Stubborn Genius

It’s not uncommon for artists of a certain stature to have assistants. The painter and photographer Marilyn Minter currently has six. One of them, her studio manager Johan Olander, answers the door when I arrive at her studio in Manhattan’s garment district. Moments later, the artist herself appears with a friendly smile and offers me a LaCroix. Olander returns to his stool, continuing one of Minter’s newest paintings. Made of enamel on metal, Lucent, 2024, shows a partial close-up of the Filipina- Canadian model-slash-influencer Jael Dorotan’s face: her eyes outside the frame, a fringe of platinum hair skimming her freckled nose, and a chrome-lacquered nail resting on her plush, parted lips. A string of pearls obscures her chin with round, gleaming opalescence. The painting, which will be included in an eponymous show opening at Lehmann Maupin in Seoul this spring, is, like all of Minter’s paintings, photorealist in style. To achieve its high-pixel clarity, Olander coats a single finger with paint, then layers it onto the work’s surface with light staccato pats to soften the underpainted brushstrokes. This causes the metal to bang loudly against the wall, the sound reverberating across the studio as Minter and I sit down at a small table in the center of the room to talk.

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“I hire people that can make the same marks over and over and over and over,” Minter says over the noise, noting that all of her assistants are “serious artists” in their own right. “It’s like playing video games all day.”

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Some serious-artists-slash-video-gamers might find that sort of comment ego-bruising, but Olander seems genuinely unfazed. He met Minter when he was a student at the School of Visual Arts where she still teaches, and has worked for her since 1997. “There’s no filter,” he says of his employer. “She is who she is.”

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And who is she? A feminist for one thing. In November 2016, The New York Times’ co-chief art critic Roberta Smith called Minter one of “contemporary art’s bad girls” in celebration of her retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Opening just days before Donald Trump was elected president, the exhibit demonstrated, Smith wrote, Minter’s devotion to making “provocative images of female independence at its most intimate, centering explicitly on the body.” Given the context, the show felt perversely well-timed.

Minter’s pieces generally feature women, often nude, provocatively dressed, or decontextualized into parts: hands, feet, armpits, vaginas, tongues. Her palette is crisp and almost clinically vibrant, and she possesses an unwavering desire to seduce, sometimes by recasting ostensible flaws as decoration. A proud user of Photoshop, she can also eschew it to great effect, as in Blue Poles, 2007, a closeup of eyelids slicked with sparkly blue eyeshadow and prominently featuring a zit. (“I make good-looking pimples,” she jokes.) Her portrait portfolio includes Pamela Anderson, Gloria Steinem, Monica Lewinsky, and Lady Gaga. Madonna used her video installation Green Pink Caviar, 2009—featuring a tongue and lips licking and sucking a variety of substances from behind a pane of glass—as a stage background on her Sticky & Sweet Tour, and, when Minter and I speak, she’d recently shot Natalie Portman in Los Angeles. Occasionally, the artist turns her eye toward the older and less conventionally pretty, as when she contributed photographs for a recent magazine article on sex after 70. “It was all new to me,” says Minter of that particular assignment. “I didn’t know there were male vibrators. Did you?”

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Minter is also, much like her subjects, highly exposed. At 75, she’s been interviewed so many times that even her trademark frankness strikes me, when reading her vault of past press, as somewhat exhausted. I admit to her that the amount of publicity she’s enjoyed presents me with a challenge. “What has been on your mind recently?” I ask. “What would you like to talk about?”

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“Politics,” she says immediately. “But I don’t want to talk about it. I think we should shut the fuck up as artists. We know nothing.”

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The “it” she was referring to was Israel’s on-going siege of Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israeli soil. It’s interesting to note which taboos are considered acceptable to break and which ones are not. Perhaps, I think—as I admire a painting of female pubic hair hanging on the wall, part of her ongoing “Bush” series—the taboos that we break so openly are not actually taboo at all.

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We move on to vaguer, more palatable topics of protest. She draws my attention to two 11-by-14-inch wall plaques resting on top of a filing cabinet nearby. They’re embossed with Trump’s smiling face and the words from that terrible and ultimately inconsequential leaked tape in which he bragged to Billy Bush about grabbing women by the pussy. They come in silver and gold and sell for just over $1,000 each; to date, Minter estimates they’ve raised about $150,000 for Downtown for Democracy, a Democratic political action committee that collaborates with famous artists to benefit community organizing and digital media campaigns in swing states. “You put them over your bathroom toilet,” she says of the plaques. “I’ve done activism because I can’t stand to do nothing.”

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Minter’s origin story is robustly mythological. Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, to a debutante-turned-addict mother and gambling father who separated when Minter was 8, she spent the bulk of her childhood in Florida. On a visit home from college in 1969, she captured her mother’s crest-fallen glamor in a series of black-and-white photos, “Coral Ridge Towers,” that helped professionally rehabilitate her sex-crazed image when she showed them at Postmasters Gallery in 1995. To this day, Minter is still not sure what drugs her mother took, nor does she know with confidence her parents’ ages. “My mother was five years older, or seven years older than my father, depending on who’s telling the story,” she says. “They were very good-looking people,” she replies when I ask how they met—an explanation that, while information-deficient, is charmingly unimpeachable.

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“I’ve been quarantined from criticism. I haven’t had a really bad critique in a long time. It probably is about to end.” — Marilyn Minter

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For her part, Minter recently celebrated 31 years of marriage to her husband Bill Miller, a former vice president at Morgan Stanley. She tells me she plans to get a new tattoo on her forearm to commemorate their past three decades together: a balloon with string and the number 30 on it. Her engagement ring and wedding bands are also in ink, partly for practicality. “I have my hands in paint,” she says.

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As an undergraduate, Minter idolized Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, discovering her love of photography and her aptitude for replication—she often says she could have been a forger—before earning an MFA in painting from Syracuse University. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, she worked steadily as a photographer and painter, depicting domestic tableaus like coffee splashed across a tile floor (Spill, 1977) and the contents of a kitchen sink (Sink Study, 1978)—images that played with ideas of presentability and the conventionally feminine task of cleaning up. At some point in the 1980s, she got sober. She still attends AA meetings and credits them with keeping her “right-sized.”

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Minter’s early works proved to be coy precursors to Porn Grid, 1989, four Pop Art-style paintings depicting fellatio and titty-fucking with clever, cummy exuberance. The series, which debuted as part of a solo exhibit at Max Protetch Gallery in New York City in 1992, both raised Minter’s profile and polarized it. The show closed a week early, and it took three years for Minter to open another—at which time one critic speculated with condescension that “perhaps she wants to be the Camille Paglia of the visual arts.”

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But Minter has grown in prominence, particularly since 2005, when she received her first solo museum show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Since then, “I’ve been quarantined from criticism,” she says. “I haven’t had a really bad critique in a long time. It probably is about to end.”

Such commercial success isn’t bad, but it does suggest that Minter’s art isn’t as boundary-pushing as it perhaps once was. Last year, Lévy Gorvy Dayan showed a series of Minter’s “21st-Century Odalisques’’—photos and paintings that aim to reclaim the reclining female form from the imagination of such canonical male masters as Édouard Manet and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres by connecting Minter’s own female gaze with that of her subjects. One of the works, a giant dye-sublimated print of Lizzo, shows the singer stretched out on a chaise lounge, phone in hand, looking fabulous in a black corset and pink feather slippers while she eyes Minter’s camera with sublime inscrutability. “I wanted to show odalisque agency,” says Minter of that particular image, which she shot, like most of her portraits, in her home on Mercer Street.

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I ask her what that ubiquitous word—“agency”—means to her. “It means that she’s aware that you’re looking at her, and she’s in charge of the way she’s gonna look at you.”

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At times, I am irritated by Minter’s tendency to ignore questions or answer them circularly, as when she shows me a series of small paintings she and her assistants are working on inspired by the work of Philip Guston. “We have the same lexicon—shoes and mouths,” Minter says of Guston, but when I ask her why shoes and mouths preoccupy her in the first place—several of her works star the stiletto heel—she insists they don’t. “I’m working with the same lexicon,” she repeats.

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Such deflection feels pertinent to Minter’s art, which is obstinately, gorgeously superficial. It’s well-suited for our current culture in which life is so privatized that conformity to convention is often credited with subversion.

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To confess that I find Minter’s level of introspection less than satisfying says as much about me as it does about her. In part, it testifies to her influence. Even in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s reversal, as a 32-year-old American woman living in New York City today—with insurance, abortion access, and a college degree—I get to inhabit the more sexually permissive world that Minter and her generation helped create. I’d like to think this increased liberty has freed up some energy for additional concerns. Though, like so many women, I still find it difficult to be openly critical, especially of someone like Minter, who asks one of her longtime assistants, Genevieve Lowe, to put me on an invite list for the next party Minter hosts at her studio.

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I like getting invited to parties. I like Minter. “She’s very flattering,” I tell Olander. “She’s a Southern belle,” he responds.

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Minter’s frustrating tendency, in conversations and in her art, to reject demands for depth is clearly part of her resilience. The word “boundaries”—today so overused and blindly encouraged—comes to mind: You’d think someone who’s made a name painting tits, ass, and happy trails wouldn’t have any, but boundaries are practically her magnetic field. I suspect this helps explain why she’s able to retain some employees for years, even decades: She’s demanding but consistent, and she seems reluctant to take offense. At one point, when Olander calls her a narcissist, she smiles, as if to say: Where’s the lie?

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And of course, repetitiveness is not a crime. The conceptual artist Marina Abramović has often said, citing her one-time mentor, the Croatian painter Krsto Hegedušić: “If you’re a good artist, you might have one good idea; if you’re a genius, you might have two.” At the heart of Minter’s big idea—executed with technical perfection and persistent pleasure—remains the simple recognition that women are deeply appealing. We like to look at them, and we can.