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May 13, 2021 · In her 1998 painting The Girl Who Had Everything, she melds the figurative and the abstract to create a new painterly grammar, filching the shiny bits of art history with magpie abandon.
- Summary of Cecily Brown
- Accomplishments
- Biography of Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown might have settled for a comfortable spot in the London art scene where she'd have been quite at home. Just as she was wrapping up her art school studies, the trendy Young British Artists were making their mark. Instead, like countless aspiring artists before her, Brown left London for edgy, make-it-or-break-it New York City. Her meteo...
The genre of the grotesque in painting had been largely dominated by male artists like Francis Bacon and Gilbert & Georgeand their overtly sexualized depictions of women. Cecily Brown was one of th...In some regards, Brown is thought to have successfully built her own career on the legacy or, less positively, remnants of the male Abstract Expressionists. She mocks sexuality with equal parts sen...Brown is frequently discussed in the context of feminist art. Not unlike preceding feminist artists who actively challenged the canon, which some assert has traditionally presented "masculine" art...Childhood and Education
Cecily Brown, the daughter of British novelist, Shena Mackay, and influential art critic and curator, David Sylvester, grew up in the idyllic countryside of Surrey. As the child of somewhat bohemian parents, she grew up immersed in the arts. Sylvester introduced her to the painter, Francis Bacon, when Brown was still young and the influence of Bacon has remained a constant. Her mother's creativity, work ethic, and drive also encouraged Brown to aim for a career in the arts, although she claim...
Middle Period
Brown found it difficult to establish herself in the art scene of early 1990s London, at the pulsing heart of which were the Young British Artists with their attention-commanding installations and spectacle works. She believed she might fare better in New York City, where she had fallen in love with the sunlight in a previous stay as an exchange student during her years in college. The contrast between bright, vivacious New York to gloomy London intrigued her, and so in 1995, she made the mov...
Current Work
Brown's style has evolved over time. Her early focus on highly charged sexual themes, with the heavily impastoed canvases of roiling figures was expanded through the years to incorporate more diverse subject matter. Sexual themes are tempered so that there is a subtlety or even vagueness to her work, which the artist says now features a myriad of topics -- "life, death, and the kitchen sink." In May 2015, Brown left the Gagosian gallery after 15 years to the tremendous surprise of the art wor...
- British
- London, England
The Girl Who Had Everything is done in the fleshiest of pinks, ripe for the taking. Populated with fragments of figures as twisted and mysterious as Francis Bacon, it has all the vigour of a macho abstraction, created with a pastel decorative palette.
The Girl Who Had Everything is a 1953 American romantic drama film directed by Richard Thorpe and produced by Armand Deutsch for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The film features William Powell in his last MGM feature and one of his last film roles before retirement.
View THE GIRL WHO HAD EVERYTHING by Cecily Brown on artnet. Browse upcoming and past auction lots by Cecily Brown.
The Girl Who Had Everything: Directed by Richard Thorpe. With Elizabeth Taylor, Fernando Lamas, William Powell, Gig Young. Attorney's daughter falls for one of his gangster clients.
Originally part of the Saatchi Collection, The Girl Who Had Everything is an exhilarating masterwork that stands among Cecily Brown’s finest early canvases. Painted in 1998, the year after her debut solo exhibition in New York propelled her to critical acclaim, it captures the euphoric flourishing of the carnal, gestural abstraction that ...
