George Condo

If not necessarily a major artist, George Condo is, however, an intriguing figure. But it is not easy to explain why. As “Lost Civilization,” a sizable exhibition at the Musée Maillol, makes clear, Condo’s paintings are generally naive, not faux-naïf, and only rarely hilarious; his subject matter, ranging from whores to orgies and clowns, is banal but never about banality, and Condo does not seem to really “play” with bad taste—it appears instead that bad taste plays with him, overwhelming any desire, on the part of the viewer, to perceive these pictures as conceptually cunning or ironic. Additionally, Condo is an uneven technician. He offers many suave, spirited passages (The Cave Woman, 2006, for example, has a gorgeous offhand intensity, depicting a heavy rock that, amazingly, also looks soft and faraway, like a cloud), and his drawings are sometimes very graceful, but many of the more recent pictures are catastrophically indebted to Francis Bacon.

Still, there is something absolutely, indescribably correct about Condo. He might be this moment’s Douanier Rousseau: A painter who is fated to straddle the line between insider and outsider, as if exactly halfway between Neo Rauch and Henry Darger. Not coincidentally, younger artists have been seen “playing” with Condo’s work. In 1908, Picasso and his gang threw a banquet for Rousseau: To this day, no one knows whether they were celebrating or mocking him. Although the context is not quite the same, one feels something similar in front of a better Condo painting, if “better” is understood to mean neither the best nor the worst, neither inspired nor uninspired—just strangely, smoothly, blandly there.