Exhibit of the week
Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, through Dec. 3
“The ideal way to approach Cecily Brown’s impressive retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum may be in blessed ignorance of her past,” said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. Forget, if you can, that Brown’s paintings sell for seven figures. Or that the London native has been “buffeted by hype and counterhype” since her 20s, when the combination of an intriguing biography, a boldly physical painting style, and her blurred depictions of naked entangled figures turned her into the New York City newcomer everyone wanted to talk about. For a while, “a toxic mixture of breathlessness, dismissiveness, sexism, and snobbery made it difficult to see her work as it really was.” Fortunately, “Brown has outlasted the condescension,” and the 20 or so paintings that now hang adjacent to the Met’s many older treasures “project confidence that they belong under the same roof as all those august artifacts.”
“Brown is prolific and, like most prolific artists, uneven,” said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. The exhibition attempts to downplay the sensuousness of Brown’s early work by focusing on, as the brochure will tell you, “the intertwined themes of mirroring, still life, memento mori, and vanitas.” But the result is a show whose drawings and paintings are loaded with skulls and mirrors, which does Brown no favors. She deserves credit for being among the first to build on abstract expressionism’s legacy after decades in which artists felt compelled to instead knock it down, and she has produced some strong work. Her riff on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1559 painting Carnival and Lent, for example, combines “an over-brimming density and a compositional coherence” that makes it the best painting here. Elsewhere, her interest in borrowing from and blending the imagery of both the Old Masters and modernists such as Willem de Kooning feels merely derivative.
It has taken me years to come around on Cecily Brown, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. In 2000, I panned a show of hers at a major Soho gallery. Her paintings “struck me as pointlessly messy, gratuitously provocative, amateurish in their mixes of abstraction and representation—and made to sell.” Unexpectedly, though, “my review nagged at me,” because I realized that I may have lacked the patience to appreciate what she was doing. As subsequent shows revealed, “her masses of brushwork harbor small images, some intentional, some in the eye of the beholder,” that she expects a viewer to slow down long enough to see. “The work in the Met show is beautiful, and became more so on each of my three visits.” All I had to do was learn to see more deeply.