Cecily Brown, Untitled (Young Spartans), 2015. Modern & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Afternoon Session.
Spend some time with a work by Sahara Longe, and you’ll quickly discover her reverence for the classical painting tradition that the British-Sierra Leonean artist carefully studied at the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence. Likewise, an extended viewing of any work by British artist Cecily Brown uncovers references to goliaths of Western painting that lurk beneath surfaces in a continual flux between abstraction and figuration. In each case, these artists’ works are decidedly contemporary, but we can immediately sense they have a profound personal understanding of the painters who came before them.
It should then come as no surprise that both Longe and Brown are drawn to the same defining work by Edgar Degas, seen in two works on offer in our upcoming Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale in New York. But it is enlightening that Degas’ 1860 work Young Spartans Exercising, which illustrates a passage described in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, could resonate so strongly with two women artists working today. In it, Degas clearly deliminates the composition’s foreground to showcase how Spartan girls were encouraged to challenge boys during exercise. In the background, we see the young subjects’ mothers assembled with Lycurgus himself and the cityscape of Sparta in the distance.
Edgar Degas, Young Spartans Exercising, 1860, National Gallery, London. Image: Bridgeman Images.
This early work was personally important to Degas, and he kept it in his studio throughout his life. He returned to the painting over time, reworking the poses and expressions of the young figures to modernize their demeanors. In a sense, this work places a push toward modernity in the foreground and a look to the past in the background. From our cultural vantage point today, it suggests generational shifts and implies that each new generation must undertake its own negotiations of power. This notion itself encapsulates much of what defines the work of Cecily Brown and Sahara Longe, two artists who carefully glance at the past while defining the future.
Sahara Longe, Loneliness, 2022. Modern & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Afternoon Session.
First presented at Sahara Longe’s 2022 solo exhibition In The Garden at Deli Gallery in New York, Loneliness is one of several works that was born from Longe’s absorption of Degas’ Young Spartans Exercising. In Loneliness, the artist draws on her classical training, using paints infused with tree sap and linseed oil that were thickened by sunlight. Yet, she breaks with the more classical elements of her earlier paintings and instead applies these techniques to a flattened pictorial style that utilizes rich colors. The figures here echo the Degas in how their limbs join each other, the directions of their glances, and the expectant stance of the figure at right. Crucially, the figure at right not only demonstrates Longe’s characteristic method of depicting Black figures in historical scenes from which they were previously omitted, but she also nearly exactly matches the posture of a girl seen in the Degas.
Left: Edgar Degas, Young Spartans Exercising (detail), 1860. Right: Sahara Longe, Loneliness (detail), 2022. Modern & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Afternoon Session.
Similarly, in Untitled (Young Spartans), Cecily Brown references the Degas as a starting point in a painting that continues her adored exploration of the tensions between motion and stasis, figuration and abstraction, illustration and sensory experience. The Degas proves to be fruitful ground for her, considering the overt eroticism of her early works and her fascination with the art historical tradition of the nude ensemble.
Cecily Brown, Untitled (Young Spartans), 2015. Modern & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Afternoon Session.
Speaking about Degas’ work in a video filmed by London’s National Gallery, Brown highlights the contradictions seen in the work, discussing the mix of playful sparring and flirtation that emerges among prolonged viewing of the young figures’ expressions. She points out the overtly affected arrogance of the boys in the scene but highlights the ways in which they are powerless, remarking that “they’re mocking, but you feel that they’re actually intimidated in that way that boys are with girls at that age.” Indeed, with a careful look at Brown’s Untitled (Young Spartans), key figures from the Degas emerge. But in Brown’s hand, the tension between them is mixed into a swirl of abstracted striations that expand the mystery of Degas’ work, with the figure of a girl here appearing slightly closer to us than the boys.
Left and Center: Edgar Degas, Young Spartans Exercising (details), 1860. Right: Cecily Brown, Untitled (Young Spartans) (detail), 2015. Modern & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Afternoon Session.
Brown’s work alludes to the sensation of fleeting innocence felt during Degas’ figures’ transitory age. She approaches the tensions of the Degas painting head-on, leaving us with an image that invites the joys of prolonged inspection. As she has tellingly said of her own work, “The more you look, the more you get.” Indeed, this idea finds resonance not only in her work but also in Longe’s, Degas’, Plutarch’s — and in the very nature of being an art lover.
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