Join Dr. Caroline Knighton to discover the space between sensation and gesture in this astonishing work by
Cecily Brown.

“My ideal is to have the tension and intensity of an aggressively sexual image without actually having to describe it.”
—Cecily Brown

Immediately arresting in its scale, subject, and stylistic virtuosity, Skulldiver II is a breath-taking 2006 work by acclaimed British artist Cecily Brown. With every corner of the surface activated by writhing, protean brushstrokes, the work’s climactic energy is palpable - an erotic charge passing through the two figures at the centre and electrifying the entire composition. Richly painted in thick, gestural marks of variegated fleshy tones, the present work is one of a suite of four Skulldiver paintings focused on the same explicit theme, and was included in Brown’s 2008 exhibition with Gagosian in New York alongside two other works from the series, one of which is now held in the permanent collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

 

 

Abandoning themselves to pleasure, the figures at the centre of these paintings appear to dissolve into one another, as overcome by Brown’s sensuous application of paint as by their own carnal desires. Borrowing from pornographic and painterly sources alike, Skulldiver II bluntly emphasises the centrality of touch and sensation in Brown’s practice, the monumental canvas showcasing the close conceptual connections between oil paint and corporeality that have interested the artist throughout her career.

 

Shifting restlessly between figuration and abstraction, Brown’s paintings are – as feminist art historian Linda Nochlin has noted - intensely embodied, making close and careful reference ‘to the act of painting, painting as process’ within which she positions the sex act itself as ‘both an analogy and a specific referent.’ⁱ Drawing out the latent sensuality of oil paint and its proximity to bodily textures, Brown seems to suggest that sex has as much to say about painting as painting might have to say about sex.

 

Art and the Erotic

 

Looking back to overt eroticism of her early Bunny Paintings and the ribald orgies and contorted bodies that shift in and out of focus in works such as Trouble in Paradise, Skulldiver II also showcases the artist’s promiscuous blending of art historical sources, bringing to mind a dizzyingly expansive net of references that rove from the voluptuous fleshiness of Titian’s nudes to the gestural vitality of Willem de Kooning’s mark-making via Chaïm Soutine’s ‘tornado like landscapes, glutinous paint, and unembellished brushstrokes.’ⁱⁱ

 

 

 

Buried amongst the rich, fleshy palette of flushed peach tones, chalky whites, and streaks of vermillion, Brown has also introduced verdant shocks of green, evoking tangled undergrowth and introducing a more complex sense of place into her painterly narratives. Recalling an earlier body of work featuring trysting couples in rich, green landscapes, Brown here too evokes the natural world in a contemporary reframing of the fêtes galante, bucolic scenes of pastoral bliss that came to prominence in France in the early decades of the 18^th century. Typically associated with painters such as Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard – who would eventually push the more mannered Rococo elements of their predecessors into more overtly erotic territory – these paintings typically featured playfully amorous groups of fashionably dressed men and women set within cultivated, rolling parkland.

 

Evoking these pictorial traditions, Brown amplifies their latent eroticism, drawing especially on the furtive or illicit quality of these en plein air liaisons. Abandoned to their passions and completely absorbed in each other, the couple at the centre of Skulldiver II seem caught in a stolen moment of uncontrollable desire, the pulsing fluctuations of Brown’s brushwork also generating a visual correlate for the sensations and shattering self-annihilation of la petit mort.

 

Although laying out across her back, her naked body stretched out before us, the female figure retains an air of detached autonomy, her head and face obscured in a flurry of gestural brushstrokes. In this respect, Skulldiver II also represents a bold and uncompromising expression of female erotic desire that finds a literary analogue in the provocative sexual confessions of of Anaïs Nin, Katherine Millett, and Annie Ernaux. Maintaining a careful tension between abstract and more figurative qualities, Brown ensures that the woman’s pleasure remains her own, bringing a distinctly feminine perspective to bear on art’s relationship to the erotic. Indeed here, as is so often the case in Brown’s painting, it is this sense of embodied sensation that brings the work to life, Skulldiver II masterfully employing the ‘distinctly sexual turbulence that brings forth the image, giving it density, definition, before swallowing it right back up again.’ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Executed in the early years of the 21^st century, Brown’s bold and uncompromising take of sexual desire and the fundamentally erotic nature of oil paint has paved the way for a new generation of artists whose work similarly engages with the tactile and embodied qualities of the medium to explore intimacy and physical sensation. In their luminous celebration of touch and human closeness, emerging artist Doron Langberg’s depiction of queer love and longing in particular nods to the raw physicality of Brown’s work and the ‘complex and stimulating meditation on the nature of painting and the place of the human figure within it’ that it proposes.^iv

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• First exhibited in 2008 with Gagosian Gallery in New York, Skulldiver II is a monumental celebration of erotic and painterly pleasure. One of four Skulldiver paintings, a sister work is now held in the permanent collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

• Now based in New York, Cecily Brown was born in the UK and studied at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art. She is an internationally recognised and defining figure of contemporary art, with examples of her work held in some of the most prestigious public collections in the world, including the Tate Collection in London, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk.

• She has been the focus of solo exhibitions around the world, including the significant Where, When, How Often and with Whom held at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark in 2018 and the recent exhibition of new paintings installed in historic Blenheim Palace in 2021. 

 

 

ⁱ Linda Nochlin, ‘Cecily Brown: The Erotics of Touch’, in Cecily Brown (exh. cat), The Des Moines Art Centre, Des Moines, 2006, p. 55.

ⁱⁱ John Yau, ‘How Soutine Showed de Kooning a Way Out’, Hyperallergic, July 24 2021, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Jan Tumlir, ‘The Paintings of Cecily Brown’, in Cecily Brown (exh. cat.), New York, 2003, p. 10.

^iv Linda Nochlin, ‘Cecily Brown: The Erotics of Touch’, in Cecily Brown (exh. cat), Des Moines, 2006, p. 55.