompassed the global recession, the Iraq War, and the re-election of George W Bush. The paintings deal with what it was like to live through the muck and messiness of the world.
Some of the work recalls early 20th century figuration, such as that of Edvard Munch – he of The Scream – and James Ensor and German expressionists. Paintings like Coping and The Triumph of Poverty (2009) are akin to the densely peopled scenes of Breughel and Holbein. While Eisenman in 1993 was grouped with the “bad girls” in their provocative and explicit feminisms, there is always a keen humanism, a connection with people asserting their identities.
Exhibition visitors are greeted with a wall of sometimes-embarrassingly frank paintings and drawings of gay couplings, beginning with a series of ink drawings depicting lesbian life in downtown New York in the 1990s. A few paces forward, there is a sharp reversal of, even revenge for, the aeons of male-controlled presumptions in art and life. Sexual politics is to the fore, not to mention a sense of the absurd, in Fishing from 2000 in which beautifully drawn femme groups of Inuit hunt for prey with trussed-up male bait. Works including Captured Pirates on the Island of Lesbos (1992) combine eroticism with humour and set out to disrupt conventional ideas about gender and male power structures.
The exhibition shows her wide range and inventiveness of form — constantly reworking her critical, often humorous, commentary on socio-political issues. Her scenes of protest and activism are drawn from real life, and she probes the impact of technology on personal relationships.
After a successful start to her career, by the 2000s Eisenman produced paintings that reflected what she felt was a decline in interest in her work. Titles were of the nature of From Success to Obscurity (2004) and Were-artist (2007) which depicts an artist, brush in hand, who has begun to metamorphose into a monster.
Following the despondency episode, she turned to explore wider concerns and expressed her strong sense of community and solidarity, including the Beer Gardens series (2009–17) of Brooklyn social life and its frustrations.
During the 2010s, Eisenman focused on the increasing use of hand-held technology and what she felt was an accompanying rise in narcissistic behaviour of the ‘selfie culture’. Such are the oil on canvas Selfie from 2014, and the bronze Econ Prof of 2019, where she returns to the motif of the head, about which she once said: “When you can’t think of what to draw, draw a head.” In Morning Studio (2016) and Long Distance (2015), the artist explores ways in which couples communicate via screens and how technology modulates human behaviour both privately and in public.
The influence of the Jewish culture of her family (her grandparents once lived in Vienna) can be seen in her 2010 painting of Seder, the Jewish Passover meal, where she commemorates the often-marginalised contributions of women and LGBTQ+ members in the community. In the painting she captures the tensions between tradition and innovation in the Passover meal of today.
Eisenman has continued to use her work for political statement. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, she embarked on allegorical representations of the American hard right. Three large canvases are on display, including Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass (2017) which shows men sailing a donkey’s jawbone through a polluted watercourse towards a cataract; and Dark Light (2017) in which three men wearing Make American Great Again (MAGA) caps driving a red pick-up truck belching polluting fumes. They shine a dark beam instead of light from a torch and there is a hidden swastika.
The exhibition concludes with a new work, Maker’s Muck (2022), a spacious kinetic sculpture that features a large figure shaping clay on a potter’s wheel, surrounded by surrounded by discarded maquettes and debris.
Underlining her continuing political engagement, nearby is placed a reproduction of Eisenman’s most recent large-scale painting The Abolitionists in the Park which shows demonstrators outside City Hall in New York during Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police protests. The monumental painting, based on memories and experience, rather than press photographs, portrays prominent writers, artists, and activists.
A new publication documenting Eisenman’s career with 10 newly commissioned texts and 200 illustrations accompanies the exhibition. Essays by curators Mark Godfrey and Monika Bayer-Wermuth survey developments in Eisenman’s work since the 1990s, and art historian Chloe Wyma considers her recent approach to national and institutional politics.
Nicole Eisenman: What Happened is a cooperation with Museum Brandhorst, Munich and is curated by Mark Godfrey and Monika Bayer-Wermuth with the assistance of Lydia Yee and Cameron Foote at Whitechapel Gallery. The exhibition premiered earlier this year at Museum Brandhorst and after the Whitechapel show will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, from April 6 to September 1, 2024.
Captions in detail:
Fishing, 2000. Oil on panel. By Nicole Eisenman. Collection Craig Robins, Miami. Image courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art. Photo: Bryan Conley.
Detail from Coping, 2008. Oil on canvas Collection of Igor Da Costa and James Rondeau.. Barbara Weiss Gallery.
Selfie, 2014. Oil on canvas. from the collection of Stephanie and Timothy Ingrassia.
Econ Prof, 2019. Bronze. By Nicole Eisenman. The Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehman Collection. Image courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Portrait of Nicole Eisenman. Photographer: Brigitte Lacombe copyright holder.
Some of Nicole Eisenman’s early work on display at the Whitechapel
Nicole Eisenman: What Happened is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, until January 14, 2024.
