Is there such a thing as being too tall to be an artist? Christina Ramberg, the subject of a long-overdue retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stood 6-foot-1 and considered her height a liability. She grew up in the Eisenhower era, when the average American woman was 5-foot-4 and aspired to have an hourglass figure, and she sewed her own clothes, since standard sizes didn’t fit. As if wanting to somehow shrink herself, she painted images of the female body constrained by fabric — corseted, cinched, girdled and even bound.
By a nice coincidence, Cecily Brown, a generation younger than Ramberg and the subject of a retrospective at the nearby Barnes Foundation, is also a devotee of the human figure — but unbound. If Ramberg’s imagery evokes a period when women were tethered to traditional roles and constricting fashions, Brown’s world is just the opposite: untethered and uninhibited.
Brown is known for exuberant semi-abstractions, in which gleaming nudes in shifting gradations of salmon pink turn up in French forests and other far-flung places. The two artists could not be more different, but their work teems with eros, emotion and painterly audacity, and it has turned Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the site of both museums, into a temporary capital of the much-heralded female gaze.
Ramberg, who died in 1995 and remains underknown, was officially a Chicago Imagist, one of a dozen or so figurative artists who defined their work in opposition to New York, the country’s No. 1 painting town. Spurning abstraction, the Chicago Imagists worked on the margins of cartooning and surrealism. They pursued the rough, often raunchy edges of American culture with a zealousness that made the art of both coasts seem relatively polite.
Ramberg’s work is easy to recognize, even from the next room. She painted cropped, centered, fastidiously crafted images that isolated a female hand or a vintage hairdo against a blank ground, as if turning them into heraldic emblems. And she can fairly be called a connoisseur of undergarments. With nearly devotional detail, she captured the texture of different fabrics, contrasting the smooth, blue-black sheen of satin bands with the intricate patterns embedded in lace. Her colors, compared to the screaming hues of other Imagists, tend to be soft and muted, with an emphasis on peachy beiges and grayed lavenders reminiscent of women’s slips.
Her work can put you in mind of Roy Lichtenstein, with his nostalgic subjects and thick cartoon outlines. He and Ramberg both made memorable paintings of a female hand raised to display its slender white fingers and red-painted nails.
A mesmerizing series by Ramberg of three small paintings from 1971, “(Untitled) Hand,” show a sinuous, near-boneless hand binding itself in a length of cloth that mutates into a glove. In the place of Lichtenstein’s Pop jokiness, her work feels psychological and interior. Ramberg was adept at turning the visual clichés of cartooning into an entirely personal language, and her influence can be felt in the work of painters as different as Elizabeth Murray, Amy Sillman and Julie Curtiss, all of whom spent some time in Chicago.
Born in 1946 in Ft. Campbell, Ky., Ramberg moved frequently. Her father was a high-ranking officer in the U.S. Army, and her mother was a piano teacher. She believed that her father (her first critic) viewed her as “awkward and unattractive,” as she later wrote, and she attributed her negative self-image to him.
After her family settled in the Chicago area, she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She later joined the faculty and served as head of the painting department. She married a fellow artist and Chicago Imagist, Phil Hanson. They separated in 1980, but Hanson returned to care for her in 1989, when she was diagnosed with early-onset dementia. She died six years later, at age 49.
One of the fascinations of her short career is her devotion to the same limited repertory of subjects. “Hair” (1968), her undergraduate thesis show, consists of a series of 16 small, square, olive-green panels that each depict the back of a stylish woman’s head, with hairdos that are variously bobbed, plaited, or curled, and patted by a manicured hand. Whose head is this? Impossible to know, but I had a shivery vision of the young Ramberg watching the back of her mother’s head as she played the piano, pressed into silence in that era when children were seen and not heard.
In the 1970s, Ramberg’s paintings shed their retro flavor and began courting figurative grotesqueries. The exhibition culminates in a room ringed with large-scale torso paintings, each about four feet tall and dominated by an action figure with broad shoulders, a small waist, and signs of brokenness. “Troubled Sleeve” feels like a bad dream, with its four pickle-shaped organs sprouting from beneath a woman’s tightly wound belts and tourniquets, defeating her efforts to control her body.¶
Philadelphia is the only East Coast stop for Ramberg’s show, which was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has never been properly assessed by a New York museum, perhaps as a result of the geographic bias that has often afflicted American artists working outside of New York. The good news is that the situation is likely to improve in September when the Whitney Museum will feature Ramberg and other Chicago Imagists in “Sixties Surreal,” a rethinking of more than 100 artists whose work was initially eclipsed by the shiny surfaces of Pop art.
Cecily Brown’s Best Paintings Take Time to See
The subject of a handsome and high-spirited show at the Barnes Foundation, Cecily Brown is in no danger of being forgotten. Now 56, the British-born painter is one of the signal figures on the New York scene, having survived the contretemps of early fame and established herself as an artist of irrefutable seriousness.
In 2023, she was accorded an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Death and the Maid,” a thematically focused show of works lamenting the brevity of life; it was shoehorned into a too-small space. The Barnes retrospective, by contrast, which was organized with the Dallas Museum of Art, is not large — it comprises just 30 paintings and related drawings — but spans her career and feels expansive. It’s interesting to see her once-maligned early paintings, such as “Untitled” (1996), whose circle of humping rabbits, in hues of gold and blue, today could pass for a relatively wholesome campfire scene.
It makes sense that museums appreciate Brown, because she appreciates museums and centuries-old European masterpieces. She is hardly the only artist to raid art history as well as pop culture for inspiration — one of the defining activities of postmodernism — but she does so with an intelligence and ardor that are entirely her own. She isn’t interested in recycling the past to bemoan the exhausted present. Instead, she is a kind of artist-explorer, feeling her way, as if eyes could walk, into long-ago scenes by Degas or Goya, into Fragonard’s garden scenes or shipwrecks by Delacroix or robust hunting scenes by the lesser-known Flemish painter Frans Snyders.
In the process, she recycles figuration as abstraction, collapsing the timeline of art history into a one-of-a-kind expressionistic lexicon of whippy lines and whorls of curling brushstrokes. One of her gifts, as we see in works ranging from the riotous, red-smeared surface of her 25-foot-long hunting epic “The Splendid Table,” to a riveting, small-scale bedroom scene, titled “Body (After Sickert),” is the way Brown dramatizes the act of looking at art, the process by which we — the viewer, standing before an unfamiliar painting — take it apart with our eyes and then reassemble it.
Her best paintings and drawings take time to see, and the Barnes show would have benefited from benches. “Selfie” (2020), one of the standouts, deepens the longer you look. The painting takes us into a cluttered, high-ceilinged room where a nude figure rendered as a wave of pink flesh reclines on an iron bedstead. Or are there two nudes — a woman on her back and a bearded man face down beside her, lost in his own thoughts? Around them, paintings are hung salon style, covering every inch of wall space. The furniture, which includes a tall grandfather clock, suggests that the room is a 19th-century European studio, or a picture gallery that looks a little chaotic. The dozens of picture frames hanging on the wall form a jumble of rectangles that emit a quivering energy, as if shaken by an earthquake.
Looking at “Selfie” you may feel it echoes your own situation amid the Barnes, its walls crowded from floor to ceiling with masterpieces by Cézanne, Matisse and Renoir. There are so many paintings in the world, more than we can ever see, but as Brown’s work exhorts us, take it one picture at a time, and look as searchingly as you can.
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective.
Through June 1, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, philamuseum.org.
Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations
Through May 25, the Barnes Foundation, 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, barnesfoundation.org.
Deborah Solomon is an art critic and biographer who is currently writing a biography of Jasper Johns.
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