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Lot Essay
“I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back” Cecily Brown (C. Brown, “I take things too far when painting,” The Guardian, September 20, 2009)
An exuberant canvas teeming with deft brushwork, historical allusions and concealed figuration, Cecily Brown’s 2013 painting The Butcher and the Policeman exemplifies the British painter’s unmatched ability to fuse painterly abstraction and figuration. Both volatile and powerfully fluid, the jewel-toned maelstrom invites the eye to swirl around its deluges of blue and ripples of green, ochre, and orange. Punctuated by the artist’s signature flesh-peach hues, the sublime vortex of form and color bursts into life, yielding unending contemplation as forms and figures emerge and recede among the artist’s torrential brushwork.
Last April, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its doors to Brown’s highly anticipated mid-career retrospective. For many, the exhibition solidified what was already known: Brown is one of the most formidable painters working today. For others, including the venerated New York Times co-chief art critic, Roberta Smith, heads were turned. “The more I looked at the paintings, the more they calmed down, opened up and differentiated themselves from one another in color and composition,” Smith observed of the works in the exhibition (R. Smith, “I Was Wrong about Cecily Brown,” New York Times, April 13, 2023, online). Indeed, with a new survey recently opened at the Dallas Museum of Art, soon to travel to The Barnes Collection, the world continues to elevate Brown’s status among her peers, allowing her work to beautifully unfold before our eyes.
Brown’s dynamic compositions are charged with an outpouring of activity with their tumultuous push and pull between form and abstraction never coming to rest. The artist encourages viewers to take time experiencing the rich complexities of her work. As with one of Brown’s many heroes, Willem de Kooning — whose liquid compositions from the 1970s The Butcher and the Policeman immediately recalls — the first look is only the beginning. Only time will pull back the layers of Brown’s brushwork, unveiling an encyclopedia of images and references hardened in paint, some intentional and some left to the eye of the beholder.
Cecily Brown’s paintings are a continuous stream of color and forms that accumulate and expand on the canvas in changing, multiple layers of influence,” critic and curator Danilo Eccher has observed. “Staring at her paintings is like leaning out over an orchestra pit, where cultural and historical references are like musical instruments mixing their notes.(D. Eccher, “Cecily Brown in Turin,” Gagosian Quarterly, October 22, 2014).
While Brown has not explicitly stated her influences for The Butcher and the Policeman, the title suggests an interplay of authority (the policeman) and brutality or raw humanity (the butcher), evoking both a literal and metaphorical tension. To this end, the phrase was famously penned by the Polish-English writer, Joseph Conrad, in his famous novel Heart of Darkness. Writing during the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland, which had been parceled out among three occupying empires through most of his life. As Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, journeys into Africa — where he had been sent to retrieve a once-idealistic ivory trader whose fatal flaw triggers an evil and amoral downfall — Marlow ponders the psychology of man divorced from scrutiny and authority:
“With solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums — how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him into by the way of solitude — utter solitude without a policeman — by the way of silence, utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering of public opinion?” (J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899).
Both Brown and Conrad engage with similar existential and moral concerns, looking towards themes of authority, chaos, and the darker sides of human nature. Tangentially, the abstracted figures, verdant colors, psychological conflict between power and brutality recalls Cuban painter, Wifredo Lam’s The Jungle, wherein Lam drew on the horrors of colonization in Cuba.
In recent years, London-born Brown, who relocated to New York shortly after finishing school at Slade School of Fine Art in 1993, has grappled with her own complicated relationship with England’s past. At an early age, Brown was introduced to the likes of Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, and Francis Bacon. While Brown and Sylvester mutually held Bacon at exceptionally high regard — the title of the present work even conjures Bacon’s own Figure with Meat, Brown was eager to forge her own path in a city where her father’s shadow would not loom so large.
Time and distance, however, has made this relationship even weightier. “The whole idea of empire, when you’re a little kid, you don’t really get that that actually means colonialism,” Brown has stated, recalling the themes explored in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “You grow up singing ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and you learn about the war…. You only learn the good things about Winston Churchill, and you know, when you really look into it, everything’s obviously so much more complicated” (C. Brown quoted in C. Kino, “Cecily Brown’s Fearless Approach to Painting,” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2023).
The abstract, energetic brushwork combined with subtle hints of figuration in The Butcher and the Policeman exemplifies Brown’s interest in evoking emotion and narrative through abstraction, while grounding her work in historical and cultural references. “My work has always had a kind of unstable nature in that nothing’s fixed,” Brown has explained. “You think you know what you’re looking at. You look again and it shifts.” Increasingly, she says, “I feel there’s this instability to now, especially in the last five years or so, whether it’s Britain, America or just the world in general. But it’s funny: For the first time my work feels topical” (C. Brown, quoted in ibid.).
An exuberant canvas teeming with deft brushwork, historical allusions and concealed figuration, Cecily Brown’s 2013 painting The Butcher and the Policeman exemplifies the British painter’s unmatched ability to fuse painterly abstraction and figuration. Both volatile and powerfully fluid, the jewel-toned maelstrom invites the eye to swirl around its deluges of blue and ripples of green, ochre, and orange. Punctuated by the artist’s signature flesh-peach hues, the sublime vortex of form and color bursts into life, yielding unending contemplation as forms and figures emerge and recede among the artist’s torrential brushwork.
Last April, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its doors to Brown’s highly anticipated mid-career retrospective. For many, the exhibition solidified what was already known: Brown is one of the most formidable painters working today. For others, including the venerated New York Times co-chief art critic, Roberta Smith, heads were turned. “The more I looked at the paintings, the more they calmed down, opened up and differentiated themselves from one another in color and composition,” Smith observed of the works in the exhibition (R. Smith, “I Was Wrong about Cecily Brown,” New York Times, April 13, 2023, online). Indeed, with a new survey recently opened at the Dallas Museum of Art, soon to travel to The Barnes Collection, the world continues to elevate Brown’s status among her peers, allowing her work to beautifully unfold before our eyes.
Brown’s dynamic compositions are charged with an outpouring of activity with their tumultuous push and pull between form and abstraction never coming to rest. The artist encourages viewers to take time experiencing the rich complexities of her work. As with one of Brown’s many heroes, Willem de Kooning — whose liquid compositions from the 1970s The Butcher and the Policeman immediately recalls — the first look is only the beginning. Only time will pull back the layers of Brown’s brushwork, unveiling an encyclopedia of images and references hardened in paint, some intentional and some left to the eye of the beholder.
Cecily Brown’s paintings are a continuous stream of color and forms that accumulate and expand on the canvas in changing, multiple layers of influence,” critic and curator Danilo Eccher has observed. “Staring at her paintings is like leaning out over an orchestra pit, where cultural and historical references are like musical instruments mixing their notes.(D. Eccher, “Cecily Brown in Turin,” Gagosian Quarterly, October 22, 2014).
While Brown has not explicitly stated her influences for The Butcher and the Policeman, the title suggests an interplay of authority (the policeman) and brutality or raw humanity (the butcher), evoking both a literal and metaphorical tension. To this end, the phrase was famously penned by the Polish-English writer, Joseph Conrad, in his famous novel Heart of Darkness. Writing during the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland, which had been parceled out among three occupying empires through most of his life. As Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, journeys into Africa — where he had been sent to retrieve a once-idealistic ivory trader whose fatal flaw triggers an evil and amoral downfall — Marlow ponders the psychology of man divorced from scrutiny and authority:
“With solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums — how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him into by the way of solitude — utter solitude without a policeman — by the way of silence, utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering of public opinion?” (J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899).
Both Brown and Conrad engage with similar existential and moral concerns, looking towards themes of authority, chaos, and the darker sides of human nature. Tangentially, the abstracted figures, verdant colors, psychological conflict between power and brutality recalls Cuban painter, Wifredo Lam’s The Jungle, wherein Lam drew on the horrors of colonization in Cuba.
In recent years, London-born Brown, who relocated to New York shortly after finishing school at Slade School of Fine Art in 1993, has grappled with her own complicated relationship with England’s past. At an early age, Brown was introduced to the likes of Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, and Francis Bacon. While Brown and Sylvester mutually held Bacon at exceptionally high regard — the title of the present work even conjures Bacon’s own Figure with Meat, Brown was eager to forge her own path in a city where her father’s shadow would not loom so large.
Time and distance, however, has made this relationship even weightier. “The whole idea of empire, when you’re a little kid, you don’t really get that that actually means colonialism,” Brown has stated, recalling the themes explored in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “You grow up singing ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and you learn about the war…. You only learn the good things about Winston Churchill, and you know, when you really look into it, everything’s obviously so much more complicated” (C. Brown quoted in C. Kino, “Cecily Brown’s Fearless Approach to Painting,” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2023).
The abstract, energetic brushwork combined with subtle hints of figuration in The Butcher and the Policeman exemplifies Brown’s interest in evoking emotion and narrative through abstraction, while grounding her work in historical and cultural references. “My work has always had a kind of unstable nature in that nothing’s fixed,” Brown has explained. “You think you know what you’re looking at. You look again and it shifts.” Increasingly, she says, “I feel there’s this instability to now, especially in the last five years or so, whether it’s Britain, America or just the world in general. But it’s funny: For the first time my work feels topical” (C. Brown, quoted in ibid.).