John Currin is an American artist who plays with the family dynamic of European and American art. He sees European art possibly an older brother who gained endless talents from his father, but eventually was molested (World War II). Europeans than threw away everything they related to that time in history, and abandoned forms of art like paintings almost all together. Currin is intimidated by his brother’s amazing abilities that he left behind and tries to paint similarly to him, but still with an understanding that he can never be as good. Using classical approaches to a contemporarily taboo subject, the figure, Currin starts his paintings off with a poorly drawn image of typically pornographic scene as shown here with “The Conservatory.”
