Human be-ing

There’s something almost everyone responds to, in some way or other, when looking at artwork: the human figure. It’s a constant, a universal motif, a touchstone that the viewer recognizes and relates to: After all, everyone’s got a body.

But what an artist does to those bodies — through the posture, through paint texture and color, through anatomical distortions; through hundreds of different ways an artist can evoke a history or a psychology when presenting a human figure — takes that recognition and builds on it. You feel a kinship in the figure on the canvas — now can you envision what’s happening to that person? And, by extension of the common humanity you’ve recognized — what’s happening to you?

Thirty-four paintings explore the power of the human body to convey universal themes — aging, tension, injustice, sexuality, fear, death — in the nationally touring exhibition “Paint Made Flesh.” The exhibition — which includes paintings created from 1952 to 2006 by such artists as Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon — is on view at the Memorial Art Gallery through Jan. 3.

The gallery is one of only three venues for the show, organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn. It opened at the Frist Center in January and next traveled to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

“I think what really holds the entire show together are the ways of using the human figure as a metaphor” and how the life one’s lived is reflected in the body,” noted Marlene Hamann-Whitmore, curator of education for interpretation at the gallery. “The events on the inside become visible on the outside — we wear the inside out.”

There’s the tension and the vulnerability displayed in English painter Tony Bevan’s 1992 “Self-Portrait.” The naked male figure is ridden with scars, wrinkles, pockmarks; there are no smooth edges — even the hair is tense and angular. The man in the painting looks considerably older than the 41 years Bevan had lived when he painted it — the terrain of the man’s body is almost an X-ray into inner turmoil.

There’s something else, Hamann-Whitmore pointed out: The way he holds his head, at an angle, exposing what’s one of the most vulnerable parts of the body: the neck (and therefore, the life-blood). That’s something an animal in the wild would never, ever do, she noted.

The times and turmoil the artists — and the viewers — have lived through are reflected in the works. Leon Golub’s devastatingly vivid acrylic “Napalm II,” for example — painted in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War — shows two figures, one upright and running, one writhing on the ground. Both figures are rendered in reds and blacks that call to mind raw meat — evoking war as a depersonalizing slaughterhouse — and the prone figure has masses of heavily applied paint in the darkest of hues around the shoulder and knee that suggest severe burns.

“He really manipulates the paint so it looks like flesh that’s been obliterated by bombing or by fire,” Hamann-Whitmore said. But there’s something else to notice, she pointed out: The poses of the two figures are reminiscent of classical depictions in Greek and Roman art — signifying that while the names, countries and means of harm may change over the centuries, the savagery of war is a constant, leading the viewer to question why, and whether, it has to be.

German artist Daniel Richter captured the universal unease and dread of the Other in “Duisen” — which, exhibit text explains, is about how authorities can view a large immigration influx as in Germany’s south. The mass of figures — a block of faceless but unmistakably human shapes in a panoply of hues, as seen through police thermal-imaging devices, arms ambiguously raised in threat or surrender — evoke how threatening a large number of new and unfamiliar people can appear to a citizen or a law officer. The placement of the people — all the way from left edge to right edge of the painting, several deep — can call to mind a battle onslaught, or zombie-movie iconography. As Hamann-Whitmore points out, you’re usually looking at the painting alone or with one or two other people — and there’s a lot more of them than there are of you.

These aren’t the figures of a Renoir or a Goya — these are figures that force, or at least suggest, the issue of one’s mortality. A Hyman Bloom painting, for instance, shows a body mid-autopsy, an elevated rib cage the first indication one sees that reveals what one’s looking at. And Eric Fischl’s “Frailty is a Moment of Self-Reflection” depicts a naked, elderly man entering a high-ceilinged room, his face and posture a study of mingled emotions: sadness and anger, acceptance and defiance, shame and pride.

One particularly striking image is “Hyphen,” a 1999 painting by Jenny Saville. A large painting taking up the bulk of one gallery wall, it shows two female human faces — one with bleary eyes, scars and wrinkles; one with a smooth, wide-eyed, almost babyish face. The way they’re posed — the latter head rests on the other’s shoulder — a viewer can easily mistake them for conjoined twins. In fact, the models were Saville and her sister — but the painting arises from the artist’s interest in the art of reconstructive surgery (or plastic surgery). The two faces can serve as comment on the possibilities — and slings and arrows — that life throws our way and the effects they have: We all are conjoined to the us who might have been and could still be.

“Paintings are really primary documents,” Hamann-Whitmore said. “They’re looking at primary text — they’re looking at painting as a way that the individual comments on the time in which they live.”

The artists

Ivan Albright, Karel Appel, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Tony Bevan, Hyman Bloom, Michael Borremans, Cecily Brown, Joan Brown, Francesco Clemente, John Currin, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Eric Fischl, Philip Guston, Lucian Freud, Leon Golub, Leon Kossoff, Jack Levine, Wangechi Mutu, Alice Neel, Albert Oehlen, David Park, A. R. Penck, Pablo Picasso, Daniel Richter, Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, Susan Rothenberg, Jenny Saville, Julian Schnabel, Lisa Yuskavage

If you go:

WHAT  “Paint Made Flesh” exhibit

WHEN  Through Jan. 3, during gallery hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday (until 9 p.m. Thursday)

WHERE Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave., Rochester

ADMISSION  $10 ($6 college students with ID and senior citizens; $4 children 6-18; free for members, University of Rochester students, children 5 and younger) — half-price admission 5-9 p.m. Thursdays

DETAILS  http://mag.rochester.edu

GUIDED EXHIBITION TOURS  Fridays from now through Dec. 18 at 2 p.m.; Sundays from now through Jan. 3 at 1 p.m. (included in gallery admission)

NOTE The exhibition in Rochester is made possible by Victoria and William Cherry, with additional support from the George D. and Freida B. Abraham Foundation, the Herdle-Moore Fund and an anonymous donor