One Fine Show: ‘Cecily Brown, Themes and Variations’ at the Barnes Foundation
Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
There’s something so excellent about the way those American cars from the 1950s shuttle hordes of folks across Havana to this day. The garish amusements of the empire have been refashioned for a practical purpose. This was done out of necessity, yes, but consider those Cuban mechanics. They’ve shown more love for the guts of those cars than the auto workers who threw them together in Detroit so long ago.
This analogy is, of course, about Cecily Brown, whose survey “Themes and Variations” has just come to the Barnes Foundation. Brown (b. 1969) is one of those Cubans, digging into the engineering of antique forms that functioned well, regardless of how thought out they were by the people who invented them. The show brings together more than thirty paintings and drawings from across her career, showing just how much mileage she’s managed to eke out of old technology, i.e., the history of Western painting.
Brown’s work has been deeply subversive from the start. Her first breakthrough series, Bunnies, saw her painting detailed rabbits, a reference to both the once-living creature featured in so many historical still lifes and the Hugh Hefner playmates named for the appetites they supposedly shared with the creature. There may have been still more; looking at a painting by Brown entails being pulled in many different directions—by the colors and references, plus you’re often yanked between figuration and abstraction.
The main vectors for continued subversion have been her intellectual engagement with art history, her skill and her eroticism, which is ever more subversive in an era when Gen-Z explains to us that movies made 30 years ago should not have had sex scenes.
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Justify My Love (2003-2004), from her Black Paintings series referencing that existential swansong by Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), depicts a woman masturbating, her face blurred like something out of Francis Bacon (1909-1992), the background chunking itself up like Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). These aren’t all references, necessarily, or even borrowed techniques. Let’s call them shared interests, like the couple masturbating side-by-side in These Foolish Things (2002). On the Town (1998) is a more straightforward depiction of an orgy, done in enthusiastic depictions of flesh tones that few artists would attempt, though maybe it recalls the pinks of Philip Guston (1913-1980).
Linda Nochlin wrote that for too long male artists had made “an explicit comparison between painting and fucking. Renoir, for instance, said that he painted with his prick. Brown has made it possible for critics to speak of sex in relation to a woman artist—and it’s about time.”
All this is deeply subversive, and Brown subverts even her own work. A recent masterpiece, Saboteur four times (2019), portrays the animal rights protesters who sabotage England’s famous fox hunts. It’s the same scene of pastoral chaos, redone four times. What’s remarkable about this work is how different all four of the panels are. Brown is apparently very into Marcel Proust, and this feels like the painting equivalent of his general goal: how different can you make the same story, over and over again, while keeping the structure the same?
“Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations” is on view at the Barnes Foundation through May 25th.