“You start with basically a motif or the germ of an idea, which might be a girl,” said Cecily Brown during her 2016 Elson Lecture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She was there to discuss Girl on a Swing (2004), held in the National Gallery’s Collection and included in Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations, a survey of 30 years of the artist’s work now on view at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation through May 25, 2025. The Foundation holds one of the world's most significant impressionist, post-impressionist and modern paintings. Girls and girlhood are a continued trope and concept in Brown’s practice, explored through a singular hybrid of abstraction and figuration. She resuscitated this style in the 1990s alongside contemporaries such as Jenny Saville, at a moment when bravura brushwork was still synonymous with hypermasculinity. Since then, Brown’s focus on the female figure, formally and thematically, has forged a conversation on painting and gender, in part freeing feminist practice from the dominant textual, sculptural or installation practices of the time. For her, painting surfaces and images are containers to consider not only sexuality and gender, but also the iconography, experience and idealisation of the feminine body.

Co-curators Simonetta Fraquelli, consultant curator for the Barnes, and Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, organised Themes and Variations (first presented at the Dallas Museum of Art) into five converging themes. Amassed by Dr Albert C. Barnes in the early 20th century, the Barnes collection of impressionism and modernism is unrivaled in depth and breadth (with 179 Renoirs and 69 Cézannes, for example) and it is stipulated that the collection cannot travel or be loaned to other institutions. That the Barnes presentation of Themes and Variations does not draw connections between the permanent collection and Brown's work feels like a missed opportunity to consider a contemporary painter alongside art historical references never to be shown anywhere else. What would it mean, for instance, to contextualise Girl on a Swing, itself a reference to Fragonard’s The Swing (1767–68) (not in the Barnes collection) with Courbet’s Woman with White Stockings (La Femme aux bas blancs, 1864), on view at the Barnes as part of its permanent collection? Arguably, it would bolster and expand the curators’ supposition that Brown “explores gendered tropes in both art history and popular culture…[and] with its endless complexity and power…has broader implications for how women are represented in society today”, as they write on the introductory wall text. The exclusion of the relationship to the Barnes collection aside, Themes and Variations does make clear Brown’s ongoing relationship–stylistically and thematically–with Western painting writ large, and image making as well.

For instance, the introductory gallery, ‘Returning and Revisiting’, presents recent works in which Brown employs both horizontality and verticality, harkening to the traditional formats of landscape and portrait painting alike. With compositions made from a plethora of minute mark-making, recognisable figurative forms emerge and recede within a larger whole; these works seem to be both landscape and portraiture. One in this section, Picture This (2020), is seemingly completely composed of pure mark-making in black, orange, white and greenish-blue hues, but a closer look reveals a minuscule human figure in the composition's centre right. This figure is not necessarily female, as its legs, torso and raised arms are unsexed. But the figure’s grimacing smile and orange and pink-coloured face are somehow reminiscent of Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1950-52), in which the central femme form is both enticing and menacing. The title “Picture This” is ostensibly a reference to the ways in which the femme has been idealised, imagined, objectified, or otherwise used in Western art history; in this work, Brown seemingly calls out how women have been props in image-making, through pictures made via paint or printmaking. By placing this work next to the introductory text, the curators position Brown’s work as a reclamation of the female form in painting, imbuing it with an agency and emotion rarely seen in the history of the pictorial medium.

The exhibition’s second section, ‘Painting Flesh’, contends with this explicitly with the presentation of Brown’s earliest works included in the exhibition, such as On the Town (1998). Tonally reminiscent of Picture This in its peachy-orange palette, On the Town is more figurative with clearly delineated male and female body parts penetrating and receiving, respectively. Action is enmeshed with painterly gesture here, as Brown’s loose, bravura brushwork and the activity depicted are one. As in much of Brown’s work, style is synonymous with subject, with hands, faces, buttocks and sexual organs all rendered in a sinewy linework that belies the bulky muscularity of her subjects and forms. Toward the top left of On the Town is another smiling female figure (perhaps an early reckoning with Woman I ?) while the cascading, all-over composition recalls Bosch as much as it does Jackson Pollock’s loose, drippy brushwork or Lee Krasner’s tightly abstract shapes. Though not textural, this work nevertheless has a dimensional effect in that Brown’s many lines and shapes accumulate in the composition, just as so many atoms assemble into the complete human body. Flesh and painterliness are the building blocks of Brown’s practice; the female form is a connective tissue that enables her to contend with the entirety of art history.

The exhibition’s next gallery, a continuation of ‘Painting Flesh’, most directly contends with art history. Presenting works from the late 1990s and early 2000s, this section includes several paintings that specifically reference Spanish painter Francisco Goya and German-British painter Walter Sickert in both subject and structure. Here, figures are alone or coupled, and in repose, their bodies are the focus of Brown's compositions. Often, they are female nudes reclining, amidst or post-pleasure, as in Black Painting 2 (2002), These Foolish Things (2002) and Justify My Love (2003-04). Brown engendered these reclining female nudes with an agency and prowess seldom, if ever, implied in the paintings she references. Instead, Brown’s figures are sexually powerful and self-assured in their nudity, which the curators argue is a critique of how women have been historically depicted by male painters. The figures’ autonomy is certainly palpable in their poses, but what, beyond how they are portrayed, and Brown’s identity as a woman, makes these paintings a critique? Is it the use of images and painting specifically? Brown’s stylistic choices?

These questions could be more explicitly confronted throughout the exhibition and its ensuing section. These, ‘In the Night Garden’ (which includes Girl on a Swing), ‘Sirens and Shipwrecks’, and “Looking and Stealing” each examine how Brown uses particular motifs, genres and movements of painting and image making. Brown’s practice is one of continual viewing and the recycling of art history, the curators seem to suggest in their repeated presentation of how Brown stylistically reinterprets canonical tropes of Western painting. Variance in style is clearly articulated in this exhibition, as is Brown’s commitment to the female body and how it is represented across time and Western cultures. But is this enough to meaningfully grapple with “how women are represented in society today”, as the curators write that Brown does, despite not fully articulating how, through their curatorial choices? Clearly, it was in the 1990s, during third-wave feminism. And it might be today, if Brown’s curators are able to go beyond style and subject alone to engage with the conceptual impulse that scaffolds her conceit. In an age of fast images, digital appropriation and manipulation, what does it mean to harness the slow, process-driven time of oil painting or printmaking to reinterpret historical images? Themes and Variations, though a robust presentation of 30 years of prolific and determined making, leaves this question unanswered, to be more fully chased by future art historians. Thus, the girl is still a germ of an idea, a question yet to be meted out.

‘Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations’ is on view at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, from March 9 – May 25, 2025.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.