But The Young and Evil is reactionary, too.
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Or has been, at least).
They pursued a modernism of the body driven by eroticism and bounded by intimacy.
George Bellowss boxer was sinewy; Thomas Hart Bentons farmers were willowy.
The artists here knew deeply whereof they spoke in this expanded erogenous field of art.
Most of the artists here also knew one another intimately.
Everything is unmistakably, audaciously out in the open.
They all were far more coded.
), subject matter mayalsomake art modern.
And not by half-measures.
Benton did similar things, making serpentine mural paintings of rural life and country farmers.
This signaled to all that their art was trying to be different in form as well as subject matter.
Not so the artists in Earnests show.
Tight rendering apes early- and late-Renaissance style and color.
A few of the works look like they could have come from the villas of Roman emperors.
This wasnt scrapbooking art history to return to any golden Pre-Raphaelite era.
Talk about making it new!
The show announces its intentions right at the start with Tchelitchews riveting, eroticThe Lion Boy (193637).
This boy is seen in archaic Roman wall-painting mode, Pompeian pleasure-palace fresco, or high-camp Felliniesque lasciviousness.
The painterly details are unlike anything after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
(Think Tadzio, the 14-year-old Polish bather inDeath in Venice.
No matter, thats what these artists risked doing and did.
In Young,youll see some of the weirdest realisms youve set eyes on in some time.
Such freedom, bawdiness, joy, and almost Disneyesque innocence and nuttiness.
Next to him, on his knees, the famous expat novelist Glenway Wescott.
Theres a superrealistic print of a hawk in front of him.
All with individuality, agency, purpose, desirability, and psychological complexity.
See this showfor one of the origins of this fire.
The Young and Evilis open at David Zwirner, 533 W. 19th St., through April 13.
