WHO'S THAT MUSE?: Art tart has NYC guessing
MAY 22, 2010 --- Who's that girl?

The entire New York art scene --- make that all of New York --- wants to know. Call this impassioned pretty woman the "Moan-a Lisa." Not since Leonardo da Vinci's mystery madam has a femme in a frame been the object of so much speculation.

The question arises at the Museum of Modern Art's blockbuster retrospective of James Morales, the "bad boy" artist who thumbed his nose at the art establishment by entering a self-imposed exile just after shooting to fame in the late 1990's. For years, when curious collectors asked after Morales's work, curators told them the hard-edged Latino's brush had dried up (and, word had it, that the bald bruiser himself had cracked up). Now we find that his magic materials were flying across the canvas the entire time. Along with Junkyard, the mixed-media painting that won Morales his first kudos at 1997's Promettente (as always, at the Galina Woodworth Gallery), MOMA offers room after room of lush abstracts in lighter flesh tones, browns, and reds --- leading, chronologically, to his final works, more straightforward paintings of what are obviously half-body nudes featuring a porcelain-skinned woman in repose. Many have compared the most triumphant, Untitled IV 2005 --- a deeply textured, full-body nude of a tortured and apparently scarred female form --- to the work of Expressionist Egon Schiele.

But the public has other associations in mind. "I think the comparison to Mona Lisa is a valid one," observed Gresh Martin, the self-admitted "George Plimpton of the art world," who discovered Morales during his brief stint curating the annual Promettente (Italian for "up-and-coming") group shows in their heyday. "The look on this woman's face...it's simply exquisite. It's impossible to tell if she's in agony or ecstasy. She could be dying --- or having an orgasm!"

But the guessing game is complicated by the fact that so little is known about the personal life of Morales, who died in 2007 after an apparent overdose. And those who knew Morales, including current Oscar nominee Carly Croft, aren't talking. Some recall having seen former model Doreen Philbrick, who dabbled at the Woodworth Gallery before her marriage to Mick Jagger, with Morales at the time of his early success.

But others say the identity of the mystery woman, along with that of the paintings' current owners, is anybody's guess.

"Whoever she is, I can say this about her," Martin says, with a twinkle in his eye. "Morales owes her a great deal. But I think he's paid her back in spades. Thanks to him, she will live forever."