29/11/2001
by Martha Schwendener

What would you expect from a painter who described her own works as "lush frenetic orgies of potent color, at once vulgar and subtle?" Something tactile and extravagant, perhaps, along the lines of Cecily Brown’s canvases, which are filled with twisting bodies and abstract, gestural brushstrokes in flesh-toned oil paint.

Brown draws from a variety of sources - including Willem De Kooning, Francis Bacon, the Marquis de Sade - for her large-scale canvases, which have been shown everywhere from Gagosian Gallery, Deitch Projects, and P.S. 1 in New York to the Saatchi Collection in London and Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. She has made a name for herself very quickly by placing her work alongside big names in recent art history—although being the daughter of late London art critic David Sylvester (interestingly, one of Francis Bacon’s greatest champions) can’t have hurt, either. Rather than adopt the serious tone of some of her forebears, however, Brown tags her works with sassy titles—many of them drawn from pop-culture sources—like Dog Day Afternoon, Suddenly Last Summer, Lady Luck, and Tender is the Night.

The market for Brown’s paintings has mirrored the brisk pace with which the artist entered the art world. Her first New York show was at Deitch Projects in 1997, shortly after the London-born artist moved to the U.S., and by the end of last year, her paintings were already selling on the secondary market. Untitled, trapeze, an oil on linen, sold at Christie’s in November 2000 for $ 55,000 (€ 61,880), while "Kiss Me Cupid," another oil on linen in the same sale fetched $ 75,000 (€ 84,380) - both well above their estimates ranging between $ 30,000-40,000 (€ 33,750-45,000). The New York auctions this spring provided an even bigger boost to Brown’s prices. "Untitled" (1997), an orgiastic canvas filled with rabbits, was hammered by Christie’s New York at $ 95,000 (€ 106,890), way above its $ 40,000-60,000 (€ 45,000-67,500) estimate (and double the price of contemporaries like Inka Essenhigh, whose prices stayed well within similar estimates at the same sale).

Brown’s smaller works have also done respectably as they hit the secondary market. "Beware My Lovely," a watercolor diptych, sold on the Artnet website in June 2000 for $ 3,630 (€ 4,100), along with "Film still from ‘Cunning stunts,’" a pencil and acrylic work on paper that sold for $ 2,420 (€ 2,720). At Phillips de Pury New York, in May 2001, an untitled work on paper—two human figures drawn in black ink, in typical Brownian erotic throes—sold for $ 4,500 (€ 5,060). While in the November 13, 2001 Contemporary Sale at Phillips in New York, Brown fared even better. The painting Spring Fever B, sold for $ 20,000 (€ 22,500), beating its high estimate of $ 18,000 (€ 20,250). At the Contemporary Art auction held three days later by Christie’s in New York, the oil A chorus line was hammered at $ 60,000 (€ 45,000), confirming its low-end estimate.