Encouraging people to stare made Cecily Brown a star

In the 1990s, Cecily Brown was a struggling young New York artist waiting tables to make ends meet. By the year 2000 she was a star, and her voluptuous, semi-abstract, semi-pornographic paintings were the talk of the town. She was showing at Gagosian Gallery , she was collected by Elton John and Michael Ovitz, she was a guest on ``The Charlie Rose Show," and she appeared in a glossy, double-page photo spread in Vanity Fair magazine for an article about the moment's hottest young painters. Wearing paint-spattered jeans and a T-shirt with a big dollar sign printed on it, she reclined in a languorously sexy pose on her messy studio floor.

Now a selection of her paintings dating from 1997 to the present is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts.

The story of Brown's rise to fame is also a story about art and painting at the end of the 20th century, and it's about a boom in the art market that incited speculative fevers among collectors and turned promising young artists into celebrities and sought-after commodities.

Born in London in 1969, Brown is the product of an affair between the writer Shena Mackay -- whose 1996 novel ``The Orchard on Fire" was short-listed for the Booker Prize -- and David Sylvester , the eminent art critic who died in 2001. As a teenager, Brown made the museum and gallery rounds with Sylvester, whom she knew only as a friend of her mother's until her parents told her the truth when she was 21.

From 1989 to 1993 Brown attended the Slade School of Art in London, where painting was not in vogue. In an era under the influence of such multimedia provocateurs as Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Tracey Emin , painting did not seem capable of having the sensational impact that installations and videos could exert.

``In art school there was a feeling that you were a loser if you were a painter. I always felt like a nerd," Brown recalled last week while checking in on the installation of her exhibition at the MFA. In person, she is not a dazzling talker as high-profile artists often can be; rather, she is thoughtful, open, and remarkably unassuming.

After graduating from Slade, Brown moved to New York, where she had studied for half a year as an exchange student and which had, she felt, ``a less dogmatic art world than London." Her timing could not have been better. In the '90s in New York, painting was beginning to enjoy a renewed appreciation because of the efforts of such artists as John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, and Elizabeth Peyton.

In some ways their painting was traditional and even bordered on illustration. But it could be brashly impolite, too. The works of Currin and Yuskavage in particular featured bizarre erotic imagery. So the funky, cartoonish paintings of rabbits in X-rated scenarios that Brown showed in her first New York solo exhibition in 1997 fit right in.

Critics who favored less market-friendly kinds of art decried the newly fashionable painters of the ' 90s as opportunists. Others embraced their hedonistic rebellion against Puritanism in the art world and in American society.

Brown cannily walked the line between bad girl and serious painter. Soon after her exhibition of the rabbit paintings she turned to the human figure and began creating the mix of Expressionistic painting and sexually graphic imagery that would make her famous.

Though her images could be naughty, Brown says that her main purpose has never been to shock or titillate but to get people to look harder and closer at her paintings. Often it does take some time to make out images of erogenous body parts and couples making love that are folded into churning fields of generously painterly abstraction. But, says Brown, she did not deliberately obscure her imagery to produce a kind of Where's Waldo? game, which is how some critics interpreted her project.

``The image does come and go as I'm working," she says, ``but I'm not trying to hide things." What she's after is ``not a fixed image but a psychological space. I don't want everything to be explained or named or fixed. I like it to be in flux."

By making pictures that are erotically charged but resistant to the hurried viewer's quick scan, Brown hoped ``to make people stop and look as long as possible. People have lost the habit of standing still in front of a work of art. I didn't want them to feel they'd gotten it too quickly. I always wanted it to be more than one thing, to be multilayered. It could be funny and very serious at the same time."

For Cheryl Brutvan , the MFA's curator of contemporary art, Brown's sensuously tactile imagery becomes ``a metaphor for painting itself." Brutvan adds, ``She is an artist who is consistently pushing the medium at a very high level. She's a great painter."

Now 37, Brown works 10 to 15 hours a day in a 20th Street studio with a view of Manhattan's Flatiron Building. Reflecting back on the trajectory of her career, she notes that contrary to public perceptions, she was not really an overnight sensation.

``I waited tables for my first five years in New York," she says. ``There were days when I had to decide whether to buy a bagel or a pack of cigarettes. The big surprise for me was that I could even get my work exhibited. I was resigned to thinking that I wasn't an artist of my own time." About the MFA exhibition, she says, ``I'm still shocked that I'm doing a show in such a grand place."

As for the future, she foresees no major shifts on the horizon: ``I love my life at the moment. The less it changes the better."

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.