Nicole Eisenman: What Happened

Using a phrase famously coined more than a hundred fifty years ago by Charles Baudelaire, I once wrote that Nicole Eisenman and Kerry James Marshall were our two great contemporary painters of modern life; after which, another remarkable painter, just as renowned and just as deserving of renown, confronted me to ask why they weren’t on my list, too. It’s not that Eisenman and Marshall are better painters than you, I told this artist, but what you are a painter of is not what I mean—nor what Baudelaire meant—by “modern life.” The painter of modern life, the poet declared, had to “set up his house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of motion, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.” To capture not just a slice of this heaving multiplicity but as much of it as possible: that is what the painter of modern life aspires to.

What I didn’t articulate at the time was that because this aspiration is in principle impossible to fulfill—“as much as possible” will never be “all”—it can only be satisfied, as it were, by synecdoche. The painter must paint the “some” that evokes the “more” and if possible the “all.” And one of the best ways to do this—to supercharge one’s some—is to match the multiplicity of one’s subjects by the multiplicity of ways one depicts them. One’s manner of painting, too, must seem to be as various and inexhaustible as life itself.

That painterly variousness has become the hallmark of Eisenman’s art. But her current retrospective—What Happened, curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Mark Godfrey and now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, following stints at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, and the Whitechapel Gallery, London—reminds us that this has not always been the case. In her work of the 1990s, Eisenman’s is above all an art of drawing—literally so in the earliest pieces on view, from 1992 and 1993, all on paper; but up through about 2000, even in her canvases, Eisenman seems most concerned about setting her ideas down as directly and distinctly as possible, and there is no very evident engagement with paint as such or with any explicit exploration of the myriad ways it can manifest itself. Her work at this was many things, often self-contradictory: rambunctious, fantastical, violent, charming, obscene, humorous, and art-historically savvy—at once classical, cartoony, and mock heroic. Important to this phase of Eisenman’s work was a series of murals, which have not survived, but are documented here in a video.

Nicole Eisenman: What Happened, MCA Chicago, 2024. Photo: Shelby Ragsdale, © MCA Chicago.">

Eisenman’s multifarious oeuvre is not easily encompassed. I’ve been asked for a one-thousand-word review, but I’m giving you a one-thousand-word precis of an unwritten three-thousand-word review, because there’s just too much. And the show isn’t even as complete as I could hope. For instance it skips, curiously, over the years 2001–03 and 2005–06. And from 2000 to 2007, something significant seems to have changed in Eisenman’s approach to painting. But let’s stop for a minute in the year 2004, represented by three paintings (the only works from between 2000 and 2007) in the Chicago iteration of What Happened. All are occupied with questioning the worldly role of art and the artist, as indicated by titles like Inspiration, From Success to Obscurity, and Commerce Feeds Creativity. That last title sounds like something that could have come from boosters of the “creative industries”—Richard Florida had published his book The Rise of the Creative Class just two years earlier—but the painting is, unsurprisingly, skeptical about the relation between money and art. Commerce here is a lean and hungry gent with no shirt and a bowler hat, pictured against the backdrop of a schematic reduction of a cityscape, as he spoons something into the mouth of a nude, bound woman with a bandaged head. What he’s dishing out, though, she’s not swallowing—the liquid streams out of her mouth and down her breast. If Eisenman was brooding about the discomforts of success, that was probably because her art was finding an ever-warmer welcome; for instance, she’d just had her first museum survey (at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University) the year before. Rather than encouraging complacency, success was leading her to question herself.

But it was also leading Eisenman to stretch herself as a painter. The tied-up figure of Creativity is depicted in a style similar to that of her 1990s work, with its physical gusto, but the wraithlike Commerce, an altogether more intangible figure, is subtly different—and the diagrammatic background of urban architecture is something else again, and quite unlike anything in the earlier work. We see an artist beginning, in a tentative way, to grasp how she can hold multiple styles together in a single work. This becomes even more explicit in Untitled (Portrait of a Man, Wolfie) (2007), and Were Artist (2007), which depicts the substance of paint invading the painter’s very being. On the canvas, we see Eisenman’s artist figure in three-quarter profile considering a canvas of their own. Whatever it shows, all we can see of it is a thick impasto—and that its crude, garish hues have invaded the painter’s lupine hands.

Trash's Dance, 1992. India ink on paper, 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy the Hort Family Collection.">

Ceding agency to paint, as it is comically encoded in Were Artist, is what finally enabled, I think, the remarkable sequence of multifigure canvases that has been the most salient of Eisenman’s achievements as an artist: in this show, they are Coping (2008); Beer Garden with Ulrike and Celeste (2009); The Triumph of Poverty (2009); Beer Garden with A.K. (2009); Seder (2010); Tea Party (2011); Another Green World (2015); and The Abolitionists in the Park (2020-21). These are the works that make Eisenman our premier painter of modern life. In many ways they hearken back to Eisenman’s riotously crowded early works, high-spirited and uninhibitedly transgressive, such as drawings like Untitled (Lesbian Recruitment Booth), Trash’s Dance, or Captured Pirates on the Island of Lesbos, all from 1992—and yet what a difference. Since 2008, Eisenman’s work, for all its wryness, has seemed to bear the weight of the world. And that burden has measured itself in the multiplicities of paint, of malleable matter—a physicality that has lately also assumed the form of sculpture, whose specific role in Eisenman’s developing oeuvre I will probably be able to assess by the time she has her next retrospective, I suppose in a decade or so, and in three thousand words, or maybe four.