A 'dark, twisted fantasy' revealed

NEW YORK - How did the New Museum in Manhattan come to display a censored work by George Condo?

When the contemporary art museum mounted a solo exhibition for the darkly comic portrait artist, curators Ralph Rugoff (of London's Hayward Gallery) and Laura Hoptman (formerly of the New Museum) neglected to include the censored painting. But you can still find it inside - in piles and piles of Kanye West's latest album, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," stacked up for sale in the museum's gift shop.

Included in each CD is a reproduction of five portraits the painter made for the critically exalted new record, including the one that has been censored digitally. They stand as a microcosm of the much larger surrounding show, evincing several portraiture strategies borrowed from Old Masters and mid-century moderns alike, from cubist head shot to historical painting. "Mental States," which opened Jan. 26, is Condo's first major U.S. survey, a show that will travel to Rotterdam, London and Frankfurt.

But "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" beat the exhibit to all those places. A narrowly focused exhibit organized to explain Condo's methods and madness, "Mental States" nevertheless can't compete with Kanye's album as a precis on Condo's beautiful, dark, twisted fantasies.

It would be too cute by half to say that glossy reproductions tucked away in album liner notes somehow compare to Condo's paintings in the flesh - in particular as they have been installed in the New Museum's fourth-floor gallery. A soaring, salon-style hanging, this installation features more than 50 paintings along one long wall, exhibiting the range of the painter's career. The display summons Condo's art-historical forebears, including Velazquez, Magritte, Picasso and Rembrandt, artists to whom he is indebted for his brush stroke, textures and subject matter. More than indebted: These are painters he channels.

But it's not a stretch to say that Condo's collaboration with Kanye West - and Condo's part should be considered a collaboration, as important to the album as any spot by Swizz Beatz or Nicki Minaj - has done more to introduce Condo to new viewers than the New Museum ever could.

Two of those new viewers, Apple and Wal-Mart, took quick offense to Condo's work and called for a cleaned-up version. (That is, if you believe the tale tweeted by Kanye: It's still unclear why it was, in fact, censored.) The offending work was a piece from Condo's suite of Kanye portraits in which a fearsome Kanye, pictured naked, sits straddled by a nude, phoenixlike, winged woman-creature. It might be a twist on Kanye's lyric from "Monster": "Have you ever had sex with a pharaoh?"

There's something that this collaboration tells us about contemporary art, too. Kanye and Condo are kin artistically, creators who work first and foremost as curators, sampling and remixing the work of their peers and forebears. Condo's chipmunk-faced characters - marked by their bulbous cheeks, fan-shaped ears and toothy grins - all have some Warner Bros. to them; though the difference between "The Water Nymph" and "The Cracked Cardinal," both painted in 2004, is the difference between looking at a Rembrandt and a Velazquez.

Maybe it is owing to the art world's embrace of the figurative, or perhaps it's a stratospheric art market that has been deemed worthy of its own Bravo reality television show, but visual art has a new relevance in pop culture beyond the Kanye-Condo collaboration - even outside Lady Gaga.

The candy-confection painter Will Cotton, who once painted the Nesquik Bunny and Trix Rabbit, couldn't ask for a sweeter figure than Katy Perry's, which he painted for the portrait that graces the cover of her 2010 album, "Teenage Dream." Daniel Bejar, singer-songwriter of Destroyer and New Pornographers fame, collaborated with artist Kara Walker - whose silhouettes mine sexually and racially charged imagery from the Antebellum South - on the lyrics for "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker," released by Destroyer last month.

But none made a bigger splash than Condo's censored cover for "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," which became an immediate sensation online after Kanye tweeted complaints and previewed pics of the art to his 2.25 million followers. "They don't want me chilling on the couch with my phoenix!" he wrote, referring to conversations with executives at Universal Music Group's Island Def Jam label.

Distorted and pixelated, the censored version looks like a Condo painting that has been Auto-Tuned: blocks of color with no recognizable human traits. In reproduction, it looks more like the Altria corporate logo than a naked woman with wings and a tail. All four other alternate album covers - one depicts a Shakespearean vision of Kanye's decapitated head wearing a crown - made it through free and clear.

Kanye's dark phoenix portrait would have found a fitting place in the New Museum gallery of Condo's work featuring pieces on the theme of "manic society." It could hang right beside "The Return of Client No. 9" (2008), a portrait of disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, pictured in flagrante with call girl Ashley Alexandra Dupre. In that painting, Dupre's body is depicted with disarming sexual alacrity; but her face, which looks back at Spitzer and bears a halo, is contorted to look like a jackal's. Spitzer - pierced by a spear and daggers, covered in tufts of fur and pocked by oddly placed green bottles - stares straight out at the viewer as he gives Condo's signature, maniacal grin.

Like Kanye, Condo appears to take deliberate satisfaction in wallowing in pain and pity alike. The highly mannerist displacement of his subject's shoulder and neck in "The Janitor's Wife" (2000) reflects the pity he seems to feel for her. Other archetypal characters (the secretary, the stockbroker, the executive, even Jesus) are all rendered similarly pathetic - just short of sympathetic. Condo is more stimulated by the libidinous rampages of his characters. The only time they appear to evince any emotion at all is when they binge on sex or alcohol, and the emotion, then, is bestial at best.

The museum's chronological gloss follows Condo's career in three modes: from abstractions (each a muck of doodled parts and faces) to the sad-faced portraits of drones from corporate America to the aforementioned crazy-faced gallery. The best painting in the abstract realm is "Figures in a Garden" (2010), whose abstracted female forms crowd a vague, fictive space, like Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," painted a century ago.

The "manic society" gallery conjures a more recent artist, Philip Guston, who captured the absurdity of America in the 1960s. Maybe it's the stubby cigarettes in both painters' work. While the New Museum's focus is limited to particular themes, through them can be traced Condo's influence on artists such as John Currin and Dana Schutz, who rose to prominence before Condo.

If the New Museum is interested in Condo the painter, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" is still more revealing of Condo the portraitist. Though the five portraits he did for Kanye might not fit squarely in the New Museum's schema, they mirror conceptually a series of paintings he made of Queen Elizabeth II in 2006 - 15 or so works for a gallery commission asking for just one. No figure could be more irresistible to Condo than a woman who goes about calling herself the queen, someone so totally removed from reality. Kanye must have held equal fascination for Condo: a man who struggles with his status as the new king of pop but believes himself to be the basest of beings.

Note here that Condo's portraits of Kanye in the New Museum gift shop are the only pictures of any African American figure in the whole show. Condo is interested in a certain brand of under- or over-stimulated white American, from the chiaroscuro-lit "The Secretary" (1998) to the cubist "The Colorful Banker" (2010). Black figures don't exactly fit Condo's symbolic vocabulary. Similarly, Kanye's depiction of race is pointed. He has been called out by a host of feminist critics, most eloquently by Latoya Peterson, for portraying black women as monsters and white women as victims in the video for "Monster."

Condo's most revealing portrait for "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" addresses this most monstrous aspect of Kanye's appetites squarely: It is a painting of a white ballerina. She wears a black leotard and tutu and holds a glass of red wine; she looks over her shoulder directly at the viewer. What she sees - what we know she sees, owing to his lyrics and the appalled look on her face - is Kanye West. She is a portrait of him, because we are seeing her as she beholds him: as a monster. Which is precisely how Kanye would have us see him.

Not since Robert Rauschenberg designed the packaging for Talking Heads' 1983 "Speaking in Tongues" have musicians and artists engaged one another so directly. It comes as no surprise, perhaps, at a time when figurative art and concrete lyricism are both trending. But it is a marvel to find cover art that is potentially as revealing of the artist as it is enlightening about the music.

"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" may not say anything about Condo's cubism redux: Look to the New Museum for that. But this densely concentrated portrait of a perfectly bizarre celebrity, the public's favorite bete noire, anchors Condo's surrealism in the real - however dark and twisted it gets.

Capps is a freelance writer.

George Condo:Mental States is on view through May 8 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York. Call 212-219-1222 or visit www.newmuseum.org.