Cecily Brown

by Jim Lewis

Known for her lush surfaces, vivid color, and energetic brushwork, Cecily Brown inhabits her torrid, atmospheric paintings with life forms that swim amongst swells of color and gesture. Often cast in sensual situations, her figures advance and recede into painterly abstraction. With her various references to art history-- from the seventeenth-century French Classicism of Nicolas Poussin to the Baroque flamboyance of Peter Paul Rubens and the living gestures of Willem de Kooning, among other Abstract Expressionists--Brown reinvigorates twenty-first-century painting. Working alongside the traditions of the medium, and borrowing freely from them, Brown absorbs formerly male-dominated approaches to painting, unapologetically infusing a feminine viewpoint. This publication, which accompanies the first one-person museum survey of Brown's work in the United States, features three major new essays by Jeff Fleming, Linda Norden and Linda Nochlin, as well as a series of key color reproductions.

Genres: Art

Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

Jim Lewis, born 1963 in Cleveland, Ohio, is an American novelist. Soon after he was born, his family moved to New York; there, and in London, he was raised. He received a degree in philosophy from Brown University in 1984, and an M.A. in the same subject from Columbia University, before deciding to leave academia.

Since then, he has published three novels, Sister (published by Graywolf in 1993), Why the Tree Loves the Ax (published by Crown in 1998), and The King is Dead (published by Knopf in 2003). All three have been published in the UK as well, and individually translated into several languages, including French, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Greek.

In addition to his novels, he has written extensively on the visual arts, for dozens of magazines, from Artforum and Parkett to Harper's Bazaar; and contributed to 20 artist monographs, for museums around the world, among them, Richard Prince at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Jeff Koons at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Christopher Wool at The Los Angeles Museum of Art, and a Larry Clark retrospective at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

He has also written criticism and reportage for a wide range of publications, among them The New York Times, Slate, Rolling Stone, GQ, and Vanity Fair. His essays have appeared in Granta, and Tin House, among others.

He has collaborated with the photographer Jack Pierson on a small book called Real Gone (published by Artspace Books in 1993), and collaborated with Larry Clark on the story for the movie Kids.

He currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Stephan Ferreira · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was available to me during an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston back in 2006. But I didn't buy a copy until visiting again in 2007. Kinda pricey for the small amount of writing and collected images...but great since it's one of the only ones...yet.