The Contemporary Art Specialist
A monumental Cecily Brown canvas blends her signature sensuality with the drama of 19th-century French Romanticism.
By Lucius Elliot
Head of Contemporary Art Marquee Sales, New York
At more than 12 feet wide, Cecily Brown’s “Untitled” is an extraordinary display of the sensual possibilities of painting. Sweeping passages of color suggest flesh, breaking waves and the glow of a distant sunset, their almost tidal rhythm drawing the viewer into the canvas. Yet behind this dazzling surface lies the influence of two of the 19th century’s great images of catastrophe: Delacroix’s “The Shipwreck of Don Juan” and Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa.” The tension between these tragic precedents and Brown’s luxurious treatment of paint is central to the work’s fascination.
Brown developed her shipwreck series between 2016 and 2018, exhibiting several monumental canvases in 2017 at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, the British artist’s adopted city. For this work, Delacroix provides the closer compositional reference, but I find Géricault’s painting, housed in the Louvre, the more intriguing point of departure. Its arrangement of figures gives form to an appalling event: in 1816, the French frigate Méduse ran aground off the West African coast while bound for Senegal, and survivors were abandoned on a makeshift raft. Two centuries later, Brown found herself working while harrowing photographs of migrants crossing the Mediterranean were being widely disseminated. At its best, art can be a means to speak truth to power, and the resonance of Géricault’s masterpiece through the centuries is clear.
She achieves this above all through the freedom of her brush. In late works by Titian, Rubens and Hals, gesture can conjure a reality rather than reproduce every detail of its appearance. Willem de Kooning took that freedom further, repeatedly drawing the human figure into abstraction. Brown works in that tradition, but her command of paint is entirely her own. Light seems to flicker across the paint, and the restless movement of the brush becomes the movement of the sea. There is nothing definitively figurative to grasp, but the painting has an extraordinary physical presence. It is not simply a depiction of turbulent water—it gives us the sensation of being surrounded by it.
Brown’s relationship with art history also has a personal dimension. As a child, Brown knew critic David Sylvester as a family friend, who introduced her to artists such as Jasper Johns; only while studying art at London’s Slade did she find out Sylvester was her biological father. A wide-ranging commentator on 20th-century art, Sylvester was a celebrated interviewer of Francis Bacon, though his interests extended as far back as Cimabue. My own introduction to art came through Venetian Renaissance painting, and I have always been interested in artists whose engagement with the past amounts to more than a quotation. Brown discovers what Géricault’s composition can make possible for a painter working in a different age.
One of the first auctions I ran at Sotheby’s was the 2018 London sale of the David Teiger Collection, which included Brown’s “Sock Monkey.” Painted in 2003, it depicts lovers entwined in a lush, almost Edenic landscape. Her homecoming exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries, which ran from March to September 2026, revisited similarly verdant landscapes, inspired partly by memories of England. “Untitled” occupies a distinct chapter of her career: It exchanges pastoral calm for the awesome power of the sea, but Brown’s fascination with the meeting of figure and landscape remains.
I can see why Dick and Betty Hedreen were drawn to this painting, now coming to auction from their remarkable collection. Over six decades, they built a collection that looked backward and forward at once, placing Old Masters and contemporary art in conversation rather than in separate worlds. That same double vision runs through Brown’s work. “Untitled” reaches back to the grand ambitions and dramatic compositions of Géricault and Delacroix, yet its restless surface and freedom of gesture belong entirely to the present. In both the Hedreens’ collecting and Brown’s painting, the past is not something fixed behind us, but something continually made new.—As told to James Haldane
The Fashion Specialist
Worn by Princess Diana on one of the most scrutinized nights of her life, the black dress became an enduring image of confidence on her own terms.
By Morgane Halimi
Global Head of Handbags & Fashion
With an object as famous as the Revenge Dress, what interests me most is not the story everybody already knows, but what lies beyond it—and why its message has become so much more universal. On June 29, 1994, Princess Diana wore this dress to a Vanity Fair fundraising dinner at London’s Serpentine Gallery on the same evening her estranged husband was due to admit to adultery on national television. She had planned to wear Valentino, but changed her mind at the last minute and reached instead for a Christina Stambolian design that had hung unworn in her wardrobe for three years, having considered it too daring to wear publicly.
For me, what happened that evening was much more than revenge. Diana understood that you do not need words to communicate. She used her actions, her presence and, of course, her clothes. With this dress, she no longer had to speak—it did that for her. There is something still very modern, and very feminist, about that. She transformed the piece into both a shield and a weapon, allowing her to stand for herself while projecting that strength to everybody watching.
Stambolian, who was born in Greece and trained in Athens before moving to London in 1968, made it from black silk crepe, with a crisscrossing pleated bodice, off-the-shoulder neckline and diagonally draped chiffon skirt. Seeing the garment in person, I was struck by how much more refined the construction is than the famous photographs suggest. From a distance, much of that detail simply disappears. She came to see us at the preview and told me how difficult the pleating had been, and that she had worked almost by herself, day and night, to achieve it. After delivering it, Stambolian heard nothing for years. When Diana finally wore the dress, she learned the next morning that her design had made headlines.
In 1997, three years after that night, Diana included the dress among 79 gowns auctioned to benefit cancer and AIDS charities. The present owner acquired it there and has held it for nearly 30 years. When we brought the piece back into public view this September, what struck me was how personal the response was. I cannot tell you how many people—both members of the press and exhibition visitors—told me what they had been doing that day when they saw Diana wearing it on television.
From this reaction, I would expect bidders to come from well beyond fashion collecting. This is a rare object people recognize long before encountering it in person. By now, its story is inseparable from the object; perhaps even more important than the silk itself. A collector is acquiring both: the dress and everything that it has come to represent.
