Sorry, but nudes aren’t only for the male gaze
With her giant new painting a centrepiece of the renovated Courtauld, British artist Cecily Brown talks to Alastair Sooke
Next week, London’s Courtauld Gallery will finally reopen to the public following a three-year, top-tobottom redevelopment, with an astonishing new painting by the 52-year-old British artist Cecily Brown adorning its beautiful spiral staircase. Executed across three canvases, Unmoored from her reflection is more than 17.5ft wide, and depicts a pair of prominent male nudes against a swirling backdrop. For the next two years, it will hang, surrounded by a plasterwork frame, on a curved wall at Somerset House.
“I mean, it’s mind-blowing,” says Brown, speaking to me from her New York studio. As a student at the Slade, she often visited the Courtauld – and the idea of displaying one of her own paintings there today, alongside the likes of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, feels “very cheeky”: “You think of your young self ” – for much of the 1990s, she worked as a waitress to support herself – “thinking: ‘How could this possibly have happened?’”
Articulate and witty, Brown is surprisingly down-to-earth given her stellar success since the late 1990s: today, her kinetic, kaleidoscopic paintings, which seem to slip between figuration and abstraction, can sell for seven-figure sums.
Thanks to Covid restrictions, she was unable to inspect the spot earmarked for her new painting for herself. It is, though, a self-evidently illustrious, if idiosyncratic, place to show a picture: the apex of a neoclassical staircase leading to Britain’s first purpose-built public gallery, the splendid Great Room, where, from 1780 until 1836, the Royal Academy, which once occupied this wing, staged its annual exhibition. In those days, a frieze-like painting depicting the Roman goddess Minerva visiting the Muses on Mount Parnassus filled the panel where Brown’s work now appears; in a well-known cartoon, the English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson satirised the fashionable throng that used to trip up and down the staircase every year, tumbling down in a flurry of undergarments and exposed buttocks.
By taking on the commission, then, Brown, who lives in the East Village with her husband, the American architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, and their 12-year-old daughter, was engaging with the long tradition of British art, as well as the Courtauld’s modern masterpieces. Concerned that she might start to suffer, as she puts it, “stage fright”, she opted for a strategy that served her well for another recent commission for the Metropolitan Opera: to engineer a sense of “freedom” by “sort of faking yourself out that you’re just an art student, and nobody gives a f---.” She is a “very prolific” artist, she tells me: “I just paint my ass off every day – and edit later.”
If freedom is what she was going for, then Unmoored from her reflection delivers in spades. Against a welter of painterly marks, teeming with half-glimpsed fantastical motifs and body parts, like sprites and sirens hidden within thick undergrowth, two vigorous nude young men stride towards the viewer, simultaneously heroic in the manner of classical Greek statuary, and strangely vulnerable. Above them, a yellow, female face surveys the scene like the sun. This is a self-portrait: “I couldn’t resist,” she says.
From the off, Brown decided to structure the composition around “very clear standing figures”, lest it become “too loosey-goosey”. Adamant they should be men, she alighted on a printout in her studio of a painting of male bathers by Edvard Munch – and they “found their way into [the picture] very naturally… Shamelessly pilfered.”
That picture doesn’t belong to the Courtauld, but the picnic basket to the right of Brown’s composition alludes to a painting which does: Manet’s sketch for Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which depicts a racy al fresco meal featuring a pair of fully dressed men and their female companions, one completely naked. Only Brown decided to flip Manet’s scenario, so that, this time, the men would be unclothed.
Was she after a homo-erotic frisson? “No,” she replies emphatically, “they are sexy, naked men to be looked at, and for their bodies to be enjoyed, by everyone.” She’s happy for people to interpret their relationship however they like: “My whole way of painting is very fluid, which makes me feel trendy at the moment, because my figures have always been sort of ‘in transition’.” But, she continues, as a “female, heterosexual” artist, she finds it “very frustrating that you paint a male nude, and people say it’s homoerotic. So, female nudes are for the male gaze? And then male nudes are also for the male gaze, even when they’re by a straight woman?”
Over the years, Brown has often incorporated erotic, even pornographic, details into her paintings. But, she points out, while her viewers frequently “get a glimpse of a breast or a bum or a thigh or whatever, there’s never a [naked woman] standing there to be viewed.” According to Barnaby Wright, a curator at the Courtauld, Brown “twists the codes and conventions of painting, and thinks about how, as a contemporary artist, she can negotiate these great, often male, artists of the past, whom she hugely admires, but must also overcome”.
This summer, Brown, who grew up in Surrey and says that she now misses “Englishness” more than ever, finally made it back to London, having been prevented during lockdown. She caught up with her mother, the novelist Shena Mackay; her father, the critic David Sylvester,
‘My whole way of painting is very fluid, which makes me feel trendy now’
died in 2001. As it happens, Brown didn’t know she was Sylvester’s daughter until she was at art school. “When I was a kid, we’d probably only see him once a year,” she recalls, though he took more of an interest as she gravitated towards art, which she says was his “religion”. “As a young artist,” she reveals, “his interviews with [Francis] Bacon were my bible. I’m very proud of him.”
Yet, while her own “obsession” with painting comes, she believes, straight from Sylvester, she has never taken her talent for granted: “The fact that I could paint all the time, as soon as I could afford not to have a job, is, for me, the greatest gift you could have.”
The Courtauld Gallery reopens on Nov 19. Details: courtauld.ac.uk