Cecily Brown, ‘High Society,’ 1998, oil on linen, 76 x 98 in., Martin and Toni Sosnoff, © Cecily Brown.
Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian
Big, fleshy, writhing canvases filled with body parts.
Visceral.
Sexy.
Not romantic sexy, lustful sexy. What was your name again sexy. Sometimes graphically sexual. Orgiastic.
Swishing, swirling paint laid on thick, mimicking the swishing, swirling bodies. Paint as a bodily fluid.
Cecily Brown dares going there. Where art history–ever obsessed with the female nude from the male perspective–prohibits. Objectifying men and their penises. Feelings proper women in a polite society are not supposed to have. Women’s sexual liberation and freedom and pleasure.
The Dallas Museum of Art brings visitors up-close during the exhibition “Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations,” on view through February 9, 2025.
“Owning sexuality and depicting male nudes in that way is completely unique in the history of art when women have been depicted as nude and male fantasies for centuries,” Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA, told Forbes.com. “In some of these boudoir paintings you really see where she’s exploring women in these throws of sexual pleasure, but from a very internal stance. It’s not about performing for the male gaze, but fully embodying this ownership of it.”
Empowerment.
“Instead of the woman being the object, the woman’s the subject,” Brodbeck continued.
And the author.
The exhibition brings together nearly 30 large-scale paintings and drawings from across almost 30 years of Brown’s (b. 1969, London, UK; lives and works in New York, NY) career, including two new works on paper that will be shared with the public for the first time.
Best known for bringing female sexual agency to gallery and museum spaces, more recently, Brown has taken on a range of provocative political subject matter. The migrant crisis on the Mediterranean.
Shipwrecks and the sea. Gericault and Delacroix. Salacious groundbreaker, yes, but a history painter too.
“She does these beautiful, large paintings about the royal hunt coming from Fran Snyders (Flemish, 1579-1657), and then the still life’s that result from it. This is one of the themes we explore in the show,” Brodbeck said. “She’s a very strict vegetarian. She’s been one her whole life. She’s an animal rights activist and part of her interest in that material was seeing these as cruel and bloody scenes of the hunting of animals. You can read it as an art historical thing, but there’s also, behind all of it, a very human critique.”
“This double standard; traditionally, there’s the criticism that women are showing too much, and here, (women) also being criticized for being too modest,” Brodbeck said. “This impossible situation where women are always being policed for their appearance.”
Political commentary served up with a dash of witty, British humor.
A Painter’s Painter
Cecily Brown, Untitled (1996), oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in., Promised Gift of Agnes Gund to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, © Cecily Brown
Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian
Brown graduated from the renowned Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1993. Her contemporaries were known as the YBA’s–young British artists. Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, the standard-bearers. They were not painters.
“The YBA generation was not as interested in painting, and when they were painting, (painting) was almost kind of a gimmick to do something else–gimmick is a strong word–but they had a unique agenda that was beyond the materiality of paint,” Brodbeck explained. “She started painting when painting was not very popular amongst advanced artists.”
Brown arrived on the scene during a period when painting was considered dead. By artists and critics. Played out. An asinine opinion repeated every generation or so for the past 100-plus years.
“A lot of artists in the mid-90s were doing more conceptual or installation-based work,” Brodbeck adds. “Even amongst her generation, her love of the medium of painting and her belief in its continued relevance is unique.”
Brown took her love of painting to New York in the mid-1990s, moving there, crashing the boys club. She achieved what thousands before had unsuccessfully attempted: a harmonious synthesis of figuration and abstraction. Neither one nor the other. Both, simultaneously. Peter Paul Rubens meets Joan Mitchell.
Never before or since has an artist so thoroughly and effectively obscured the line between figurative painting and abstraction. A virtuoso in her medium to go along with pioneering subject matter.
An artist who loves paint and painting and reveres her place in its 10,000-year lineage.
“It was cool seeing her unpacking work that she did 25 years ago, that she hasn’t seen for a long time. At that time, she was doing things like adding varnish to the paint, which is something that you see in conventional paintings from centuries past, but it’s very uncommon in contemporary painting,” Brodbeck said. “She’s deeply steeped in that history. She’s engaged with all of the formal qualities of (paint). She’s a maker and it’s beautiful to hear her speak about the physicality of the practice.”
A painter’s painter.
“What’s great about doing a survey is you’re putting her back in the context from what she emerged and her dedication to the craft of painting, her dedication to art history, but also how she really revolutionized it from the women’s perspective,” Brodbeck said.
Following its presentation in Dallas, “Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations” will be on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia from March 9 through May 25, 2025.
