Cecily Brown's Gaze

Installation view: “Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations”, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. Showing:“The Splendid Table”, 2019-20, oil on linen, in three parts, 105 1/2 x316 1/2 inches (overall). The Hartland & Mackie Family/Labora Collection and The Rachofsky Collection © Cecily Brown

By EDWARD WAISNIS April 28, 2025

Cecily Brown’s mid-career retrospective has landed in Philadelphia on the heels of it’s premiere at The Dallas Museum of Art in an install with some minor modification, mostly with a few works added and subtracted from the respective venues. Themes and Variations, the Philly version, is set-up as an amble through the artist’s three decade output achieved with a lively layout of quadrants arranged to facilitate a circular flow to the whole affair.

With less than three dozen works one might anticipate strained abbreviation. Rather, engagement strengthened by the concision of selection is sufficient in providing satiation. Organized under five themes: painting flesh; in the night garden; looking and stealing; returning and revisiting, and sirens and shipwrecks. Brown’s utility with the brush and explosions of color resounds against the hothouse of Cézannes, Matisses, and way too many Renoirs of the historically significant collection of the hosting institution. A perfect venue for a painter who cross-pollinates a wide swath of art history into her own practice.

Additionally, Brown has retained that adolescent thrill one comes up against upon discovery of the confounding and, dare I say it, the taboo; that first encounter with an R-rated film, a banned book, or an underground comic–in short, all of the  verboten items not meant for underage consumption. Brown’s re-counting of the delight she experienced coming upon reproductions of the paintings of Chaïm Soutine and Francis Bacon, at an impressionable age, in her version of this rite of passage. Brown’s fondness for those brain teasers of the Victorian Gilded Age–Rabbit and Duck; All is Vanity–offers evidence that these exercises of illusion have contributed to her distinctive shifts between the corporeal and the nonrepresentational endemic throughout her work.

Cecily Brown, “Girl on a Swing”, 2004. Oil on linen, 72 × 96 in. (182.9 × 243.8 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2015.62.1 © Cecily Brown

Settling in New York–the breeding ground for painting of monumental import and overwhelming scale–at the turn of the millennium enabled Brown to disassociate herself from the hothouse YBA scene, then surging in her native Britain. With the bonus of distancing from an aesthetic direction that ran counter to her innate passions. Brown’s expatriation did little to dim a connection to the English tradition in painting, stretching back to Turner and Gainsborough and running through Bacon, Auerbach, and Kossoff. Brown’s landscapes are firmly situated within the established traditions of the bucolic hills and dales of Europe. Just take a look at Girl on a Swing, 2004, wherein Brown has co-opted Fragonard, with a glint in her eye, by exposing the raw nerve of the flora; indeed, it’s encroaching foreboding potential toward malevolence. At the same time, there is no denying that the slather and froth of deKooning has infiltrated her very physical paint handling.

The passage of time, in concert with Brown’s art world exposure, has dimmed the brouhaha once stirred by works like On the Town, 1998, deemed shockingly explicit in their day. Now settled into scruffy grandeur having been acknowledged for powers of feminist critique that were always there, while the up-front explicitness has receded.

The saving grace, if that is the correct terminology, that has come to buoy her work above the fray is the beauty of the slippage she has come to embrace, even master, between imagined forms, depictions from reality, and the soif de vivre she has absorbed along the journey.

Brown’s way with flesh, driven by her deep appreciation for the accomplishments of Peter Paul Rubens, as well as a broad array of old masters, and the previously cited modern masters who took succor from the abattoir, revels in bundles of voluptuousness jostling and melting into one another. Her figures simultaneously emerge while being obscured by the lashes of paint. The obscurity offered by these group compositions, with their ill-defined features, aid the abet Brown with the gaze she seeks, and ultimately imparts to the viewer.

Cecily Brown,“Justify My Love”, 2003–4. Oil on linen, 90 . 78 in. (228.6 . 198.1 cm). Forman Family Collection © Cecily Brown

A lilt of mannered androgyny is evident in of many of the figures in the Black Paintings, that are enthralled with the arch romance of the boudoir. Given their blazing iconography dripping with glittering gloom Goya holds sway with a harking to his The Dream of Reason Produced Monsters. The reverie of the nude–an ode toVenus and Olympia–in Justify My Love, 2003-04, has them marveling at falling fluff (feathers from a pillow fight?; cascading leaves?; the deritus of peeling wallpaper?) descending upon the scene. The cursive legend running across the bottom, a touch redolent of photo album archiving, only heightens the sense of ardor.

Cecily Brown,“Lobsters, oysters, cherries and pearls”, 2020 Oil on linen 59 × 67 in. (149.9 × 170.2 cm). Collection of Suzi and Andrew B. Cohen © Cecily Brown

Brown’s penchant for scale is addressed in the wall-spanning The Splendid Table, 2019-2020. In this triptych Brown employs a trope of intentional mismatch at the canvases junctures, yet another version of her signature splintering and fracturing techniques that put in mind Georg Baselitz’s use of similar strategies in his early work. The expanses of delectable swarthy cherry red, applied with a large sweeping strokes of the enveloping table cover. It is in this mural-sized work that Brown comes closest to–while not facilely imitative of–that early hero of hers, Francis Bacon.

Equally luscious, Lobsters, oysters, cherries and pearls, 2020, presents the spoils of a beggar’s banquet (not only do I envision The Stones occupying this space, but other rakish characters–Byron; Delacroix, etc. would also suit the occasion) where the eponymous riches have been strewn across an immense tabletop. All the while a black cat, who also makes an appearance in The Splendid Table in a less primary role, and lacking the sfumato treatment given in this instance, crouches apprehensively peeking out from the nether lair beneath the expanse.

Cecily Brown,“Body (after Sickert)”, 2022. Oil on linen, 13 . 17 in. (33 . 43.2 cm). Private collection, New York © Cecily Brown

A few years ago, reassessing her trajectory of going ever bigger, Brown swung, pendulum-like, to the challenge of working small. A few examples are included here. One example, Body (After Sickert), 2022, pays homage to the Camden Town post-impressionist for his interiority and chill; the figure depicted, wearing only what might be described as tube halter top, can be observed flopping lazily on a bed-sitting room cot. Brown culls structural lessons from these easel friendly tableaus.

Cecily Brown,“Madrepora (Alluvial)”, 2017. Gouache, watercolor, and pastel on paper. 40 × 60 in. (101.6 × 152.4 cm). Private collection © Cecily Brow

An outlier to the compactness, Madrepora (Alluvial), 2017, a gouache, watercolor and pastel frieze in which the sediment referenced in the title has produced eruptions of sprouting figures emerging/encased from/in the flinty bed/sarcophagi. An airiness emanates, attributable to the medium deployed, from the aquatic dregs evoked.

Cecily Brown,“Saboteur four times”, 2019. Oil on linen and oil on UV-curable pigment on linen, in four parts. Overall: 67 × 212 in. (170.2 × 538.5 cm). Private Collection © Cecily Brown

Brown delves into digital reproduction with Saboteur four times, 2019. Ordering an original painting reproduced three times and subsequently reworking the reproductions that allowed free-range riffing on a medley of variation. The retinal payoff is akin to shuttling back and forth with a flip book. Or reminiscent of the effect when a projected film jams in the gate and stutters.

Cecily Brown,“Black shipwreck”, 2018. Oil on linen, 83 . 79 in. (210.8 . 200.7 cm). Collection of Nancy and Pat Forster © Cecily Brown
 

With regards to the sea pictures, Gericault is Brown’s go-to guy. Specifically for his masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa. Black Shipwreck, 2018, puts one in the eye of the swell, bringing to mind the legend of Turner lashing himself to the mast during a storm to experience it in situ. Here Brown uses thinner layers that she swipes and lunges at with a putty knife. The results are noting short of immersive.

Cecily Brown,“Picture This”, 2020. Oil on linen, 47 × 43 in. (119.4 × 109.2 cm). Green Family Art Foundation. Courtesy Adam Green Art Advisory © Cecily Brown

Picture This, 2020, is invested with a network of gangly live wire meanderings worthy of a Terry Winters web that factiously never seems to coalesce, though the boxy lattice work that predominates wiggles towards depiction–a figure with their hands over their head (in ecstasy, or expressing woe); another recumbent, or, alternately, a messy bedstead; several ghostly diminutive faces (busts, or statues?); a pair of cartoon-inspired googly eyes, all dancing within a breathing domestic scene. An uncanny wispy white band running across the bottom edge brings a surprisingly powerful point of punctuation to the unwieldy vista.

While wholeheartedly made for viewer consumption, Cecily Brown’s output acts as a record of her inestimable appetite. Her relentless probing enables her fertile sensibility to absorb and contain situations, historical noodling, and gushes of brilliance. In large part the endeavor Brown has undertaken requires faith. It is encouraging to experience her call to prayer.
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On the occasion of what would have been his seventy-fourth birthday, this one goes out to the memory of my brother Donald Waisnis (1951–2023), in appreciation for his role as the person who put me on a path in art. His unerring support and encouragement, after his own aspirations were derailed by a heart transplant, spirit of creativity, honestly and love continue to inspire and guide me.

Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations
Barnes Foundation - Roberts Gallery
2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia
March 9–May 25, 2025