THE MASTERS STUDIO 1956

Oil on Canvas

The set-up of this composition reminds the viewer first of other studio paintings: Gustav Courbet’s Studio of a Painter: A Real Allegory Summarizing My Seven Years of Life as an Artist, 1854-55 and Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas, 1656. Artists’ studios have long been subjects of major paintings because they give the artist a chance to fully explore perspective from multiple angles, and many times, to include their self-portraits in a scene. Garikow’s The Master’s Studio, depicts a self-portrait of the artist painting a live study of a nude female. She poses in the right foreground of the painting, so the viewer sees her body directly. Garikow paints her in his customary exaggerated and idealized manner. Her skin is flat and her body is rounded.

In the left foreground, Garikow gives us another body: a truncated marble sculpture also completed from a nude study. In this painting, Garikow portrays himself as both a painter and sculptor, multifaceted in his artistic talents, much like the great master Michelangelo.

The artist stands in deep space, dressed impeccably in suit and tie. He stands before the canvas where he works on the painting of the nude woman, and an audience of men and women watch him work. Behind the audience, paintings are stored in racks, and an open door in the centre of the background opens the deep space even further, creating one of the most dynamically arranged compositions in Garikow’s oeuvre. Though the perspective of the composition is not completely accurate—it is a little distorted—we get the main concept of the painting from Garikow’s

composition. This piece is thematically about scrutiny of the subject. Just as the artist looks at the model and then looks at his work in progress, the audience watches the artist moving through the space of the studio. And then in addition to that, the viewer of the physical painting looks at this piece and sees the layers of relationships between scrutinizer and subject that Garikow has painted.

Of course, the scene is complicated further because Garikow depicts all of this, most likely, from memory. It is as if in his mind’s eye, as he actually painted a model for an audience, he decided he would produce this painting that depicts him working in his studio. He wanted to insert himself into the dialogue and tradition of “studio” paintings. The casual viewer accepts the nude woman as the subject of the painting, but the careful viewer sees that the true subject is the artist creating his work in the studio for an audience that takes an interest in watching art in progress