The Brooklyn Rail

“I want to know what the artist was on when they were making these,” a man commented to a museum attendant as he stepped into the large gallery of Cecily Brown’s Themes and Variations at the Dallas Museum of Art. His tone was laced with irreverence, an aside offered to an otherwise silent room, his perplexion or perhaps repulsion so acute he could not internalize it. But there is something apt in his implication that Brown’s body of work evokes a drug-induced fever dream. The merging of figuration and abstraction, Brown’s pinks and reds and whites nurture thighs and screams and puddles of nothingness and everythingness. In this mid-career retrospective, we confront close to thirty years of the body perceived and the body in sensation through Brown’s unbridled brush.

Brown’s methodology and its effects are immediately present in the first gallery as massive canvases command the space, and limbs, genitalia, and shadowed forest paths reveal themselves and disappear. There is a lot to take in, and the looking feels ever unfinished; Brown also returns again and again to her paintings, painting over what once was, a work lying abstinent for months, a decade, and then a new touch commands a reawakening. Saboteur four times (2019), a four-paneled work, exemplifies this instinct to tinker, with a core painting cloned three times, each digital duplicate reworked into a different scene where familiar bodies find themselves in new twists and evolving palettes of greens, blacks, and ochres, which foretell fates clandestine and ominous.

The smudginess of it all is alive. In High Society (1998), Brown’s reference material—Peter Paul Rubens’s The Rape of the Sabine Women (1635–40)—is unburdened by character or narrative blocking. High Society neither distracts us with the garb of maidens, soldiers, and kings, nor does it make clear the setting of its chaos. Too long have there been demands for something exact, something reliable, something sharp about trauma; the reality is a lot murkier. Trauma rewires our brain, disrupting how we process memory and perceived threats, disrupting how we live in our own bodies. How does a mass rape or a singular rape exist in the mind, both in the moment and long after? Brown renders flesh and groping hands and writhing bodies, small-scale figuration on the borders merged with giants that read as humans or parts of humans or phantoms of humans. It is violent, and perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Brown’s work is the reminder of how many of the themes of bodily violence are shared with bodily pleasure. A 1998 Artforum review described High Society as an orgy. Perhaps without the Rubens reference point, without a life lived in this woman body, I could have seen an orgy, too.

The boundaries and obfuscations between pleasure and brutality pulse throughout Themes and Variations. The Splendid Table (2019–20) beckons the viewer to the final gallery, “Painting Flesh,” a back room of eroticism and gluttony. On Brown’s grotesque tablescapes, both in Splendid Table and Lobsters, oysters, cherries, and pearls (2020), consumption is framed as a depraved act. Land and sea creatures contort limply on tablecloths of their own blood. Human figuration is absent, but the human touch is not. These works hang alongside others exploring sexual indulgence. Voyeuristic old masters are reclaimed as scenes of self-pleasure in the “Black Paintings.” In the most (relatively) naturalistic works of the show, the female form is clarified when in control of her own desire. In On the Town (1998), a particularly sexually explicit work, the penis is rendered as a tool for, rather than a weaponization of, pleasure. These are tempting to read as empowering, as a reclamation of uncontrollable female sexuality. But Brown’s work does not concede to a one-note feminist sentimentality: in Themes and Variations we are victims, and we victimize, and these facts do not absolve one another. Brown’s style of abstraction across content compels the viewer to link these scenes of slaughter and sex.

Themes and Variations branches off from our most animalistic nature and probes other particulars of the psychology and physiology of the body through space, the body through time. How the body, especially the female body, is perceived and self-aware of that perception, feels particularly pressing in the works of Selfie (2020)—where vertically oriented rectangles encroach on a lounging figure, evoking the claustrophobia of screens through which we willingly offer our faces, our bodies, and our intimacies to the masses—and Name That Tune (2012), a Jimi Hendrix album cover in abstract in which the naked bodies of a group of young women blur together, their facial features obscured and gazes no longer a staged seduction for a presumably male collective. Brown’s practice of referential work cements the female body as object throughout history, from Susanna and the Elders, a biblical tale of harassment and discrediting (Untitled [2005]) and voyeuristic Rococo swings (Girl on a Swing [2004]), to the marketing tactics of the twentieth century (and beyond). In the most distinct section of the exhibition, “Sirens and Shipwrecks,” the interpersonal tribulations of the human condition are set aside for a larger scale: one that contends with geopolitics and migration but also the torrential truths of nature, and how just as our bodies are at the will of each other, we are also at the will of a force far less controllable. Here, Brown’s canvases are at their most abstract, the figures drowning in the riptides of her brushwork.

My body, the female body, is not at peace this December. I struggle with the ways it feels so privately essential and publicly irrelevant—until it is needed to sell something or excite someone or wield for political enterprise. But as Brown makes clear in her canvases, the body is rarely at peace, is not honored for all the ways it rages and quivers and delivers. Don’t look away. Don’t look away. Don’t look away.