IRRESISTIBLE.(John Currin)

The soaring fame of John Currin, the forty-one-year-old satiric and surrealistic painter, whose sparkling mid-career retrospective has come to the Whitney Museum by way of Chicago and London, surprises me, and I'm a longtime Currin enthusiast. A New Yorker originally from California, he made a small stir with his commercial-gallery debut, in 1992, which featured acrid fantasy portraits of menopausal women--images suspended, in his words, "between the object of desire and the object of loathing." Subsequent shows attracted lukewarm and often annoyed, though oddly compulsive, critical attention. I assumed that Currin's skilled, sly, ineffably old-fashioned work--pastiches of Old Masters and hack illustration, in easel paintings fit for a bygone Beaux-Arts salon--would remain a renegade taste, marginal to video, photography, installations, and other dominant, paint-allergic modes of contemporary art.

But to resist Currin's claim to preeminence in art's present state and near-future course suddenly seems beyond anyone's ability. A formerly ill-disposed curator told me that, at the Whitney show, "I kept trying to figure out why I don't dislike him anymore." Even the art critic Kim Levin, of the Village Voice, whose outraged response to Currin's "awful" work, in 1992--"Boycott this show"--has pursued her through innumerable discussions of the artist, capitulates, sort of, in a recent column. "But Currin's subsequent oeuvre reveals an artist whose work is something other than merely misogynistic, sexist, and ageist," Levin now allows. Thus do the anathemas of the politically correct give way, even as Currin's distinctly male political antagonism continues apace.

Here are exhibits for an inquest into Currin's popularity:

"Mary O'Connel" (1989). An unhappy blond teen from what might be a high-school yearbook photo. There is something sexually demonic about her.

"Bea Arthur Naked" (1991). Bea Arthur naked.

"Nadine Gordimer" (1992). A realistic portrait of the author, employing the motif of a David Levine caricature: an enormous head on a vestigial body. She's a monster.

"Ms. Omni" (1993). A skinny, leathery, over-the-hill Park Avenue divorcee type, with haplessly gallant mien.