Looking at Cecily Brown’s Untitled (Vanity) 2005
In multiple interviews the British artist Cecily Brown has said that to her, the ideal painting is one that can take being looked at for years. And the ideal viewer is a person that stands in front of a work long enough to see what was not visible at first sight. I haven’t heard Brown say that her goal is to create an ideal painting, but several times she has mentioned that she tries to make works that capture the observer’s gaze and keep him (or her) focused long enough to see them start changing.
Hanging in New York’s The FLAG Art Foundation, among works by Jeff Koons and Charles Ray, was Brown’s 2005 Untitled (Vanity). This painting caught my eye, and for the time I stood in front of it, it became Brown’s ideal painting and I her ideal observer.
The work is oil on linen, it measures 77 x 55 in, and depicts a young woman sitting down in front of a dressing table. The palette shifts between black, white, shades of grey, and hints of ocher tones that start appearing as you look more closely. The dressing table and the chair are partly brown, and a vibrant green brushstroke stands out in the upper right corner, as does one yellow glove lying on the table.
Partly because of the painting’s title, at first sight you tend to think that the young woman is embedded with her reflection in the mirror. So, to the inattentive observer she’s a common representation of vanity. Yet, if you look at it more carefully you will realize that she’s actually looking at the viewer from the corner of her eye. This makes the work become more interesting and the idea of vanity more elusive.
Brown’s style, particularly in this work, is reminiscent of American abstract expressionism and Austrian expressionism. When you look at her thick and aggressive brushstrokes, and the blend of figurative painting and abstraction, the artworks of Willem de Kooning immediately come to mind. And the somber tension of Untitled (Vanity) that mesmerizes the viewer is reminiscent of most of Egon Schiele’s paintings and drawings. Looking at Brown’s work, and noticing these similarities, I understood why some art critics have told her that she paints like a man from the 1950’s. The Brit is not surprised by these comments. To her, “lots of artists are sort of like magpies. Where you sort of like steal, or you take or you borrow what you need from somebody, but then obviously, and hopefully, it gets transformed.”
The energy of Brown’s rapid brushstrokes is what gives tension to Untitled (Vanity). These have the effect of breaking up the figurative and making it borderline the abstract. Brown’s works are never fully abstract because she says she needs a body to give the work substance. Otherwise, it would just be “paint showing off”. She has mentioned several times that, for her, the process of creating a painting consists of taking the time to carefully contemplate and reflect on the work, only to be able to apply the paint in swift motions.
Brown doesn’t like painting detailed faces. “Painting a face is so problematic,” she said in an interview with Louisiana Channel in 2015. “Because famously, if there is a face on the painting you automatically go to the face. And then the face seems to hold the meaning to the painting or to the narrative. People will assume the face has all the clues, so kind of the face always ends up giving too much personality.”
The profile of the young woman in Untitled (Vanity) with a dark red rose adorning her black hair, is soft. Yet, her reflection on the mirror is blurry, the brushstrokes are thick rather than delicate, and when you look at it carefully you realize that she has no nose, the left eye has no pupil, and her lips are not delineated. So, it is not a distinct feature in her face that which creates the energetic tension that captures the viewer’s attention, but rather the fact that this kind of faceless woman is holding your gaze and staring you back.
With Untitled (Vanity) Brown achieved her goal of creating a painting that changes if the viewer takes the time to meticulously contemplate it, and reflect on what he (or she) is seeing. Those who take no more than 5 seconds to look at it will miss the variety of color, the play of detail and abstraction, and the real object of the woman’s gaze. They would also remain unaware of how Untitled (Vanity) relates to the history of art, and wouldn’t know about the interesting dialogue that Brown establishes with some of her predecessors. All this makes one realize how much the ideal painting depends on the gaze of the ideal observer.
