The Barnes Foundation presents Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations

Brown’s painting is the kind where you must stand and really look, because it’s not easy: big canvases subsume you with oil pigments; brushstrokes laid down with whole arm gestures or tender marks that feel uncertain. Her layered compositions offer psychogenic worlds populated with disembodied limbs, animals, and tree trunks rendered in colors of genital pink, tongue red, sea blue, nipple brown, bat black, orgy orange, and lines that go nowhere and everywhere. There are forms that look like a thing but maybe are not that thing.

If you like art history, consider Brown’s take on Gentileschi’s innocent Susana harassed and threatened by leering elders. Or the sensuous Dutch Baroque still life table. Bruegel’s scenes of gleefully sinning peasants. The Rococo kink of Fragonard’s swinging beauty up-skirted by her lover crouching in a hedge. Gericault’s wretched raft adrift at sea, bearing the hopeful and the hopeless. An impressionistic portrait by Morisot whose stunning radical brushwork seems to presage the rupture of Bacon’s despairing bodies. And the out-sized gestural abstractions of expressionist Mitchell.

A satisfying visual history for our moment

Brown encompasses all the above: a satisfying experience of painted canvases and visual history in our contemporary existential moment where nothing in life seems easy or reasoned. Her recurring motifs are the human body and landscape, conventional subjects deployed to wring out possible insights into the absurdities of life: stuff that is always irrational, like gender roles, sex acts, injustice, life’s precarity. She considers current socio-political issues like climate change and immigration.

Most remarkable is how Brown mines art history for compositions, symbolism, and subject matter, using a kind of dialectic (two opposing notions) to coalesce a (third) new idea. By way of example, in her Black Paintings series, multiple references are at work. One is the classical Renaissance ideal of the female nude as in Titian’s Venus of Urbino; in context these paintings existed solely for the fantasy and gratification of a male audience. Another influence is Goya’s late 18th-century The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters in which nocturnal creatures torment a man asleep at his desk. This etching comments upon the post-Enlightenment need for a balance of imagination and reason in art. Synthesizing these earlier works, Brown serves up Justify My Love (2003-4), which depicts an unidealized nude pleasuring herself while above fluttering phalluses evoke fireflies in the night.

Women artists are essential

Themes and Variations originated in Dallas and contains 30 works; it is co-curated by Simonetta Fraquelli and Anna Katherine Brodbeck. The works are organized into five overarching themes: Brown’s creative processes, nudes, landscapes, social critique via the phenomena of shipwrecks, and a recent scrutiny of Dutch and Flemish 17th-century still life. The gallery installation is daring. Rather than conventional rectangular rooms, many paintings are hung on angled walls, creating a succession of zigzags in which themes bleed into each other. The atypical arrangement is congruent with Brown’s compositional devices, such as imbalance, use of diagonals for implying movement, and lack of a focal point.

One more consideration: did you know Google removed Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day from its calendar? I noticed the omission as I was drafting this review. The systematic erasure of women is nothing new to art history, or history in general. Women (famous or not) who make art are essential; art is necessary; creative acts can serve as acts of resistance in the face of oppression and censorship. Going to the Barnes to see Cecily Brown’s exhibit is likewise an expression of resilience.