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Lot Essay
Combining painterly rigor with an intuitive sensuality, Bedtime Story is an important early painting from a significant moment Cecily Brown’s career. Exhibited at her debut solo exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York in 2000, it was painted in 1999, when Brown was moving away from the ‘hedonistic bunnies’ imagery that had populated her previous major body of work. Her focus began to shift towards eroticism and the human body, and she began to deepen her exploration of abstraction. This pivotal year in Brown’s artistic development is represented in international public collections including the Tate, the Guggenheim Museum, The Broad and Denver Art Museum.
Painted on a canvas measuring just over six feet square, Bedtime Story arrests the attention of the viewer with its mesmerizing interplay of intense fleshy colors. Rendered in a vivid palette of peaches, fuchsias, burnt umbers and creamy whites, the painting is richly suggestive, calling to mind bodies in motion, or dancing flames. Yet, the picture remains deliberately elusive, entrancing the viewer with its evasive meanings and shifting imagery. Our eye oscillates between surface and depth, figurative shapes and abstract forms. Brown is deeply interested in this ambiguity, for it allows the viewer to become complicit in the creation of the painting. “I prefer a state of flux where the process is still in the process of becoming,” she told an interviewer in 2019. “From the beginning I was very aware that people looked at paintings very quickly…so I had the desire to make people stay and look. I am not into hidden imagery, but I do like the sense that something will benefit from long and close looking, convey a sense of movement and move while you look at it, and reveal itself. The meaning is always shifting, just as the paint is.” (C. Brown, quoted in Alain Elkann Interviews, February 24, 2019).
In common with other paintings from the late 1990s, Brown took the title for this work from a Hollywood film—in this instance Bedtime Story, a 1964 film starring Marlon Brando. After moving to New York City from London in 1994, Brown worked briefly in an animation studio and made a short film, which debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in 1995, before shifting her focus back to painting. The reference to cinema in Bedtime Story is not literal, yet the experience of looking at one of Brown’s paintings is not dissimilar to the complex way in which we process moving imagery, bringing our own subjective interpretations to a shape-shifting medley of imaginative visions, fleeting sensations and colored light.
Allowing her interest in cinema to influence her painting is characteristic of Brown’s consistent ability to tread the line between contradictory forces, ultimately uniting the strengths of both. Her move to the US in 1994 was in pursuit of a stimulating tension created by being a foreigner in a city she loved; of feeling at home in America while at the same time never quite feeling like she belonged. “I feel at odds about everything. My natural state is being torn; it would be bad for me if I wasn’t. If I had to narrow the work to one word, it would be ‘conflict’. I don’t like things to go along too happily” (C. Brown, in J. Wullschlager “Lunch with the FT”, Financial Times, June 10, 2016).
This energizing relationship with conflict is reflected in her work itself. Educated at the Slade School of Art in London in 1990s, her unwavering commitment to painting stood out from many of her contemporaries, some of whom became known as Young British Artists (YBAs). In contrast to their more conceptual and iconoclastic concerns, Brown approached her work with an unquestioning sincerity that was rooted in a profound respect for the history of painting. Citing as influences the European old masters, such as Veronese, Titian, Poussin, Delacroix and Rubens, she has also come to be associated with the American Abstract-Expressionist painters who dominated the art world in the mid-twentieth century. Her paintings carry a kindred sense of vigorous energy and confidence, an enjoyment of the act of painting and its possibilities. Nevertheless, she has maintained that she is not as different from her British peers as might be supposed: “Subject wise, I’ve always thought I have a lot in common with [the YBAs], I think they’re the children of Gilbert and George and [Francis] Bacon in a way that I feel I am as well. I’ve just got a bit more Turner thrown in” (C. Brown, quoted in R. Wetzler, “An interview with Cecil Brown,” Apollo, November 3, 2018).
Bedtime Story is characteristic of Brown’s bold and uninhibited approach to painting, which unites instinctive talent with an intellectual understanding of her medium. It is an intoxicating combination that continues to motivate Brown to this day. “I've discovered that the more I paint, the more I want to paint,” she has said. “The longer I go on doing it, the more I have to say and do” (C. Brown, quoted in “Cecily Brown: I take things too far when painting,” The Guardian, Sunday 20 September 2009).
Painted on a canvas measuring just over six feet square, Bedtime Story arrests the attention of the viewer with its mesmerizing interplay of intense fleshy colors. Rendered in a vivid palette of peaches, fuchsias, burnt umbers and creamy whites, the painting is richly suggestive, calling to mind bodies in motion, or dancing flames. Yet, the picture remains deliberately elusive, entrancing the viewer with its evasive meanings and shifting imagery. Our eye oscillates between surface and depth, figurative shapes and abstract forms. Brown is deeply interested in this ambiguity, for it allows the viewer to become complicit in the creation of the painting. “I prefer a state of flux where the process is still in the process of becoming,” she told an interviewer in 2019. “From the beginning I was very aware that people looked at paintings very quickly…so I had the desire to make people stay and look. I am not into hidden imagery, but I do like the sense that something will benefit from long and close looking, convey a sense of movement and move while you look at it, and reveal itself. The meaning is always shifting, just as the paint is.” (C. Brown, quoted in Alain Elkann Interviews, February 24, 2019).
In common with other paintings from the late 1990s, Brown took the title for this work from a Hollywood film—in this instance Bedtime Story, a 1964 film starring Marlon Brando. After moving to New York City from London in 1994, Brown worked briefly in an animation studio and made a short film, which debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in 1995, before shifting her focus back to painting. The reference to cinema in Bedtime Story is not literal, yet the experience of looking at one of Brown’s paintings is not dissimilar to the complex way in which we process moving imagery, bringing our own subjective interpretations to a shape-shifting medley of imaginative visions, fleeting sensations and colored light.
Allowing her interest in cinema to influence her painting is characteristic of Brown’s consistent ability to tread the line between contradictory forces, ultimately uniting the strengths of both. Her move to the US in 1994 was in pursuit of a stimulating tension created by being a foreigner in a city she loved; of feeling at home in America while at the same time never quite feeling like she belonged. “I feel at odds about everything. My natural state is being torn; it would be bad for me if I wasn’t. If I had to narrow the work to one word, it would be ‘conflict’. I don’t like things to go along too happily” (C. Brown, in J. Wullschlager “Lunch with the FT”, Financial Times, June 10, 2016).
This energizing relationship with conflict is reflected in her work itself. Educated at the Slade School of Art in London in 1990s, her unwavering commitment to painting stood out from many of her contemporaries, some of whom became known as Young British Artists (YBAs). In contrast to their more conceptual and iconoclastic concerns, Brown approached her work with an unquestioning sincerity that was rooted in a profound respect for the history of painting. Citing as influences the European old masters, such as Veronese, Titian, Poussin, Delacroix and Rubens, she has also come to be associated with the American Abstract-Expressionist painters who dominated the art world in the mid-twentieth century. Her paintings carry a kindred sense of vigorous energy and confidence, an enjoyment of the act of painting and its possibilities. Nevertheless, she has maintained that she is not as different from her British peers as might be supposed: “Subject wise, I’ve always thought I have a lot in common with [the YBAs], I think they’re the children of Gilbert and George and [Francis] Bacon in a way that I feel I am as well. I’ve just got a bit more Turner thrown in” (C. Brown, quoted in R. Wetzler, “An interview with Cecil Brown,” Apollo, November 3, 2018).
Bedtime Story is characteristic of Brown’s bold and uninhibited approach to painting, which unites instinctive talent with an intellectual understanding of her medium. It is an intoxicating combination that continues to motivate Brown to this day. “I've discovered that the more I paint, the more I want to paint,” she has said. “The longer I go on doing it, the more I have to say and do” (C. Brown, quoted in “Cecily Brown: I take things too far when painting,” The Guardian, Sunday 20 September 2009).