A painter for her time and for all times

Big, fleshy, writhing canvases full of body parts.

Visceral.

Sexy.

Not romantically sexy, but lustfully sexy. What was your name again, sexy. Sometimes graphically sexual. Orgiastic.

Rushing, swirling paint, applied thickly, imitates the rushing, swirling bodies. Color as body fluid.

Cecily Brown dares to go there. Where art history – always obsessed with the female nude from a male perspective – forbids it. Objectification of men and their penises. Feelings that decent women in polite society shouldn’t have. Female sexual liberation, freedom and pleasure.

The Dallas Museum of Art brings visitors up close and personal during the exhibition “Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations,” on view through February 9, 2025.

“Having sexuality and depicting male nudes in this way is completely unique in art history when women have been depicted as nudes and male fantasies for centuries,” Anna told Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA Forbes.com. “In some of these boudoir paintings you really see her exploring women in these bursts of sexual pleasure, but from a very internal place. It’s not about performing for the male gaze, but rather about fully embodying that standard.”

Authorization.

“Instead of the woman being the object, the woman is the subject,” Brodbeck continued.

And the author.

The exhibition brings together nearly 30 large-scale paintings and drawings spanning nearly 30 years of the career of Brown (b. 1969 in London, UK; lives and works in New York, NY), including two new works on paper, which are being shared with the public for the first time.

Best known for bringing women’s sexual agency into gallery and museum spaces, Brown has more recently taken on a number of provocative political issues. The refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.

Shipwrecks and the sea. Gericault and Delacroix. Yes, a salacious pioneer, but also a historical painter.

“She paints these beautiful, large paintings of the royal hunt by Fran Snyders (Flemish, 1579-1657) and then the resulting still lifes. “That’s one of the themes we explore on the show,” Brodbeck said. “She is a very strict vegetarian. She was one all her life. She is an animal rights activist and part of her interest in this material was seeing them as gruesome and bloody scenes of animal hunting. You can read it as an art historical thing, but there is also a very human criticism behind it.”

Burkini bans in France.

“This double standard; “Traditionally there is criticism that women show too much, and here there is also criticism that they are too modest,” said Brodbeck. “This impossible situation where women are constantly monitored for their appearance.”

Political commentary served with a touch of witty British humor.

A painter’s painter

Brown graduated from the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1993. Their contemporaries were known as the young British artists of the YBA. Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, the flag bearers. They weren’t painters.

“The YBA generation wasn’t that interested in painting, and when they painted, (painting) was almost a kind of play to do something else – play is a strong word – but they had a unique agenda that went beyond that Materiality went beyond color,” explained Brodbeck. “She began painting when painting was not very popular among advanced artists.”

Brown entered the scene at a time when painting was considered dead. By artists and critics. Played out. A stupid opinion that has been repeated every generation for the last 100+ years.

“Many artists in the mid-90s worked more conceptually or installationally,” adds Brodbeck. “Even in her generation, her love for the medium of painting and her belief in its continued relevance is unique.”

Brown took her love of painting with her to New York in the mid-1990s, moved there and founded the boys’ club. She achieved what thousands had tried unsuccessfully before: a harmonious synthesis of figuration and abstraction. Neither one nor the other. Both at the same time. Peter Paul Rubens meets Joan Mitchell.

Never before or since has an artist blurred the line between figurative painting and abstraction so thoroughly and effectively. A virtuoso of her medium who accompanies groundbreaking topics.

An artist who loves color and painting and reveres her place in its 10,000 year tradition.

“It was cool to see her unpacking work that she had done 25 years ago that she hadn’t seen in a long time. At that time, for example, she added varnish to the paint, which you see in conventional paintings of past centuries but is very unusual in contemporary painting,” Brodbeck said. “It is deeply rooted in this history. It deals with all formal qualities of (color). She’s a doer and it’s nice to hear her talk about the physicality of practice.”

A painter’s painter.

“The great thing about a survey is that you put it back in the context of its creation and its dedication to the craft of painting, its commitment to art history, but also how it really revolutionized it from the perspective of women,” says Brodbeck said.

Following the Dallas presentation, “Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations” will be on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia from March 9 to May 25, 2025.

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