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Lot Essay
Charged with a latent, foreboding psychological intensity, John Currin’s large-scale Lake Place stands triumphantly in the artist’s oeuvre. Elaborating on his early practice, Currin here expands his tableau to include four figures—two men and two women—who Currin places into a complex exchange of feints and gazes. The relationship between the four figures and their meticulously rendered setting is heightened by Currin’s adoption of a novel practice, painting his figures from life using studio models. While the artist previously mined pornographic magazines and digital images for inspiration, Currin’s new procedure gives his subjects a newfound verisimilitude and emotive presence in the painting. First revealed in 2012, Lake Place serves as a crucial marker indicating a seismic turning point in Currin’s practice. Widely feted as one of the most significant painters of his generation, Currin’s idiosyncratic practice has boldly defied convention, incorporating the methods and iconography of the old masters into dissonantly contemporary subjects. Peter Schjeldahl, explaining the artist’s revelatory achievement, writes how Currin “has rehabilitated fallen practices of visual storytelling, restoring to painting its ancient functions of illustration and rhetorical persuasion. Most important of all, he has established a model of the artwork as the embodiment of a specific argument with and about life” (P. Schjedlahl, “Irresistible,” New Yorker, 7 December 2003, online [accessed 8 October 2025]).
At the center of the composition, a young woman dressed casually in a diaphanous cream-colored slip sits on a short stool covered with a flowing white cloth. Her startling stare directed straight toward the viewer is belied by her slight smile as she postures herself revealingly upon her seat. She is flanked by three figures, each of whom maintains physical proximity to her. An older man stands in profile to the left, leaning slightly back upon his heels as he grasps her right hand with his left. Dressed in a light pastel pink jacket and burnt orange trousers, he glances down toward the young woman, mimicking her slight smile. To the right, another woman sits upon an ottoman of astonishing black velvet adorned with mesmeric gold tassels. She shows her back to the viewer as she turns her head to the left, glancing toward her feminine counterpart. Her gleaming blonde locks cascade down her black, almost matching the color of her exposed skin—she is similarly devoid of hosiery, lifting her sumptuous red shirt to reveal even more of her back. This figure grasps the main woman’s left hand with a more assured, intimate grip, locking the two figures together as one composite form showing a frontal and rear view simultaneously. The fourth figure, a younger, mustachioed man swathed in a black suit, stands to the back of the composition, looking down on the central figure while gently fondling her hair. Currin paints his interior scene with the almost mystical light of Vermeer, sweeping from the left to enliven his colors and flesh with a compelling vividity. While favoring Vermeer’s light, Currin channels Jan van Eyck in his meticulous depiction of objects in space, experienced in the marvelous mantel, ravishing furniture, detailed blue and white chinoiserie-patterned wall paper, and especially the solitary fallen rose at the bottom left.
Currin’s encyclopedic command of the art historical tradition is vividly expressed in Lake Place, both in its execution and in the myriad references and quotations which he pulls from the length and breadth of art history. The sheer number of old masters whom Currin has studied and taken inspiration from could fill an art history course—Lucas Cranach, Botticelli, van Eyck, Dürer, Mantegna, Titian, Tintoretto, and the Carracci form the base of his stylistic pantheon, while modern masters like Goya, Otto Dix, Christian Schad and Picabia make their impact immediate as well. In the present work, the frontality of Currin’s central figure recalls Freud, Courbet, or Balthus, while the dynamic interplay between the four figures casts a wider historical net. Depictions of nude women amid clothed men have a long tradition, first appearing in the idyllic arcadian vision Concert champêtre painted by Titian—Manet later revivified this composition in his Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The psychological charge of the painting, with the two men towering over the central figure, their gazes leering at her exposure, similarly recall the iconographic tradition of the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders, most famously depicted by Artemesia Gentileschi. The conceit of placing two women in opposing positions, one seen from the front and the other from behind, was similarly a Renaissance invention. Contesting the notion that their medium could not depict figures in the round, painters began to favor subjects such as the Judgement of Paris or the Three Graces where multiple female nudes could be shown from various angles.
Marking an important departure from his prior practice and following the precedent of his old master forebearers, Currin painted Lake Place from life. Remarking on the experience, the artist acclaimed how “it is easier to do with a live model in front of you... it almost feels like cheating or something. Like this is too easy” (J. Currin, quoted in C. Wood, “John Currin in Conversation with Catherine Wood,” Kaleidoscope, Winter 2012⁄13, p. 51, emphasis original). This innovation allowed him to renew his artistic practice, having felt in a creative rut following his more erotic subjects of the previous decade. He embraces here a rarified painting technique which he taught himself by carefully examining the colors and brushstrokes of Velasquez and El Greco at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He refined this method of painting with thin oil glazes to achieve his immaculate tonalities over the previous decade, and achieves full mastery over this almost vanished style here in the present painting. As the art historian Robert Rosenblum rightly describes, John Currin’s “fusion of venerable past and vulgar present comes out as a perfect hybrid that lives in both worlds,” with Lake Place serving as the location where Currin’s notion of technique and subject collide with his contemporary sensibility (R. Rosenblum, “John Currin and the American Grotesque,” in John Currin, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2003, p. 15).
Currin has from the beginning been forthright regarding his subject: “I paint women and that’s what my work’s about” (J. Currin, quoted in ibid.). In Lake Place, Currin complicates his subject via the inclusion of two male figures whom he portrays in a ridiculous light. The artist was inspired by cinema: “One precedent to this is Russ Meyer movies from the 1970s. You have gigantic-breasted women with good-looking, dumb, weak men and the women outsmarting them, bossing them around and dominating them” (J. Currin, quoted in C. Wood, op. cit., p. 51). The artist continues, stating how “I do find myself liking Venuses and ridiculous men populating the paintings. Which is basically me as the ridiculous man and the Venuses as everybody else, I guess” (J. Currin, quoted in ibid.). Reversing the dynamics of power and gender, placing himself as a ridiculous voyeur outsmarted by his female subject, Currin shatters convention. To this day a singular achievement, Lake Place is a masterpiece denoting Currin’s intellect and technical skill which perfectly encapsulates Peter Schjeldahl’s poignant description of his best works, where “manifold pleasure disarms revulsion—without eliminating it. He demonstrates the power of the aesthetic to overrule our normal taste, morality, and intellectual convictions. Beauty and wit occasion holidays from habits of mind which, though our own, seem, for the moment, arid and boring” (P. Schjeldahl, op. cit.).
At the center of the composition, a young woman dressed casually in a diaphanous cream-colored slip sits on a short stool covered with a flowing white cloth. Her startling stare directed straight toward the viewer is belied by her slight smile as she postures herself revealingly upon her seat. She is flanked by three figures, each of whom maintains physical proximity to her. An older man stands in profile to the left, leaning slightly back upon his heels as he grasps her right hand with his left. Dressed in a light pastel pink jacket and burnt orange trousers, he glances down toward the young woman, mimicking her slight smile. To the right, another woman sits upon an ottoman of astonishing black velvet adorned with mesmeric gold tassels. She shows her back to the viewer as she turns her head to the left, glancing toward her feminine counterpart. Her gleaming blonde locks cascade down her black, almost matching the color of her exposed skin—she is similarly devoid of hosiery, lifting her sumptuous red shirt to reveal even more of her back. This figure grasps the main woman’s left hand with a more assured, intimate grip, locking the two figures together as one composite form showing a frontal and rear view simultaneously. The fourth figure, a younger, mustachioed man swathed in a black suit, stands to the back of the composition, looking down on the central figure while gently fondling her hair. Currin paints his interior scene with the almost mystical light of Vermeer, sweeping from the left to enliven his colors and flesh with a compelling vividity. While favoring Vermeer’s light, Currin channels Jan van Eyck in his meticulous depiction of objects in space, experienced in the marvelous mantel, ravishing furniture, detailed blue and white chinoiserie-patterned wall paper, and especially the solitary fallen rose at the bottom left.
Currin’s encyclopedic command of the art historical tradition is vividly expressed in Lake Place, both in its execution and in the myriad references and quotations which he pulls from the length and breadth of art history. The sheer number of old masters whom Currin has studied and taken inspiration from could fill an art history course—Lucas Cranach, Botticelli, van Eyck, Dürer, Mantegna, Titian, Tintoretto, and the Carracci form the base of his stylistic pantheon, while modern masters like Goya, Otto Dix, Christian Schad and Picabia make their impact immediate as well. In the present work, the frontality of Currin’s central figure recalls Freud, Courbet, or Balthus, while the dynamic interplay between the four figures casts a wider historical net. Depictions of nude women amid clothed men have a long tradition, first appearing in the idyllic arcadian vision Concert champêtre painted by Titian—Manet later revivified this composition in his Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The psychological charge of the painting, with the two men towering over the central figure, their gazes leering at her exposure, similarly recall the iconographic tradition of the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders, most famously depicted by Artemesia Gentileschi. The conceit of placing two women in opposing positions, one seen from the front and the other from behind, was similarly a Renaissance invention. Contesting the notion that their medium could not depict figures in the round, painters began to favor subjects such as the Judgement of Paris or the Three Graces where multiple female nudes could be shown from various angles.
Marking an important departure from his prior practice and following the precedent of his old master forebearers, Currin painted Lake Place from life. Remarking on the experience, the artist acclaimed how “it is easier to do with a live model in front of you... it almost feels like cheating or something. Like this is too easy” (J. Currin, quoted in C. Wood, “John Currin in Conversation with Catherine Wood,” Kaleidoscope, Winter 2012⁄13, p. 51, emphasis original). This innovation allowed him to renew his artistic practice, having felt in a creative rut following his more erotic subjects of the previous decade. He embraces here a rarified painting technique which he taught himself by carefully examining the colors and brushstrokes of Velasquez and El Greco at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He refined this method of painting with thin oil glazes to achieve his immaculate tonalities over the previous decade, and achieves full mastery over this almost vanished style here in the present painting. As the art historian Robert Rosenblum rightly describes, John Currin’s “fusion of venerable past and vulgar present comes out as a perfect hybrid that lives in both worlds,” with Lake Place serving as the location where Currin’s notion of technique and subject collide with his contemporary sensibility (R. Rosenblum, “John Currin and the American Grotesque,” in John Currin, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2003, p. 15).
Currin has from the beginning been forthright regarding his subject: “I paint women and that’s what my work’s about” (J. Currin, quoted in ibid.). In Lake Place, Currin complicates his subject via the inclusion of two male figures whom he portrays in a ridiculous light. The artist was inspired by cinema: “One precedent to this is Russ Meyer movies from the 1970s. You have gigantic-breasted women with good-looking, dumb, weak men and the women outsmarting them, bossing them around and dominating them” (J. Currin, quoted in C. Wood, op. cit., p. 51). The artist continues, stating how “I do find myself liking Venuses and ridiculous men populating the paintings. Which is basically me as the ridiculous man and the Venuses as everybody else, I guess” (J. Currin, quoted in ibid.). Reversing the dynamics of power and gender, placing himself as a ridiculous voyeur outsmarted by his female subject, Currin shatters convention. To this day a singular achievement, Lake Place is a masterpiece denoting Currin’s intellect and technical skill which perfectly encapsulates Peter Schjeldahl’s poignant description of his best works, where “manifold pleasure disarms revulsion—without eliminating it. He demonstrates the power of the aesthetic to overrule our normal taste, morality, and intellectual convictions. Beauty and wit occasion holidays from habits of mind which, though our own, seem, for the moment, arid and boring” (P. Schjeldahl, op. cit.).