Cecily Brown
The Barnes Foundation | 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia
Through May 25, 2025
In Cecily Brown’s canvas Justify My Love, 2003-04, a masturbating nude is rendered with all the friction and viscosity that the depicted act of sexual sovereignty suggests. The blurred figure, composed of brushstrokes that recall smears of foundation makeup in shades from ivory to bronze, seems to sail on dark water in a grisaille storm, a bed for a raft, leaving several centuries of Western art history in its wake. At the bottom, the painting’s title, taken from Madonna’s 1990 hit—whose video was famously banned by MTV for its suggestions of bisexuality, group sex, voyeurism, and BDSM—is inscribed in cursive. The work’s other reference (or one of them) Brown says, is Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare, 1781, in which an incubus crouches on a sleeping woman’s chest.
This Madge tribute (of sorts) is the most ecstatic in a trio of her Black Paintings, all from around the same time, included in “Themes and Variations,” the artist’s mid-career survey at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. (Curated by Simonetta Fraquelli and Anna Katherine Brodbeck, co-organized with the Dallas Museum of Art, it’s the largest presentation of Brown’s work in the U.S. yet.) Installed on facing walls in a kind of angled passageway, catching visitors in a seductive, disorienting triangle, the three paintings make for a stunning moment staged early on in the show. They’re outliers, marking Brown’s dramatic pivot to a constrained palette and single-figure compositions after several closely watched and remarked-upon years of exuberant, kaleidoscopic color and roiling group scenes (she soon pivoted back), but the saucy allure of Justify may be a good place to start for this retrospective, which takes as its subject the artist’s relationship to the cultural politics of the past three decades.
