Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations, 2025. The Barnes Foundation, installation view. Image © Barnes Foundation
While hanging Cecily Brown’s new exhibition, the curators at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia noticed that Brown, the British-born, New York City–based painter, would suddenly slip away, stepping out of the special exhibition space where her show was being installed and into the museum’s storied rooms of paintings.
In an interview a few days before the opening of her new show, entitled “Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations,” Brown herself remembers her forays into the galleries with a hint of incredulousness, as if she had maybe gotten away with something. “On our breaks we’d get to go into the collection!” she says.
She’d see Cézanne’s sumptuously nonplussed bathers at rest or Chaïm Soutine’s gargoyle-ish landscapes and all those Picasso ink drawings—a kaleidoscope of iconic works. “It’s this absolutely extraordinary experience,” Brown explains, “where you’ve just got all these paintings in your mind’s eye.” These forays made her excited for the gallery-to-gallery correspondences that could happen when a visitor sees the Barnes collection then hers, or the other way around. “I’m just thrilled by the idea that people would come in and see these contemporary paintings that riff off and sample,” she says.
Riffs and samples are where Brown thrives, and the joy of her new show is in the ways we get to see a painter charting her course with new paints and old paintings—simultaneously looking back through the history of painting and moving forward. The 30-something works in the Barnes exhibition represent the largest presentation of her pieces in the US up to now, and walking through it naturally feels like taking a trip through a painter’s career. But walking through it with the painter—she took a small group through the rooms a few days before the official opening—is a trip through the painter’s mind’s eye, in this case a painter who, at midcareer, is fully embracing the rewards of repetition, of returning to themes. She is also a painter who hopes you will stay a while with her work. “I can’t emphasize enough my desire that the viewer spend time with the paintings,” she says at the start of the tour. “In a way, my challenge has always been to be able to make a painting that stops you in your tracks, that makes you want to look but then keeps revealing more the more you give to it. So it’s a very slow experience. But at the same time, I love to make something very eye-catching. Hence the bright color of these early works.”
The first room we stop in highlights a grouping entitled Painting the Flesh, a nod to both the moment Brown began exhibiting her paintings and the point in the history of painting that she first explored. Then as now, each of her paintings is akin to exciting performances, the resonances reverberating even after she has put her brushes down. She applies oils in the 21st century in collaboration with painters who came before her—a bold move now and even more bold in the mid-1990s, when young artists were not likely to be painting. The trend was toward conceptual art, and the YBA (Young British Artists) were putting animals in formaldehyde (Damien Hirst) or photographing anonymous subjects with placards (Gillian Wearing). But as Brown puts it: “I basically just had to realize you can deny the kind of artist you are, and I could be a mediocre conceptual or video artist, or I could try to be a good painter.” (Later, she’ll remember one failed experiment with conceptualism: “Do you know Duchamp’s With My Tongue in My Cheek?” Brown asks. “I made an image, and it was with my tongue in his cheek. It was pretty crap.”)
Bunnies were an early subject. They were bunnies but also representational questions (is it a duck or a bunny?) that she borrowed from Wittgenstein via Jasper Johns. The bunnies offered an either-or that seems to have tickled her interest in the intersection between what’s literal and abstract: The mind conspires with the eye to see bodies in shapes or shapes in bodies. “These rabbits and bunny paintings were in conversation with the art of the past that I was so interested in,” she says.
Cecily Brown, High Society, 1998. Oil on linen, 76 × 98 in. (193 × 248.9 cm). Martin and Toni Sosnoff © Cecily Brown
The paintings of the past were not just any paintings; they were the paintings—the color plates of art-history books, the very stuff eschewed by conceptual artists for several decades prior to Brown arriving in New York to waitress by night and paint in her pre–High Line Meatpacking District studio by day. A painting like High Society, from 1998, might contain the erotic violence of Rubens’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, painted from 1635 to 1640, but the power of the figures has transferred to the paint itself. The painting’s energy source is, in part, the viewer, as your eye and mind work to make the connections in shapes, as you enter into what feel like currents of color, as you work to stay afloat. “I think I was always interested in subjects that don’t really go away,” Brown remarks. “War, battles, sexual violence, sexual ecstasy, all the contradictions of those things existing side by side and being really at one with each other. The ambiguity that I’ve embraced from the beginning I think reflects my ambiguity about, you know, being alive and what the world is like. You know, we live in a very, very beautiful world, but there are absolutely appalling things going on.”
Brown’s tour also includes the gallery entitled In the Night Garden, which features figures situated in landscapes—works inspired and engaging with 18th-century painters like Goya and Fragonard. In terms of materials, Brown describes their creation as a result of her early success, pointing to 2002’s Figures in a Landscape 2, her six-by-almost-seven-foot painting that sends you back to one of Fragonard’s forest glens, with the female in the gaze of the lurking male. “I’d moved into a big studio,” she remembers. “For the first time in my life I could afford nice canvases and stretchers and things, beautiful paint, and I think I went a bit overboard, making giant paintings with every single color. I’m not saying I got lost, but I think by Figures in a Landscape, when you look at it, it’s a cacophony of color. I think it works, but”—she rolls her eyes—“for every painting that works, there are a number that don’t work.”
She was struggling, she recalls, with putting everything she had into a painting. So she began to work on several at once. She also made a concerted effort to avoid deadlines. “I always wanted to retain that sense that you’re working for yourself, that you’re a solitary person in a studio trying to figure stuff out, and if it goes well, there will be something to put out in the world,” she says. Now the studio and the gallery have become opposites in her life, the former private and closed, the latter charged anew: “When I see a show of my own work, it’s often like I’m seeing it for the first time.”
A visitor traveling through the midcareer retrospective is struck by how much of Brown’s work is in resistance to being a painter or in reaction to it. Her so-called Black Paintings were a challenge to herself. “The Black Paintings were to sort of throw a spanner in the works,” she says, “because I still had this big chip on my shoulder about being a painter, and I thought, You’ve got to make people look and look again.” Her fear: that viewers would see the color and at some point move on. She changed tack and assigned herself paintings in black and white only. “Then if they see something like this, they say, ‘Wait, what?’ I always wanted that ‘Wait, what?’ thing.”
The “Wait, what?” that hits the viewer in her black paintings has to do with their size and simplicity, or what approaches simplicity. In one reclining nude—or something like it—the black behind the figure is not a reference to Goya’s late-in-life black paintings but to Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The Dream of Reason Produces Nightmares), an earlier etching where the dreamer is surrounded by a halo of darkness in the form of bats and maybe owls. “It’s the idea of the horrors and insomnia and incubuses and succubuses and nightmares,” Brown says. “I’ve always thought that paintings were a great place to talk about so many things at once. If they were movies, they could be like dramadies—a horror and a comedy and a romance.”
We move through more galleries. In Looking and Stealing, she shows us the paintings inspired by 17th-century Dutch and Flemish still lifes that picture the spoils of the hunt. “I’m a big animal-rights person,” Brown says, “and I find the idea of fox hunting, something still very common in England, kind of abhorrent. But I felt the hunt is always one of those subjects I’m drawn to by other people. Like great Rubens hunts and Delacroix—but there was never really any reason to paint a hunt.” That is, until a show in an old estate came up. Cut to a 26-foot-long triptych that takes up a wall at the Barnes and is entitled The Splendid Table, finished in 2020. If the painting were a landscape, it would be a panorama of red; Brown’s ability to patiently sustain its volcanic energy has you thinking of the etymology of the word splayed, its roots in the medieval Latin term for unfold. It’s reverse origami, unpacking the older paintings as it connects to the strange, sumptuous violence of our 21st-century everyday.
Her most recent paintings are in the rooms entitled Returning and Revisiting. Her 2019 painting Saboteur Four Times, is a record of returns: one canvas digitally reproduced three times, the copied panels reworked with paint, and the result being four versions of the same work. It is a painting and a lecture on its beginnings and its possible trajectories, a phased work. Selfie, meanwhile, was made during the pandemic, back when Brown was, like the rest of the world, locked up at home, claustrophobic but also very suddenly recognizing another challenge: that in better than two decades of painting, she’d never painted straight lines. “Like, never,” she tells our group. “So in lockdown, I’d done a drawing of the kind I never do—a drawing from observation from my table, in my living room, of the doorway and the French doors beyond.” As she spoke, the painting behind her was talking too, revealing a hall of mirrors’ worth of rectangles.
This first sketch set off months of paintings of what in 1840 would be paintings of picture galleries, walls covered with art not unlike the adjacent walls in the Barnes collection. “And this may sound disingenuous,” Brown says, “but it was really the hardest thing for me to do ’cause I’m naturally sort of loosey-goosey.”
But it worked out because Selfie is wonderful, connecting the salon hang, as it’s known, of the 19th-century gallery and the iPhone whatever-we’re-up-to—the former a staple of colonial institutions like museums, the latter a device for both framing our world and devouring it. In Selfie the frame contains frames, yet nothing seems cordoned off or still. It hums on its own excitingly dissimilar repetitions.
In a chat after the tour, Brown immediately recalls the very first painting she ever remembers seeing: Caravaggio’s Medusa in the Uffizi. “I remember it partly because, at the time, we had to keep a little book for school to say what you did on your holidays, and so I did a little drawing of it,” she says. “I must have been seven or eight, but I think what’s interesting about that is that it’s such a terrifying painting.”
Brown also remembers that when she first graduated art school, she was always worried about returning to ideas. “When I was younger, I was more afraid of being derivative,” she says. “But I think the longer you go on, you find your own way of working.”
Ultimately, after all, she’s just a painter in the studio, working out a problem, just like every painter prior. In work like Black Shipwreck—Brown’s response to Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, painted in 1819—you get the feeling that the past is pleading with us to revisit it, for our own sake. “It’s such a clichéd expression,” Brown says, “but it puts everything in perspective when you realize that all the problems we have, humans have been having for a terribly long time. And there are only so many stories, really.”
“Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations” is on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia through May 25.