Great expectations
Andrew Lambirth
Cecily Brown: Paintings Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street, Oxford, until 28 August There has been a great deal of media coverage of this exhibition of new paint ings by Cecily Brown (born 1969) at the curiously named Modern Art Oxford. (It’s actually an Arts Council-funded public gallery.) Brown, though a Londoner, has lived in New York since 1994 and has made a substantial name for herself there and in Europe, showing recently at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, in 2003. This is her first major solo exhibition in Britain.
Its reception has been mixed. Magazine profiles tend to stress her impeccable pedigree (her father is the late David Sylvester, her mother the distinguished novelist Shena Mackay), and dilate upon the primary subject matter of her painting — sex. British critics, a notoriously curmudgeonly lot, like to show that they aren’t easily impressed, even by bravura paintwork and international sales. Consequently, a couple of the broadsheets consider she has been over-hyped, though Richard Dorment in the Telegraph calls her work ‘dazzling’ and Jackie Wullschlager in the FT thinks that ‘for sheer painterly verve’ this is ‘the most interesting show by a living artist in England this year’. A great deal has been made of Brown’s use of paint, and it is this which has to be the focus of any serious discussion of her achievement to date.
I have been following her work with great interest since 1988, though because of her departure for the States I haven’t seen a great deal of it since her debut show here in 1999. That exhibition of just four large oil paintings was at Victoria Miro’s Cork Street space, and was a considerable success, with the Tate buying a picture. Let me quote briefly from my review:
Her work is intelligent and generous ... at once notational and baroque. There’s a great depth of figurative reference here, but it doesn’t decode easily.... The paint is beautifully handled: slathers and brush-falls, gloriously liquid and present ... Cecily Brown is a young painter to watch, for she could take off brilliantly in any direction.
You may say I was impressed.
The Oxford exhibition consists of 16 oil paintings, a lithograph and an animated film from 1995. (There’s also a limited edition aquatint for sale to mark the occasion of the show.) The film stands up well: it’s brash, funny, sexy and inventive. The paintings have all been done in the past six years, and the most obviously sexual is the earliest, ‘Performance’ (1999–2000). Dominating the second of the upstairs galleries, this monstrous slicked-up turquoise canvas freezes the blood. Although the painting depicts the intimacy of coitus, the subaqueous froideur of its palette and the mechanistic limbs destroy any sense of tenderness or sexiness. Looking round this spacious top-lit gallery, the immediate impression is of painterly clutter, of frenetic activity trying to distract the visitor from what becomes apparent with continued looking: a distressing absence of feeling, perhaps of meaning.
Is this a problem of subject? Brown seems to be moving away from the direct sexual confrontation, but has not yet replaced it with anything quite so compelling. (Yet if her reputation is based on painting the act of sex, would she ever want to abandon it?) ‘Funny Cry Happy’ (2002), for instance, takes the name of a deli near her studio, and is, she thinks, the only truly abstract painting she’s made. It contains passages of some succulence, but it’s rather as if the bunnies which disported themselves in her earlier paintings have been dumped in a food blender.
So much of the paint seems tired, scrambled. Look, for instance, at ‘Black Painting 4’; the upper half of the canvas is quite dead. Her imagery is fractured but it’s also fractious. There’s a terrible restlessness here: dissatisfaction writ large. The colour is neither sumptuous nor particularly sensual. It’s alternately ragged or overheated. ‘Wood’, with its restricted palette, fluttery undergrowth and suggested body parts, is oddly more restful. Moving through to the first gallery, the casual café crème subtleties of ‘Aujourd’hui Rose... ’ (2005) come as something of a relief after the hectic and determined overpainting of the other exhibits. But this slight, rather fey painting is not enough to justify a reputation.
Perhaps her work is a deliberate attempt to echo the visual chaos and overload of contemporary urban culture, but with the severely restricted attention span of today’s populace, Brown’s hasty paraphrase ends up a garbled mess. This is shorthand which can’t be read back. The broken feathery marks, which should be delicious, have a vapid quality. Incoherence is the order of the day. Just take a look at the mangled histrionics of ‘Thanks, Roody Hooster’. Even when she tries something different, the message is distorted. ‘Tripe with Lemons’ is like the naughty smearing of the potty rebel, painting with the body’s waste.
The accompanying catalogue is prefaced with 32 pages of green-toned source material, strongly reminiscent of the books that Pop artist Allen Jones produced in the Sixties and Seventies (Figures and Projects), showing the genesis of his erotic imagery. The effect is similar, if more overtly lascivious in Brown’s case. And yet it is precisely an erotic charge which her paintings lack. The much-vaunted physicality of her paint surfaces do not deliver.
I found none of the joy or excitement I had hoped for, and very little of the promise of the earlier work fulfilled. (Greater dexterity in paint application is eclipsed when sensitivity has been forfeited.) And yet Brown is immensely successful. Her work is in great demand, and she works hard to meet that demand, on as many as 20 paintings at once. I can only think she is overproducing. Judging by the evidence here, she is spreading herself too thinly. Brown’s genuine feeling for paint seems to have been overlaid by a devastating impatience.
Early success can be an unwelcome burden. Some, like Hockney, have survived it remarkably well. Others have cracked under the strain of expectation. Cecily Brown has all the makings of a really fine painter: proven technical ability, love of paint, ambition. She does seem to be thrashing around for something to say, but that may well emerge as she matures. However, celebrity requires a high-protein diet. Over-reliance on porn mags won’t serve her turn, and neither will regurgitated abstract expressionism. She needs something a little more nutritious. I hope she finds it.
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