Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, we need to talk about Cecily Brown (born 1969), this British whirlwind who burst into the contemporary art world like a hurricane in a porcelain museum. If you thought painting was dead, buried under minimalist installations and soporific videos, think again. Brown proves to us that painting can still roar with the ferocity of a caged beast, even if some of you probably prefer your paintings as smooth as your bank account.
This artist who left London for New York in 1994 like a noir novel heroine fleeing her past forces us to rethink contemporary painting with a boldness that would make the proponents of conceptual art blush with shame. Her monumental canvases explode before our eyes like fireworks of flesh and color, a pictorial orgy that makes the abstract expressionists look like timid Sunday watercolorists.
Let’s take a moment to examine her technique, which strikingly evokes Bergson’s philosophy of pure duration. Henri Bergson spoke of consciousness as a continuous flow where states blend into one another without precise boundaries. Brown’s paintings perfectly embody this conception of time and consciousness. In “Carnival and Lent” (2006-2008), the figures intertwine and dissolve like memories refusing to fix, creating a perpetual motion that defies any attempt at static reading.
This approach to painting as an uninterrupted flow finds particular resonance in works like “The Triumph of Death” (2019), where Brown transforms the traditional memento mori into a dizzying chromatic explosion. Death is no longer an end but a continuous process of transformation, as if Bergson had taken control of the brushes to show us that reality is movement rather than thing.
Her way of working reflects this philosophy of flow. Brown paints several canvases simultaneously, sometimes up to twenty at once, like a mad juggler refusing to let her balls drop. This method is not by chance but reflects a deep understanding of the very nature of artistic creation as a continuously evolving process.
Short-sighted critics who see in her work only a skillful synthesis of her influences, from Kooning, Bacon, Rubens, completely miss the point. Brown does not cite art history; she devours it whole, digests it, and regurgitates it in a new form that shatters our expectations. Her canvases are battlefields where the ghosts of the old masters clash in a merciless pictorial melee.
Look at “Suddenly Last Summer” (1999), sold at auction for the modest sum of 6.8 million dollars, a price that probably makes her banker weep with joy. This painting is not a simple exercise in style; it’s a declaration of war against the wise hierarchy of art history. Brown makes high and low culture waltz together with the elegance of a boxer who has taken classical dance lessons.
The violence of her pictorial gesture is not gratuitous but participates in a profound reflection on the very nature of representation. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in “Eye and Spirit”, painting is not a window on the world but a way of making visible how the world touches us. Brown pushes this idea to its most extreme limits, transforming each canvas into an arena where painting itself becomes throbbing flesh.
This philosophical approach to pictorial materiality finds its most powerful expression in her series of “Black Paintings.” These works are not mere formal exercises but deep meditations on the nature of perception and representation. Brown explores the limits of visibility, forcing us to scrutinize the darkness until shapes emerge like specters of our own desire to see.
Her installation at the Metropolitan Opera House with “Triumph of the Vanities” (2018) proves that she can stand up to the greatest. These monumental works do not merely occupy space; they devour it alive, transforming the opera into a theater where contemporary painting asserts its power with magnificent arrogance. It is like Marc Chagall on a golden powder high.
Brown’s strength lies in maintaining a constant tension between order and chaos, figuration and abstraction, tradition and rupture. She does not seek to resolve these contradictions but to make them dance together in a dizzying waltz that leaves us exhausted but electrified. Each canvas is a battlefield where the Dionysian and Apollonian forces dear to Nietzsche confront each other.
Her recent paintings on the theme of shipwreck reveal a new dimension to her work. “Where, When, How Often and with Whom” (2017) is not just a simple reference to the refugee crisis; it is a visceral meditation on the fragility of the human condition. Brown transforms the surface of the canvas into a stormy sea where bodies fight for survival, recalling Aristotle’s conception of art as catharsis.
Make no mistake, behind the apparent spontaneity of her gestures hides a calculating mind that manipulates the pictorial material with the precision of a sadistic surgeon. Every splash, every drip is orchestrated in a complex choreography that transforms the surface of the canvas into a theater of shadows where ghosts of art history come to play their last performance.
Her approach to the human body deserves attention. Unlike her contemporaries who indulge in aseptic and conceptual art, Brown plunges her hands into the pictorial material like a poetic butcher. Her nudes are not objects of desire but battlefields where flesh itself seems in perpetual metamorphosis. This vision of the body as a site of continuous transformation echoes Gilles Deleuze’s theories on the body without organs.
Brown’s contemporary vanities, notably in her series presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Death and the Maid,” reinvent a traditional genre with astonishing audacity. She explores the tension between the illusory permanence of art and the ephemeral nature of existence, transforming the classic memento mori into a frenetic celebration of life in all its chaotic complexity.
Her pictorial technique, which consists of layering paint like geological strata of emotions and sensations, creates an effect of temporal depth evoking Deleuzian conception of time as pure multiplicity. Each canvas becomes a territory where past and present collide in a spectacular collision.
The influence of Francis Bacon on her work is undeniable, but Brown transforms Baconian violence into something more ambiguous and perhaps more disturbing. Whereas Bacon sought to capture the “brutality of facts,” Brown shows us that the facts themselves are in constant dissolution. It is as if she took Bacon’s tortured figures and made them dance a macabre waltz.
Critics who reproach her for her commercial success, her paintings selling for millions, are probably the same ones who collect NFTs thinking they are avant-garde. Brown has achieved the impossible: creating a resolutely contemporary painting that dialogues with art history without falling into pastiche or servile reverence.
Her work on light and color is remarkable. In works like “The Last Shipwreck” (2018), she uses color as a weapon, creating dissonant harmonies that assault the eye before seducing it. It’s Rothko having decided to wrestle with Turner.
Brown’s unique position in the contemporary art world, a female painter who has conquered a territory traditionally dominated by men, should not eclipse the radicality of her artistic vision. She is not important because she is a woman who paints like a man (what a ridiculous concept), but because she paints like no one else.
If her recent works seem more measured, do not be deceived. This apparent wisdom hides a devouring ambition that continues to push the limits of what painting can achieve in the 21st century. Brown shows us that painting is not dead; it has just become wilder, freer, and infinitely more dangerous.
