The legend of the British-born painter Cecily Brown has been carved into the lore of contemporary art. After three decades of steady validation this former renegade of the London art scene has allowed herself to come full circle in two simultaneous exhibitions. A commission from Blenheim Palace, returns her to England-- And an exhibition of “Bedroom Paintings” at Paula Cooper Gallery returns her to intimacy. A new monograph exploring her formation and oeuvre, out this month from Phaidon completes the picture.

Unlike Pablo Picasso or Lucian Freud, who depended on a ready succession of live muses, the inspirations for Brown’s performative practice have been works by long-dead artists and contemporary iconography. Her fairy godfathers have included Francis Bacon, Goya, Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Delacroix, and Philip Guston.

At Blenheim, the good girl gone bad, provoking the art world with her early erotic and sexually violent imagery which first brought her to the attention of Deitch and Larry Gagosian, seems far away. Here her inspirations include the 16th-century Flemish painter Frans Snyders, Richard Dadd, and the 18th-century Sir Joshua Reynolds. In the “Bedroom Paintings” at Cooper, Brown revisits the edgy intimacy of bodies after many years away from this signature subject.

Brown resists categorization between figuration and abstraction and the new paintings walk the tightrope. She is fiercely dedicated to experimentation. “You have to be able to risk losing it,” she has said. Still, as Francine Prose suggests in her essay for the new Phaidon monograph on her, whereas we might once have invoked Bosch or Brueghel when we studied Cecily Brown, “now we think of a Cecily Brown painting when we look at the Bosch or Brueghel.” A great tribute to an artist who once thought she was doing everything wrong.