The Vagina Dialogues

The way many of us dread the prospect of going to 25-year school reunion is exactly how some artists feel about facing their own retrospective, where they will be confronted with all their artworks they haven't seen for years. It's emotional; it's unsettling; it's unnerving. So one can understand the reluctance of well known, Brooklyn-based artist Mickalene Thomas to say "yes" when Santa Monica Museum offered her a mid-career retrospective.

(L) Mickalene Thomas, Interior: Blue Couch with Green Owl, 2012

(R) Din, une tres belle nigresse #2, 2012

Instead, she embarked on an impressive, if near-impossible task of creating — in just one year — about a dozen ambitious new paintings, varying in size from large to monumental. Her portraits, landscapes, nudes and interiors grab your eye with their bold colors and in-your-face use of glitter and rhinestones. Mickalene Thomas is not too shy to use herself and her friends either for formal portraits or daring displays of their own naked young bodies.

Some of these new works, especially her semi-abstract landscapes and interiors, not only grabbed but held my attention long after I left the museum. But her nudes -- where, in my opinion, she gets too close for comfort to great painters of the past -- are a quite different story...

(L) Gustav Courbet, L'Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World), 1866

Musee d'Orsay, Paris

(R) Mickalene Thomas, Origin of the Universe 1, 2012

It takes courage and a lot of talent to take on the iconic artworks of a famous master. And when Mickalene Thomas decided to go head to head with the famously infamous masterpiece by 19th century French painter Gustave Courbet, Origin of the World, depicting a close-up of the female vagina, she lost her battle. Knowing that the artist proudly embraces her identity as a black, gay woman, one understands the cultural implications of this artistic gesture. But even if you look at reproductions of Courbet's painting, belonging to the Musee d'Orsay, you will see how little Thomas has to say or add to the dialogue, other than substituting black nudity for Courbet's white nudity.

Gustave Courbet, Le Sommeil (Sleep), 1866

And the same goes for her other painting, the biggest one in her exhibition, Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires, with its direct quotation of a Courbet painting depicting two voluptuous nude white women embraced in their sleep. Thomas shows, instead, a black woman embracing her yellow-skinned companion, their realistically depicted bodies superimposed over vast landscape depicted in a rather abstract fashion.

Mickalene Thomas, "Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires," 2012

© Mickalene Thomas, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

Photo: Christopher Burke Studio

Maybe, if the artist had the luxury of more time, her conversation with Courbet would have been more intriguing. But as it is, I felt sorry seeing her falling short of having meaningful dialogue with art of the past.

Anthoni Tapìes, reinterpration of Courbet's The Origin of the World

Museu Nacional D'Art de Catalunya

Only a few months ago, reporting on my trip to Barcelona, I talked about famous Spanish artist Anthoni Tàpies, who mustered enough

chutzpah and wit to go

mano a mano with Courbet's

Origin of the World. He totally, in my opinion, rose to the occasion, by smartly referring to, rather than mimicking, the original image.

Anselm Kiefer, La berceuse, 2010 (detail)

Photo: Myra May, courtesy Rijksmuseum

And the same goes for Anselm Kiefer when he was asked to do the impossible: to have a dialogue with the Rembrandt's most famous painting,

The Night Watch, at the Rijksmuseum. He knew better than to directly quote the great master. Instead, he

created an installation

made of several dried-out sunflowers, evoking the spirit of Van Gogh, another great Dutch artist, who happened to be one of the first visitors to the Rijksmuseum when it opened to the public in the late 19th century.

The career of any artist of distinction is always full of battles, many of them won, some of them inevitably lost. I would like to know what you think of this exhibition of Mickalene Thomas and her risky dialogue with Big Boys of art's past.

Banner image: (L) Mickalene Thomas, Qusuquzah, une tres belle nigresse #3, 2012; (R) Din, une tres belle nigresse #2, 2012