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Long avoided by the American art world because of the subversive nature of his work, Paul McCarthy is finally getting his due with a major show, “White Snow,” at Hauser & Wirth New York this month. So it is with some conspiratorial satisfaction that Modern Painters presents a sneak peek at McCarthy’s rousingly raw series of monumental collage drawings.

Nearly 18 years ago, Paul McCarthy’s long-standing fixation with the Johanna Spyri novel Heidi culminated in his landmark 1992 video and installation, Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone, conceived with fellow Angeleno Mike Kelley. Now another Paul McCarthy obsession with a female figure from children’s literature has spawned a new series of collage drawings. The fetishistic focus this time is Snow White, specifically the one immortalized in Walt Disney’s 1937 cartoon classic, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. McCarthy’s homage features graphic depictions of the dwarfs’ cottage, the mine shaft where they toil, the glass-encased platform upon which the heroine sleeps, her iconic dress, even the bow in her hair.

"The bow represents the transition from innocence to awareness," says McCarthy, who notes that it is left on in the sexual acts depicted in Snow White pornography.

The dwarfs he describes as "a weird male club: They have their game room; they have penis noses. They never have sex with Snow White, but she totally upends their world. Their libido impulses are coming out in the games, in the way they torment and torture each other." As for Snow White’s apple-induced slumber, McCarthy explains that it "fluctuates between being dead and asleep; she is in her own world."

McCarthy’s technique in creating his monumental 9- and 10-foot-tall drawings was performative, involving walking onto and around each sheet of paper from different directions as it lay on the studio floor. "It is drawing as analysis — not controlling it but just allowing it to unfold as it goes," he says. "It’s not an end in itself; it’s an action that takes me to another action." These pictures, like his earlier works exploring the deep psychology of Heidi, challenge the West’s mythology of purity, drawing parallels between the stories’ marketing and commercialization in the art world. Interestingly,

McCarthy has never watched the animated feature. His fascination was fueled by illustrated Disney books, Snow White figurines, and Snow White porn. "The story of Snow White is not really the point," he says. "The drawings are the point — the process of making them. The work is more about making than telling."

"McCarthyism" originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2009 Table of Contents.