Raucous, expressive and laugh-out-loud funny: Nicole Eisenman, at the Whitechapel Gallery, reviewed

There’s a photograph in Nicole Eisenman’s Whitechapel exhibition of the 28-year-old artist, in 1993, sitting at her easel with a big bow in her hair and a bevy of studio assistants – a feminist piss-take of the trope of the heroic male artist surrounded by adoring acolytes. Her resemblance in the photo to stand-up comic Sarah Silverman is not entirely coincidental; Eisenman is Jewish-American and funny. At the time she was producing the bawdy satires on downtown New York lesbian life – battles of the sexes redrawing Michelangelo’s ‘Battle of Cascina’ in the style of Where’s Wally? – which plaster the wall facing the exhibition entrance. She could have been a cartoonist, but she chose art.

Her raucous lesbianism put her on the map, but by the Noughties she wanted a bigger canvas and moved on from sexual politics to broader issues. ‘The Triumph of Poverty’ (2009) addresses the sub-prime meltdown in a composition quoting from Holbein and Bruegel in the carnivalesque language of James Ensor; later allegories are directed at the Tea Party and the MAGA disciples of Donald Trump.

Like the great cartoonists, Eisenman is an art-historical magpie, as happy filching from Ingres’s ‘Angelica Saved by Ruggiero’ as from Renoir’s ‘Bal du moulin de la Galette’. She owes the pop-eyed cyclops in her series on contemporary culture’s screen addiction to Philip Guston, but has not inherited his feeling for juicy oil paint. Her paint surfaces are strangely impersonal, as if eschewing the machismo of the gestural. Give her ink on paper, though, and she’s a different artist: her monoprints of heads from 2011-12 are wonderfully witty and expressive. Her sculptures can be laugh-out-loud funny, too. Her saving grace is her humour, which she looks in danger of losing in her recent monumental painting acquired by New York’s Met, shown in the final room in reproduction.