The details here have taken on a hallucinatory hyper-precision, leaping out with exaggerated focus, anticipating the psychedelic swirls of Brown’s paintings after Fragonard or Rembrandt such as in Death Disco, 2004, and Joseph Beuys, 2001, respectively. Adding exquisite texture to the glass-like surface, Brown replaces the classical sfumato with painstakingly executed whirls of paint. In Led Zeppelin, the body itself is elongated, illuminated from within, glowing against the shorn silk backdrop. Just as the virtuous woman has been debased, Brown carries out his own unique process of artistic plunder, taking the original to its furthest point of association. Recast for a contemporary audience, the violation of Lucretia functions as an allegory for Brown’s own artistic appropriations. Traditionally a metaphor for chastity, Lucretia’s upturned eyes reflect moral purity, her exposed breasts evidence of the violence she experienced. Lifted from the historical legends of early Rome, the rape of Lucretia was a popular secular subject in seventeenth-century Italian painting. Cast against the title of the most celebrated rock band in history who created gothic anthems for the 1970s, Brown takes Francesco del Cairo’s painting Lucretia from 1635 as his point of departure. The life-size scale of the portrait envelopes the viewer with such power and detail that her reality becomes almost plausible, as if she might suddenly emerge from the painting. Through delicate strokes of swirling paint, her porcelain features appear almost alive. 17).Ī remarkable large-scale portrait, Glenn Brown’s Led Zeppelin, 2005, presents a beautiful woman taken from the canon of art history.
cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 2004, p. Gingeras, ‘Guilty: The Work of Glenn Brown’, Glenn Brown, exh. It is all that there is left of real love, so I paint that’ (G. The paint is the crusty residue left after the relationship between the artist and his model is over. Their flesh has become paint so I paint paint. 'The naked flesh of the original model may be long dead, but that just aids the imagination Fragonard, Auerbach and Rembrandt painted the living. Kent, Shark-Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s, London 1994, p. 'I’m attracted to the Gothic notion of a figure trapped somewhere between the psyche of the model, the artist, the photographer, the printing process and me’ (G.
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