This article addresses a pivotal group of abstractions by the American painter James Bishop. During the early 1970s, the artist completed an expansive suite of paintings in oil on canvas in various shades of brown. Situating these paintings as a complex investigation of the limits between self and other, between a certain aspiration to neutrality and the no less powerful claims of the erotic, I suggest they are best understood in terms articulated by the French writer Jean Genet’s ‘What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Little Squares All the Same Size and Shot Down the Toilet’, a text famously published in Tel Quel in the spring of 1967. Special attention is paid to the essay’s provocative assertion that Rembrandt’s late portraits ‘refer to no identifiable person’: that they show us the deep equivalence of all men, a commonality rooted in flesh.
Molly Warnock (Wed,) studied this question.