Day 345 - Cecily Brown

 June 2, 2023

I headed toward the stairs leading up to gallery 914,  aware that gallery 913 is home to a special  exhibition. I've not included such exhibitions in my entries, since they are by definition temporary. (Of course, now that I know that galleries are frequently rehung, this rationale seems less persuasive.) On an impulse, though,  I turned into gallery 913, and I'm glad I did. The works I saw there were interesting, in some cases compelling, and in at least one case troubling.

The gallery houses a one-woman show featuring Cecily Brown, an English-born artist, now 54, who has lived and worked in New York since the 1990s. I gleaned two main ideas from the introductory signage. First, the history of Western art infuses Brown's work: for inspiration she draws on the masterpieces of Bruegel and the Dutch masters, on Hogarth and Fragonard, on Manet and Munch. At the same time, she is familiar with more recent popular illustrations.  And second, many of her works reflect two related and key  themes of Western art  -- vanitas and memento mori. They remind us of the evanescence of human life and the omnipresence of death. 

The show includes works in a variety of media: large works in oil, along with smaller pieces in watercolor, gouache (a sort of opaque watercolor, I learn),  and  monotype (a kind of printing whose description in Wikipedia I have trouble following). Many of the large oil paintings are abstracts, though based on the works of earlier painters. I can't say I get some of the connections.  One enormous canvas (it measures, I would guess, eight feet on a side) is entitled "Carnival and Lent" and is based on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting "The Fight Between Carnival and Lent."  (Both appear below.) But while the Bruegel figure is teeming with 

minute figures of people engaged in all kinds of activities, it's hard for me to "read" the parallels Brown is presumably tracing. Yes, her canvas is busy and crowded, as is the Bruegel, but so are many, maybe most, of her other large works on display. Maybe there is a broad similarity in the composition of the two works - the use of verticalrsand diagonals, for instance - and Brown's bright colors evoke what must have been the cacophony if Bruegel's painting had had a soundtrack. Still, it's a stretch for me to see the aspects of the Bruegel that inspired Brown.

The show includes some pages from Brown's sketchbooks, and it's evident that she is a skilled draftsman (draftswoman?). One drawing I particularly like is based on a painting in the Brancacci Chapel, "The Temptation of Adam and Eve<" by Masolino da Panicale.  With great economy of line, Brown has captured Adam's curly hair, Eve's gesture as she raises the apple to her mouth, and the human-headed serpent.

Brown's skill in depicting the human figure is evident in a monotype entitled "All Is Vanity (after Gilbert)." Measuring about four feet high and three feet across, it is based on a start-of-the-20th-century illustration by C. Allan Gilbert and shows a young woman seated at a vanity table.  She is fashionably 

dressed in an off-the-shoulder garment; her hair is piled on top of her head. Her vanity table is laden with bottles, and she gazes into a large oval mirror. It was easy for me to recognize this activity, in part because the vanity table resembles the antique dresser in my bedroom, also with an oval mirror, also topped by perfume bottles (which, I have to say, go unopened from year to year) and, in my case, boxes for jewelry.

 

The placard describes "the specter of a skull that hovers over the vain subject." I looked for a while at the image and was unable to find the skull at all. Then I did something I rarely do: I approached a man who, I noticed, had been looking intently at the picture before I did and asked him if he saw the skull. He said he didn't, came back to look again, and this time immediately saw and pointed out to me that the mirror forms the top of a skull, the woman's face and her reflection constitute eye sockets, and the bottles lining the dresser represent teeth.  (Four eyes are better than two!) It seems to me a clever visual pun on the various meanings of the term "vanity." 

Of course, once I saw this, I couldn't fail to recognize the skull lurking behind a much smaller (perhaps 20" X 18")  image of two women holding a puppy,  entitled "Aujour d'hui rose." (I imagine the reference is to the Ronsard line, "Cueillez aujour'hui les roses de la vie.")  The work reminds us that the shadow of death hovers over even our most innocent, pleasurable moments.

Out of curiosity I looked up the Gilbert illustration on which Brown based "All Is Vanity" (below) - and was unsettled by what I discovered. Brown's image is so close to Gilbert's that it might well be called copying (although not, in fairness, plagiarism, since Brown credits Gilbert in the title). But it seems to me that the creativity of this image is all Gilbert's. This raises larger questions about how we should think about imitation and originality. When I first "got" Brown's "All Is Vanity," I was captivated by its clever visual double entendre. But it's hard for me now to credit Brown with that cleverness.