George Condo: the latest hero of American painting

‘The history of American painting is one of the constant search for a hero,’ says Edmond Francey, International Director of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s in London, ‘and the latest hero is surely George Condo.’

The son of a nurse and a physics teacher, Condo was born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1957. He moved to New York in his early twenties and briefly took a job at Andy Warhol’s Factory studio, where he worked as a screenprinter on the Pop artist’s Myths series. Within a few years, Warhol was purchasing art works by Condo, apparently never realising that the latter had once been his employee.

Condo came of age in New York in the early 1980s, as part of the East Village scene alongside his friends and fellow-painters, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. After many years in which painting was said to have been in crisis — and movements such as Minimalism and Conceptualism reigned — the medium was now making a comeback, thanks to painters on both sides of the Atlantic (not just New Yorkers, but also Northern European Neo-Expressionists such as Georg Baselitz).

From his early days, Condo has been widely recognised as what Holland Cotter described in The New York Times as the ‘missing link’ that connects the figurative tradition begun by Rembrandt, Picasso and Bacon to his contemporaries, John Currin, Glenn Brown, Dana Schutz and others.

The artist recalls his youthful ambition of wanting ‘to make an incredibly important statement right away’ and deciding ‘I like Old Master paintings, so I’m just going to paint them.’

He has paid homage to Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Goya — as well as Modern masters such as Picasso. The Black Insect (1986), for example, takes its inspiration from the insects and free-floating forms in many of the paintings of Joan Miró.

Condo’s fascination with the greats of art history has persisted throughout his career, with Picasso remaining a key touchstone and influence. ‘I describe what I do,’ said the artist in 2014, ‘as psychological Cubism. Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states.’

The bodies in Figures in Motion (2013), shown above, share a distinct sense of the caricatural and grotesque with Willem de Kooning’s Woman series, while the dynamism of the work recalls the gestural abstraction of Jackson Pollock.

In the words of the Hayward Gallery director, Ralph Rugoff, Condo’s paintings reveal a ‘remarkable breadth of artistic exploration’.

He is perhaps best-known, though, for his depictions of an eccentric array of invented characters, all seemingly in competition with each other as to which has the most startling physiognomy. These include The Insane Psychiatrist and The Secretary, both from 2002.

‘George Condo is an artist who can reference French 18th-century portraiture and a comic strip in one and the same painting,’ says Francey. ‘He mixes high art and low art with aplomb — something that has helped him achieve a wide audience internationally. He’s sought after by buyers in America, Europe and increasingly Asia.’

A standout example of Condo’s mix of high and low art is Frankenstorm. The subject is inspired by Picasso’s Head of a Woman from 1960, yet its ears are clearly modelled on those of Mickey Mouse. Condo, who likes to live life on the edge, painted Frankenstorm in 2012 during the height of Hurricane Sandy, without access to electricity and the outside world.

Condo majored in music theory at the University of Massachusetts while also studying Art History. Before moving to New York, he was also briefly in a punk rock band called The Girls.

His abstraction frequently draws upon his relationship with music. ‘You are still a musician at heart,’ the theorist Félix Guattari told him. ‘With you the polyphony of lines, forms and colours belong to a temporal dimension rather than one of spatial coordination.’

In 2006, Condo’s ostensibly unflattering portrait of Queen Elizabeth II went on display at Tate Modern, with the Daily Mail accusing him of portraying the then British head of state as a ‘toothless Cabbage Patch doll’.

The artist countered that the piece was created with the best of intentions — the monarch was smiling and ‘actually people like Cabbage Patch dolls’.

The 2011-12 retrospective Mental States, an exhibition described as ‘sensational’ by Holland Cotter in The New York Times, travelled to three European venues including the Hayward Gallery in London where its curator, Ralph Rugoff, is the director.

Garnering an audience of celebrities and fellow artists, Condo’s provocative works have invited frenzied interest among high-profile collectors and personalities. Since 2018, the record price for the artist at auction has been broken four times, culminating in the sale at Christie’s Hong Kong in May 2022 of the neo-Expressionist Force Field, 2010, for $HK53,150,000 (US$6,891,135).

Condo’s 10 highest prices at auction were all sold after 2015. ‘Condo has been performing incredibly well,’ says Ana Maria Celis, Post War and Contemporary Art specialist at Christie’s in New York. ‘I can’t think of any other artist at that level right now.’

Five of Condo’s most valuable works sold at auction have been painted since 2010. ‘There’s little doubt he has got better with age’, says Francey. ‘He has reached a new level of maturity and excellence, in terms of his ideas, his sense of composition and skills in execution.

‘Like a musician who improves the more he practises, it’s the same with Condo. It’s fair to speak of him now — now in his 60s — as one of the truly exceptional artists of his generation.’

Among the first works heralding this change was 2010’s The Manhattan Strip Club (above), in which Condo fuses his process and distinct cast of characters with a subject reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It sold for $1.3 million at Christie’s New York in 2012 — then a record for the artist at auction, which indicates just how much his market has boomed in the six years since.

Combining his impressive draughtsmanship and virtuoso handling of paint, Condo talks of these works as ‘a reaction to the hierarchy that supposedly exists between drawing and painting. For me, there is no real difference between them, they can exist in one happy continuum.’

For his ‘drawing paintings’ Condo applies charcoal, pencil, pastel and acrylic paint to one and the same canvas, often twinning figurative and abstract elements in the process. A stunning, red example from 2009, Noble Woman, was sold at Christie’s in London for £2,108,750 on 4 October 2018.