The Brooklyn Rail

In the early eighties, as a Bucks County, PA, high-school student with an artistic bent, I visited the quirky old Barnes mansion in Lower Merion during a blizzard. The riotous color of the modern works in the collection was in sharp contrast to the whiteout weather, and the monochromatic little Albert C. Barnes-authored leaflets on offer at the desk: no color reproduction was allowed. This was one reason why Isaac Julien’s black-and-white Barnes-based film Once Again…(Statues Never Die) of 2022 held me transfixed over multiple viewings at last year’s Whitney Biennial. At Duke University, professors showed us color slides of Henri Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre, shot surreptitiously with concealable 35mm cameras while unwieldily perched on a staircase above which the Fauvist masterpiece hung, visible only on the descent. Relocated downtown to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 2012, the new Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects’ Barnes building has a reserved pixelated limestone exterior, carrying on this external grisaille aesthetic. The Barnes’s intricate if demure outward face has always belied the coloristic modern art inside.

Cecily Brown’s chromatic sensations, glistening in their varnished brilliance in the early works, and assured in their bravura crimson or blue/black glory over the past seven years, fit well into this modernist milieu. Themes and Variations features thirty-three oils, watercolors, and monotypes, about six fewer than in its initial incarnation at the Dallas Museum of Art. Per the title, the show traces threads running through the artist’s career that follow certain favored subjects, while at the same pursuing revision over repetition, as expounded in the nicely produced catalogue and its three scholarly essays. This is announced in a rather stark gambit: a thrusting diagonal orange title wall (technically, “Jeweled Peach”) leading to the first gallery. Here are six works from 2019–23, including Saboteur Four Times (2019), wherein Brown experimented with digital printing in four different works originating from the same composition (revision), and two claustrophobic and gridded interiors from 2020, Selfie and Picture This, from her important mid-COVID fall 2020 show at Paula Cooper. The remaining four sections then reset and follow a chronological thread. The worthy goal is to show the continuity over her whole career.

The second part, titled “Painting Flesh,” achieves what a grouping of works from across her career in the Death and the Maid show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023 could not: to establish how stunning and piercing the works were from her first two solo New York shows, in 1997 and 1998 at Deitch Projects. This was when the young and ambitious Brit first crashed the American Ab Ex party. Here are the signature cavorting rabbits from 1996, along with the kaleidoscopic High Society and the explicit, orgiastic, and pink, pink, pink On the Town—both from 1998 and slickly varnished. And then there is the thrusting Spree of 1999, with its monochromatic megalith of an erection amidst pools of mint green and swollen flesh.

The exhibition then eases into a mini-survey of three of her first “Black Paintings,” from 2002–04, large and bifurcated with their recumbent and androgynous nudes on Édouard Manet-esque sheets in the lower section, with all manner of fluttering ithyphallic forms in inky upper zones. The pastoral dominates section three, with the National Gallery of Art’s Girl on a Swing of 2004 hard by the similarly blue-skied and green-fielded Figures in a Landscape 2 of 2002; the refulgent trinity is completed with an Untitled painting from 2005 that combines nursery-tale illustrations with a female bather eating a bird, a vanitas mirror, all manner of occluded fauna, and a Susanna-and-the-Elders peeping Tom-ness, all in a riot of vibrantly hued passages that punt Cubist structure and claim the surface for a new dimensionality. This grouping smokes. There is an enlightening section titled “Sirens and Shipwrecks” with drawings tacked on the wall in two rows on flush white shelving to suggest the chaotic array of imagery and works in her studio. This foregrounds the importance of drawing in her practice, as first seen in the revelatory 2016 Drawing Center show in New York. Two large oils, the azure-dominated We didn’t mean to go to sea (2018) and Black Painting variant Black shipwreck (2018), are her early dabbles with this tried-and-true romantic subject, that continues to emerge productively in her work. Finally, the Golden-Age Flemish hunting scenes and still-life paintings of game and food from recent shows comprise the last display, “Looking and Stealing,” dominated by the over twenty-six-foot-wide triptych, The Splendid Table (2019–20), a chaotically calligraphic picture reflecting her recent large-scale works at the Metropolitan Opera and the Courtauld Gallery in London. The show is breathless and thrilling: Brown never takes her foot off the gas.

You won’t find sedate relief, however, in the adjacent two levels of Barnes’s Renoirs and Rousseaus and Picassos and other Matisses. One small picture stood out on my last visit: Chaïm Soutine’s sanguineous Flayed Rabbit (ca. 1921). The color scheme is pure Cecily: blood-red, pink flayed skin tinged with greys and whites, pools of hot colors representing offal in situ, a never-pure-white winding sheet on an ochre background slab blended with all the hues of the dead and splayed lapin. Yet, it is as solemn and sepulchral as Zurbarán’s Saint Serapion of 1628 in Hartford at the Wadsworth. But it also recalls, downstairs in gallery two of Brown’s show, the aforementioned funeral pyre of a picture from 1996, with all those tumescent and leering rabbits cavorting like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner dancing nudes at Worpswede, injecting some explicit if Leporidae sex into Albert C.’s staid-by-contrast permanent collection (excepting that Courbet—you know the one). And what about in gallery five? The two grand, Soutine-hued pictures: The Spell (2021) and Lobsters, oysters, cherries and pearls (2020), as well as The Splendid Table, all inspired by the same Flemish Baroque material that the French Belarusian-Jewish Soutine channeled in his short but explosive career. The compactness of the Barnes amplifies the expansiveness of Brown’s oeuvre.

That the most athletically gifted, mostly-abstract-but-still-figurative brush of her generation channels Soutine and Manet and Rubens and Snyders and such in her unmistakably contemporary art is one reason why Cecily Brown continues to successfully set herself apart. While the body, and politics, has emerged more and more in her recent work—at Paula Cooper last fall in various prints that channeled Brueghel the Elder’s Five Senses (1617–18), and ever more crystalline oils inspired by Sickert and Manet—the active settings contribute to a complex indeterminacy of space and form. At the Barnes, Brown is resolutely in the right company.