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Lot Essay
‘… all great art has some relationship to the great art that came before it’ (George Condo)
An arresting example of George Condo’s melding of caricature and pathos, The Housekeeper’s Family (2004) playfully refracts art-historical references through his own absurd symbolic lexicon. The large-scale painting presents three figures, the titular housekeeper and her two children, standing before a blue-green backdrop. With distorted, impastoed faces, they sport carrots growing out of their ears. During the early 2000s, figures working in domestic help began to populate many of Condo’s canvases, including a French maid and the recurring rogues Jean-Louis, a butler, and Rodrigo, a valet. The character of the housekeeper seen here recurred in several compositions. In 2005, the painting was part of the major exhibition George Condo: One Hundred Women, at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld.
The muted palette and moody, broad-brushed background of The Housekeeper’s Family lend the painting an Old Masterly aspect, contrasting with the surreal appearance of the depicted trio. The carrot, intruding in various ways into these carnivalesque portraits, was a recurrent motif within Condo’s oeuvre of this period, and one that the artist understood to be a ‘metaphor for false hope’ that seemingly signifies an artificial existence (G. Condo quoted in R. Rugoff, ‘The Enigma of Jean Louis’, in George Condo: Existential Portraits, exh. cat. Luhring Augustine, New York 2006, p. 12).
Condo never modelled his imagery on a single source but drew upon impulses from a diverse range of material. In The Housekeeper’s Family, the little girl dressed in a tutu recalls Edgar Degas’ famous ballerinas, but she also has a more personal significance, tied to Condo’s own memories of the children’s ballet classes that took place directly across from his studio in Paris. During the period that he painted The Housekeeper’s Family, Condo was also interested in paintings by Diego Velázquez and Edouard Manet, whose work had been placed in dialogue in the 2003 exhibition The French Taste for Spanish Painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Like Manet’s studies of absinthe drinkers, singers, and musicians, Condo’s paintings often feature type-figures that, although invented, occupy real positions in society.
Condo’s practice has long engaged with a variety of techniques, symbols, and motifs from every art-historical era. He came of age in 1980s New York, befriending Jean-Michel Basquiat and worked for Andy Warhol, before relocating to Paris for ten years, where he immersed himself in French philosophy. It was against this backdrop of wide-ranging influences that he began to study and copy the artists that he loved, from Caravaggio and Cezanne to de Kooning and Picasso, who remains a particular favourite. Condo has described his jarring and forcefully synthetic style as ‘artificial realism’. By embracing disorientation as an artistic gesture, his compositions trigger layered and contradictory responses. The tragicomic characters that Condo depicts in The Houskeeper’s Family appear to possess complex psychologies, at once outlandish and sympathetic, vulnerable yet potent.
An arresting example of George Condo’s melding of caricature and pathos, The Housekeeper’s Family (2004) playfully refracts art-historical references through his own absurd symbolic lexicon. The large-scale painting presents three figures, the titular housekeeper and her two children, standing before a blue-green backdrop. With distorted, impastoed faces, they sport carrots growing out of their ears. During the early 2000s, figures working in domestic help began to populate many of Condo’s canvases, including a French maid and the recurring rogues Jean-Louis, a butler, and Rodrigo, a valet. The character of the housekeeper seen here recurred in several compositions. In 2005, the painting was part of the major exhibition George Condo: One Hundred Women, at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld.
The muted palette and moody, broad-brushed background of The Housekeeper’s Family lend the painting an Old Masterly aspect, contrasting with the surreal appearance of the depicted trio. The carrot, intruding in various ways into these carnivalesque portraits, was a recurrent motif within Condo’s oeuvre of this period, and one that the artist understood to be a ‘metaphor for false hope’ that seemingly signifies an artificial existence (G. Condo quoted in R. Rugoff, ‘The Enigma of Jean Louis’, in George Condo: Existential Portraits, exh. cat. Luhring Augustine, New York 2006, p. 12).
Condo never modelled his imagery on a single source but drew upon impulses from a diverse range of material. In The Housekeeper’s Family, the little girl dressed in a tutu recalls Edgar Degas’ famous ballerinas, but she also has a more personal significance, tied to Condo’s own memories of the children’s ballet classes that took place directly across from his studio in Paris. During the period that he painted The Housekeeper’s Family, Condo was also interested in paintings by Diego Velázquez and Edouard Manet, whose work had been placed in dialogue in the 2003 exhibition The French Taste for Spanish Painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Like Manet’s studies of absinthe drinkers, singers, and musicians, Condo’s paintings often feature type-figures that, although invented, occupy real positions in society.
Condo’s practice has long engaged with a variety of techniques, symbols, and motifs from every art-historical era. He came of age in 1980s New York, befriending Jean-Michel Basquiat and worked for Andy Warhol, before relocating to Paris for ten years, where he immersed himself in French philosophy. It was against this backdrop of wide-ranging influences that he began to study and copy the artists that he loved, from Caravaggio and Cezanne to de Kooning and Picasso, who remains a particular favourite. Condo has described his jarring and forcefully synthetic style as ‘artificial realism’. By embracing disorientation as an artistic gesture, his compositions trigger layered and contradictory responses. The tragicomic characters that Condo depicts in The Houskeeper’s Family appear to possess complex psychologies, at once outlandish and sympathetic, vulnerable yet potent.