Cecily Brown

Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Berlin, Contemporary Fine Arts; Hannover, Kestner Gesellschaft; The Hague Museum, Cecily Brown: Based on a True Story, April 2010 - February 2011, pp. 14-15 and 69, illustrated in color and on the cover

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling to the sides and edges. There is a small 1/2 inch wide area of paint loss approximately 35 inches from the left edge and 36 inches from the top edge, which appears possibly inherent to the artist's working method rather than a later condition issue. Under ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

A visually sumptuous maelstrom of color, Cecily Brown’s Lady with a Little Dog from 2009-2010 is a monumental canvas, expressively rendered with a lush texture. The layered surface calls attention to the artist’s chosen medium of oil paint, which she credited with helping her achieve a sensuality and richness of form and space. She often quoted Willem de Kooning, who declared, “flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.” Indeed, the fleshy hues that dominate the picture plane in the present work expressly indicate the human body, yet are vaguely undefined in Brown's signature quasi-abstract aesthetic. Brown's work is often characterized by raunchy subject matter, executed with an unabashed painterly-ness rarely found in the work of her contemporaries. The intended ambiguity of forms and subject, teetering in the space between abstraction and figuration, force the viewer to engage with the painting and focus on “looking” as both an act of discernment and voyeurism.

Under close inspection of Lady with a Little Dog, a figure begins to emerge: her body splayed out diagonally across the canvas, her head at the bottom right, legs open, with a small dog sitting in the nook of her left elbow. Her pose is overtly sexual - one of submission and vulnerability - yet there is no partner to accompany her, leaving us to question if she has fulfilled her own needs, if she awaits a suitor, or if some unseen character has abandoned her. The figure’s position and the cryptic circumstances are aesthetically linked to Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés: 1. La chute d'eau / 2. Le gaz d'éclairage from 1946-1966, installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the viewer confronts a large wooden door with a peephole, through which a nude woman’s splayed body is visible, possibly the aftermath of a sexually violent encounter. Duchamp's similarly opaque and visually analogous compostion engages our act of “looking” and instantly turns the viewer into the voyeur.

For Cecily Brown, depicting sexual scenes is a metaphor for sex itself, both as a means of creation, personal expression and an implied virility. Working in a male-dominated practice going back centuries, Brown’s erotic and animalistic scenes assert her own femininity in the face of tradition. Sexual subject matter also facilitates Brown’s trademark combination of abstraction and figuration, leaving room for individual interpretation. In a 2005 e-mail correspondence, Brown remarked, “It wasn’t so much the use of sexual imagery that created a release, it was the attempt to bend and twist pictorial space…that was probably when I first started trying to use ambiguous space, one that defied gravity. I wanted it to be impossible for the viewer to know where they stood in relation to the action.”

Brown was acutely aware of the art historical tradition that preceded her, and she was markedly affected by the Old Masters and Abstract Expressionists. Indeed, the lush and textural paintings of her oeuvre bear profound resemblance to the large-scale genre paintings of Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin. The color palette and dynamism of forms - in addition to the implied sexual violence - in Poussin’s masterpiece Rape of the Sabine Women from 1636 mirrors the unique frenetic energy and allover composition of Lady with a Little Dog.

Further, Brown cultivated her unique brand of abstraction in studying the proto-Abstract Expressionist work of Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko, among others. She states, “If I had to place where it all comes from, the moment that interests me the most in twentieth century painting, and which I feel was not taken that far because abstraction happened in such an extreme way, is the moment when Rothko, Gorky and Newman were doing those biomorphic things that just hovered on the edge of representation. They’re not quite abstract and they are absolutely grounded in the figure.” (Brown in Robert Enright, “Paint Whisperer: An Interview with Cecily Brown,” Border Crossing, Vol. 4, No. 1, Issue No. 93, p. 40) Brown ultimately morphed these organic shapes inspired by her predecessors into body parts and sexually-charged scenes, perpetually dancing in the narrow space between abstraction and figuration.