'I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back.'
—Cecily BrownPainted in 1999, Cecily Brown’s Blithe Spirit is a striking example of the artist’s highly acclaimed practice and its careful balance of abstraction and figuration, past and present, paint and flesh. Engulfing the viewer into a sumptuous field of gestural brushstrokes, the present work expresses Brown’s ability to channel the Old and Modern Masters of the art historical canon— from Paolo Veronese to Willem de Kooning – in the formation of a singular visual language that is entirely her own. Coming to auction for the first time from a renowned Private Italian Collection, Blithe Spirit’s intimate scale and sensuous tones, all come together in a bacchanalian riot of tantalising allusions, epitomising the artist’s words: ‘The paint is transformed into image, and hopefully paint and image transform themselves into a third and new thing [..] I want to catch something in the act of becoming something else.’ⁱ  

 

Earthly Delights 

'One of the main things I would like my work to do is to reveal itself slowly, continuously and for you never to feel that you’re really finished looking at something.'
—Cecily Brown 

Following her graduation from the Slade School of Fine Arts and the epochal rise of the Young British Artists in the 1990s, Cecily Brown garnered critical attention, with her lush gestural compositions of explicitly sexual imagery. Painted the same year she joined Gagosian, the carnal details of Blithe Spirit emerge in a tangle of fleshy peaches and pinks, slowly coming to reveal the form of a woman, lying prostrate. Recalling the orgiastic scenes depicted by Hieronymous Bosch in The Garden of Earthly Delights, the present work exemplifies this pivotal moment in the rise to fame. 

 

Included in the 1999 exhibition at Galleria in Arco in Turin, Fact & Fictions, which celebrated the emerging talents of the international painting scene, Blithe Spirit encapsulates the continuous stream of colour, form and narratives that have become synonymous with the artist’s practice. The year also marked Brown’s breakout exhibition The Skin Game at Gagosian, which presented works characterised by their overtly erotic imagery. The artist later recalled: ‘I think I was doing a lot of sexual paintings… what I wanted – in a way that I think now is too literal – was for the paint to embody the same sensations that bodies would. Oil paint very easily suggests bodily fluids and flesh.’ⁱⁱ 

 

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

 

The present work takes its title from To a Skylark, a late poem by the English Romantic, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Brown extracts a line from the poem’s first stanza, in which Shelley addresses a skylark as a ‘blithe Spirit’ since its unimpeded song surpasses all other beauty. 

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! 
Bird thou never wert, 
That from Heaven, or near it, 
Pourest thy full heart 
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art

 

To a Skylark, also inspired Noël Coward’s 1941 comedic play Blithe Spirit, which centres on struggling novelist Charles Condomine who invites an eccentric medium into his home to host a séance; Madame Arcati inadvertently conjures the spirit of Charles’ first wife Elvira, who becomes determined to complicate and sabotage their relationship. 

  

 

Collector’s Digest

 

•    Now based in New York, Cecily Brown was born in the UK and studied at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art and is an internationally recognised and defining figure of contemporary art. 

 

•    Known for her assimilation of a broad range of cultural material, in 1999, Brown created additional works with titles that reference literature, such as The Skin of Our Teeth, which shares the title of a play by Thomas Wilder, and Tender is the Night, which references the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. This continues to be a theme in her recent work.

 

•    In 2020, Brown exhibited in Bustes de Femmes, a group exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Paris that focuses on female portraiture to celebrate how the female figure has been reinterpreted by modern and contemporary artists. 

ⁱ Cecily Brown, quoted in Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, ‘Painting Sensations,’ in Cecily Brown: Paintings, exh. cat., Modern Art Oxford, 2005, p. 55
ⁱⁱ https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/jun/12/art1