Cecily Brown review, Blenheim Palace: Death comes to call in this prophetic epic

Watch out: a gleeful skeleton on a ghostly steed is galloping through the Long Library at Blenheim Palace. Jauntily waving a bony hand, he hurtles, hell for leather, towards the organ at the far end. Inspired by a 15th-century Sicilian fresco, The Triumph of Death is the British-born, New York-based artist Cecily Brown’s largest painting to date, and the big finale of her assured new solo exhibition at Blenheim. “Big” is the word: at more than 17 x 17 ft, it is so colossal that Brown has never seen its four parts assembled together, because her studio wasn’t large enough to accommodate them all.

What’s more astonishing, though, is that it was painted last year, before the pandemic. (The exhibition should have opened this spring, but was a casualty of lockdown.) If you were looking for a kind of Covid-19 Guernica, announcing a society in turmoil, and reminding us of our vulnerability despite 21st-century medical technology, well, here it is. Sometimes, artists seem to possess prophetic powers.

Brown is the seventh artist selected by Blenheim Art Foundation for its annual exhibition – though, surprisingly, she is the first painter, and, to date, the only Brit. So far, the programme has been hit-and-miss. Last year, Italian prankster Maurizio Cattelan installed a working solid-gold loo, which promptly got nicked (and has not been seen since).

Brown’s show, though, is arguably the finest yet – because, rather than scattering pre-existing artworks among bijou ornaments and bric-a-brac in the state rooms, she has engaged deeply with the palace and its history, creating 24 new paintings, as well as nine drawings and two monotypes, which respond to (and often goad) their setting.

For once, Blenheim’s exhibition of contemporary art feels grown-up, sophisticated – and appropriate. This is worth the train fare.

As subject matter, Brown opts for themes relevant to an aristocratic house, with a few unexpected allusions to Victorian fairy painting thrown in for good measure. Thus, we encounter scenes of hunting and warfare (after all, Blenheim was erected as a monument to the 1st Duke of Marlborough’s victory over the French), rendered in the artist’s characteristically vigorous and turbulent, semi-abstract manner, with swirling, gestural brushstrokes all a-flicker.

Four impressive paintings, high up in the Great Hall, bounce off the 1st Duke’s beautifully faded standard, proud above the palace’s entrance. Brown distorts its various armorial emblems (crosses, lions rampant, a double-headed eagle), so that they appear to drip like molten wax. From afar, these paintings seem ablaze. Maybe Brown wants to put to the torch what Blenheim represents.

Elsewhere, in the Red Drawing Room, she offers a feminist take on Reynolds’s grand 18th-century portrait of the 4th Duke and his family, cheekily omitting the patriarch, but faithfully preserving his female offspring – and a sweet, inquisitive “Blenheim Spaniel” in the corner, craning its fluffy head to observe the scene. This spaniel appears in several of Brown’s paintings – a tongue-in-cheek surrogate for the artist, examining time-honoured ideals of Englishness.

Leaving aside the jaw-dropping peculiarity of The Triumph of Death – a writhing, apocalyptic, dementedly ambitious panorama, in the manner of James Ensor – the best paintings, for my money, focus on the hunt. Brown is no fan of blood sports, and, here, she conveys the brutality of killing wild animals with visceral immediacy. In a surprisingly figurative, freestyle response to a 17th-century work by the Flemish artist Frans Synders, Brown pictures a terrified boar, with a void for an eye, brought down by hounds. My goodness, it’s a thriller, painted swiftly so that we are plunged, pell-mell and gasping, into the chase. Simply looking at it unleashes adrenalin, provokes fear.

In other, related scenes, Brown depicts the carnage of the hunt’s aftermath. Her bucolic greens and browns may represent the English countryside, a la Ivon Hitchens, but within her woodlands, teeming with unnerving, shadowy faerie-faces, splashes of crimson evoke mangled, Bacon-like carcasses. “Et in Arcadia ego,” says Death – and one of Brown’s titles, Dog is Life, distils her vision, red in tooth and claw.

Not everything is a success: a gaudy “statement” rug, replicating a painting, looks fawningly fit for an apartment on Fifth Avenue. A few paintings, meanwhile, feel excessively muzzy. Still, Brown’s engagement with Blenheim – and, by extension, Englishness and class – is exemplary. And it’s hard to resist her delight in her medium’s flurrying, seductive possibilities.

Cecily Brown is at Blenheim Palace until Jan 3. Tickets: phone 020 8065 5395 or blenheimartfoundation.org.uk