While hanging Cecily Brown’s new exhibition, the curators at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia noticed that Brown, the British-born, New York City–based painter, would suddenly slip away, stepping out of the special exhibition space where her show was being installed and into the museum’s storied rooms of paintings.
In an interview a few days before the opening of her new show, entitled “Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations,” Brown herself remembers her forays into the galleries with a hint of incredulousness, as if she had maybe gotten away with something. “On our breaks we’d get to go into the collection!” she says.
She’d see Cézanne’s sumptuously nonplussed bathers at rest or Chaïm Soutine’s gargoyle-ish landscapes and all those Picasso ink drawings—a kaleidoscope of iconic works. “It’s this absolutely extraordinary experience,” Brown explains, “where you’ve just got all these paintings in your mind’s eye.” These forays made her excited for the gallery-to-gallery correspondences that could happen when a visitor sees the Barnes collection then hers, or the other way around. “I’m just thrilled by the idea that people would come in and see these contemporary paintings that riff off and sample,” she says...