Themes and Variations, an exhibit of Cecily Brown paintings spans the artist’s career seamlessly from early (1990s) to her most recent works. The title of the exhibit, at the Barnes Foundation, is an apt description, you zig zag though the galleries in phases, from her more sexually charged figurative work (bunnies) to abstract, to sea shanties, to lushess vanitas, each painting titled explicitly, by pop song, the Mediterranean, untitled, self-titled to selfies.
A good painting, no matter how or what you are painting, is determined by surface; scale has nothing to do with the literal size of a work of art. I like all themes and variations of paintings. And Cecily Brown is a master of surface. It’s not surprising she is influenced by painters of the great Western canon like Rubens, her palette and compositions are animated, decadent, and yes, visceral. I like that The Barnes is having this exhibit. Any painter worth their salt would want a special exhibition paired with one of the greatest painting collections in the world. The juxtaposition adds to the experience and to wholly grasp what a great painter Cecily Brown truly is and how she comments within her work on the grand scope of painting throughout art history. Many painters mentioned in the show’s catalog are available to view at the Barnes, except Francis Bacon. They do have Rubens and Soutine – for an apt comparison to Cecily’s expressionist palette, tit for tat, go see Room 5 for Soutine’s “Flayed Rabbit” 1921.Goya, El Greco, or Manet with their deep blacks and Van Dyke browns are all on view at the Barnes. Like her predecessors, Cecily’s the kind of painter that makes you want to go home to paint while also feeling intimidated as if you could ever paint as well as her. These are the things the Barnes collection was intended for, to educate and inspire artists, painters mostly.
As much as it is mentioned both in the wall texts and the accompanying catalog that Cecily Brown is a she, a woman painter, there’s not much comparison to female painters – of which there are plenty to mention, maybe most obvious is Joan Mitchell, especially in Brown’s nautical themed canvases. Mitchell was an Ab-Ex painter on par (better imho) with DeKooning who is of course mentioned in the wall text and catalog. Granted, DeKooning’s ab-ex-ing is more figurative like Brown’s compared to Mitchell’s landscape dominated compositions and palette. Back to surface, brushstroke, palette, viscosity, I found Cecily’s paintings reminiscent of peers of hers, painters coming up in the 90s, like Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnick and Jane Irish. Painters who culled their palettes from traditional Western paintings, from Realism, Rococo to Romanticism.
While the surface, composition and palette all seamlessly communicated to me what Cecily Brown was creating, the “variation”, the “themes” part fell flat somewhat. Earlier in her career the “bunny phase” in which she depicted women’s bodies, open sexuality and critiquing gender roles comes through very clearly; undulating bodies, moments of inter-tangled ecstasy. The bunnies themselves melded with exaggerated genitals all using a limited flesh-colored palette and later on in reference to late-nineteenth century erotica. That said, the “climate and migration crisis” is not so evident in the paintings, although that’s the way some of the work in one phase is talked about in the wall text and catalog. I can see clearly that Cecily Brown loves to paint and where that inspiration comes from, but climate and migration crisis sounds like marketing to a particular segment of the audience to me.
One painting listed in the catalog not on display in the exhibit is an Abstract Expressionist depiction ripped from the headlines, much akin to Rubens’ own compositions, of a woman being asked to remove her burkini at a beach in Nice, France entitled “When, Where, How Often and With Whom?,” 2017. I remember when this happened. A disturbing spectacle to be sure and I can relate to Cecily’s urgency to paint the scene as much as I could relate to posting on Facebook, but the painting, – images of which I’ve seen in reproduction – just comes off as pretentious and out of touch. It’s actually ridiculous to look at an Abstract-Expressionist-revisionist-“Cezanne’s “Bathers”-type rendering of the event. At the end of her catalog essay, “From the Intimate to the Political,” Curator Anna Katherine Brodbeck notes Cecily Brown’s own awareness of who she paints for in “…her inability to control the circulation of her paintings once resold…” In other words, she is selling million dollar paintings to people and institutions that can buy them, but sorry she can’t control their resale. It’s that very contradiction – the million dollar sales and the social conscience – which makes me doubt Cecily Brown’s social activism. Kudos to her for mentioning the social injustices, I guess. It begs the question, instead, of can the viewer separate the art from the artist; can the artist separate themselves from the collector? Maybe I should grow-up. I believe this particular conundrum is marked on all painters, famous or not. Their need to subjectify their surface, especially so for the Abstract Expressionists often sneered down upon as shallow, corny, compulsive artists, chuegy if you will. Paint is a tricky medium for social activism, being the oldest in the trade it comes with a lot of baggage. Cecily doesn’t need to prove herself beyond what her paintings represent to me, which is, that she is one of the greatest living painters of our time. I could stare at her canvases for hours. Go see this show, it is high class painting.
Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations, on display in the Roberts Gallery at the Barnes Foundation from March 9 until May 25, 2025. Curated by Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Dallas Museum of Art and Simonetta Fraquelli, Barnes Museum of Art.
