Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid

venue: The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 913

Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid Exhibition Dates: April 4–December 3, 2023

In spring 2023, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, the first full-breadth museum survey in New York of this internationally acclaimed artist. On view from April 4 to December 3, 2023, the exhibition will highlight the significant contributions of this important New York–based painter from across her 25-year career and in the city she has called home for three decades. The tightly themed show unites some 50 paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes—many never before seen in New York and several recently completed—to focus on Brown’s enduring and intertwining themes of still life, memento mori, mirroring, and vanitas. 

The exhibition is made possible by The Modern Circle and Agnes Gund.

Additional support is provided by Neuberger Berman Private Wealth, the Jeffrey and Leslie Fischer Family Foundation, and Barbara and John Vogelstein.

Born in London in 1969, Brown graduated from the Slade School of Art in 1993 and moved to New York the following year. The artist soon established a singular reputation for transfixing viewers with pictures filled with sumptuous color, bravura brushwork, and complex narratives related to some of Western art history’s grandest and age-old themes. Alongside a handful of other women artists who boldly refashioned the male-dominated discourse around painting, Brown also revived the medium for a new generation at a moment when many critics were questioning its import and relevance as a means for art making to begin with.

The exhibition follows this trajectory along two distinct but interlocking themes. The first, vanity and vanitas, emerged as early as 1997 in her painting The Only Game in Town, which depicts the figure of a woman gazing at herself at a dressing table. Brown reprised this motif in the mid- and late 2000s with a series of works that include Untitled (Vanity) (2005) and the leftmost panel of her triptych in The Met collection, Fair of Face, Full of Woe (2008). Alongside several related paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and prints that will also be on display, these works are based on some of the artist’s favorite popular images from the turn of the last century, including American illustrator Charles Allan Gilbert’s 1892 double-image drawing All Is Vanity, in which the woman and her reflection merge to create the ghostly image of a skull. This is the memento mori that reminds the viewer that death is ever present and represents a counterpart to the subject’s vain preoccupation with her own image. For Brown, the double game that Gilbert’s visual pun describes also elaborates her most fundamental belief that painting and drawing can perform multiple duties simultaneously: be both representational and abstract, moralizing and sensuous, and referential and consistently innovative at the same time.

The second, related theme is that of the still life. The show includes works that represent cluttered interiors, rollicking picnic scenes, and sumptuous tabletops, all of which draw on Brown’s fascination with the potential for painting and drawing to display decadent plenitude with a heaping dose of mortality (and morality). Recent paintings such as Nature Morte and Lobsters, Oysters, Cherries and Pearls (both 2020) draw on the heavily abundant still lifes by Dutch and Flemish artists such as Frans Snyders. A number of earlier works, such as Hangover Square and Untitled (Chambre) (both 2005), center exquisitely cluttered interiors as spaces for discovery. And landmark paintings such as Memento Mori I (2006¬–8) revisit a childhood delight and terror in Shockheaded Peter’s Fidgety Phil, the boy who cannot sit still. Phil rocks in his dining chair until he loses balance, pulling the white tablecloth and everything on it down with him—a delirious fall that is the perfect subject for a number of Brown’s most tumultuous and extraordinary pictures.

Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid is organized by Ian Alteveer, Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in The Met’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, in close collaboration with the artist.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a scholarly publication distributed by Yale University Press. With a new conversation with the artist by Adam Eaker, Associate Curator of European Paintings at The Met, and an essay by Alteveer, the catalogue aims to provide an entirely new and deeply thoughtful context for Brown. 

The catalogue is made possible by The Modern Circle.

Additional support is provided by the Forman Family Foundation, Liza Mauer and Andrew Sheiner, Paula Cooper Gallery, and Thomas Dane Gallery.