Cecily Brown at the Metropolitan Museum review — guts, gore and the passage of time

The ideal way to approach Cecily Brown’s impressive retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum may be in blessed ignorance of her past. That way, you can come fresh to the melancholy meditations of a mature artist preoccupied with the passage of time. You can pause in the hazy territory the British painter stakes out between abstraction and figuration, where objects and people simultaneously appear and vanish into lush flurries of brushstrokes. You can savour her fusion of pleasure and ghoulishness.

But such innocence can be hard to come by. Brown became an artistic celebrity before she turned 30, and she’s been buffeted ever since by hype and counter-hype, a toxic mixture of breathlessness, dismissiveness, sexism and snobbery that, for a while, made it difficult to see her work as it really was. She was young! She was too young (with “a lot to learn”, one writer admonished). The market loved her; critics complained that it loved her too much. Magazine photographers flocked to her, and sanctimonious types carped that she was exploiting her looks. She gloried in busy, vibrant surfaces and was accordingly dismissed as “bland”, “glitzy”, “vacuous” and “turgid”. Sages hated it that she sometimes signed with her first name alone. (“Is she in grade school?” one writer sneered.)

Now 54, Brown has outlasted the condescension. The paintings that hang in the Met’s galleries project confidence that they belong under the same roof as all those august artefacts. Curator Ian Alteveer has cut a narrow path through a broad career, tracing intertwined motifs of mortality, memory, fleetingness and regret. Even at their most abstract, her fiercely carnal canvases conjure flesh, fur, guts and gore. She’s been criticised for prurience, among other sins, but this show makes it easy to see that Brown lingers on flesh precisely because it’s shadowed by death. Paint preserves such pleasures and also reminds us that they disappear.

Her work teems with art-historical references, though her closest affinity is with Willem de Kooning — she emulates the way he dances between riotous passages of pure pigment and the specificity of vile bodies. In a 2020 interview with the FT, she cited his aphorism: “I think I’m painting a picture of two women, but it may turn out to be a landscape.” Like him, she’s sufficiently in control to relinquish control when she chooses and let her hand take her in unexpected directions.

Alteveer traces the corruption and decay that percolate through tumultuous surfaces, where rapture coexists with the symbolic language of vanitas. In “The Only Game in Town”, an early piece from 1998, a young woman gazes into a mirror. On our side of the glass, we glimpse only a gleam of white shoulder and a hint of profile. The eye focuses on the reflection of a ghastly hag with mottled flesh, cadaverous teeth and a tentacle-like tongue. Is this Brown’s secret portrait in the attic?

In later iterations of the same theme, like “Untitled (Vanity)” from 2005, the same woman finds a more palatable version of herself in the mirror. But take a step back and the two female heads reassemble into gaping eye sockets in an enormous skull. In another take on the same visual trick, the faces of two frilly children clutching a small dog morph into a leering death’s head.

Brown recycles both the schema and the title of a fin-de-siècle postcard in which the phrase “Aujourd’hui rose, demain . . .” (“Pink today, tomorrow . . .”) scrolls across a vast bony forehead. The double image is a Surrealist standby, your regular reminder that today’s blushing youth becomes tomorrow’s turf. Brown surely absorbed some of her taste for the morbid trompe l’oeil from Salvador Dalí, who liked to superimpose dewy female forms on ominous skulls.

The mirror has a recurring role in depictions of vanitas and in Brown’s career. She invokes classics of self-admiration, such as Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus”, where the archetype of female beauty reclines with her derrière to the viewer, entranced by her own reflection — or possibly fussing over tiny imperfections. In Brown’s 2020 “Selfie”, composed during the early months of Covid-imposed isolation, the artist lolls, Venus-like, in her studio, confronting the reflection of her own mind: walls crammed with sketches, the air quivering with colour, each rectangle a window into her life. There’s an uneasy quality to her self-gaze, as if she feared what she might find.

In recent years, she’s turned to still-lifes, a slightly more detached form of memento mori. “Nature Morte” (2020) and “Lobsters, Oysters, Cherries and Pearls” (2020) ooze sanguinary reds, lingering on the contortions of dead animals and the drippings from groaning tables. “BFF” (2006-15) could just as well be titled “BEEF”, considering its debt to Soutine, the master of the butchered carcass. De Kooning had admired the way he obscured subjects beneath palpable layers of pigment, and for Brown the relationship is even more intense. Soutine’s volatile brushwork, irregular perspective and tragic overtones haunt her imagination, yielding a marriage of morbidity and passion.

Each of her paintings can sometimes feel like a page from an i-SPY book. To decode it, you hunt for recognisable objects — a chair or a clock, say, or the oversized black cat that peeks out from under the table in “Lobsters, Oysters, Cherries and Pearls”. But Brown is a virtuoso of misdirection, distracting the eye with the slash and pulse of her brush, seducing with dabs of blue and green that hint at a landscape but might also be a corner of upholstery or just an exhalation.

From the beginning, she kept frustrating attempts to figure her out, to pin down what she was getting at. At the Met, over-explanatory text panels short-circuit the process of detection, identifying components before the viewer has had a chance to enjoy the ambiguities. If you scan her large canvases in the hope of labelling each fidget and blot, you may find you’re being teased: the search is the point. It’s a treasure hunt with no definite prize, only an infinity of discoveries.

Brown courts indeterminacy because that’s what life is made of. The past shape-shifts even as we try to hold on to it, the future dissipates into a mist of confusion, and Brown keeps vigorously stirring all that mystery and drift.

To December 3, metmuseum.org

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