Art.sy Insight: Glenn Brown masterfully appropriates the masters

Turner Prize nominee Glenn Brown carefully yet playfully appropriates works by artists both living and long dead. His Wild Horses, for example, is styled after Jean Baptiste-Greuze’s Innocence (ca. 1790), while Death Disco takes a Rembrandt portrait as its starting point. Brown’s meticulously beautiful compositions have generated frequent controversy; he was even sued for copyright infringement by science-fiction illustrator Anthony Roberts over his painting The Loves of Shepherds (2000). “I love the notion of appropriation, and the fact that we can’t escape appropriation,” Brown rebutted. “All of the knowledge of all of the art we’ve ever seen is with us when we paint, or when I paint.”