How Cecily Brown breathed life back into painting for a new generation

When Cecily Brown graduated from London’s Slade Faculty of Effective Artwork in 1993, the powers that be within the artwork world had pronounced portray a useless medium. Between the recognition of the Younger British Artists and the parallel ascendance of market-approved conceptual set up, oil on canvas felt old style at finest, stale at worst. This confluence of things made Brown’s runaway success notable, however by no means unlikely—her fragmentary figural abstractions reinvigorated portray for a brand new technology and set her aside as a really unique storyteller throughout genres. Her singular, sanguine eye is on distinguished show in Demise and the Maid at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Artwork. The present marks the primary time since Lucian Freud’s The Self Uncovered three many years in the past that the establishment has devoted a profession survey to a dwelling British artist.

Demise and the Maid options 50 work, drawings and sketches, its title referencing a Schubert string quartet, Demise and the Maiden, by which a terror-stricken younger girl begs demise to go her over. The works on view fan forth from a winking, psychologically charged reverence for European painterly tropes like memento mori, vanitas (nonetheless lifes that symbolise mortality) and the romanticisation of female ache.

Brown drew inspiration for lots of the works featured from Victorian illustrator Charles Allan Gilbert’s 1892 double-image drawing All is Vainness, which depicts a wonderful younger girl gazing into her mirror and seeing a ghoulish cranium staring again. This haunting visible informs compositions just like the furiously expressionistic triptych Honest of Face, Stuffed with Woe (2008) and the inky Untitled (Vainness) from 2005, the place disembodied skulls and limbs unravel and coagulate in eerie, romantic flurries of paint. Newer work, like Nature Morte and Lobsters, Oysters, Cherries and Pearls (each 2020), re-imagine the decadent nonetheless lifes of Flemish artist Frans Snyders as charged websites of texture and flux.

“It’s deeply about precedent and messing with precedent, but in addition delighting in precedent,” says Ian Alteveer, an affiliate curator in Met’s division of recent and up to date artwork who collaborated carefully with Brown on the exhibition. “That’s additionally in line with Cecily’s feeling that portray can do multiple factor without delay. To separate the 2 appears inauthentic.”

As a younger feminine painter thrust into the highlight, Brown’s title grew to become synonymous with hyper-sensual and sexualised compositions, a characterisation that caught, regardless of the big range of themes and imagery in her work. Alteveer made a aware determination to underscore different features of Brown’s work in Demise and the Maid.

“The eroticism of the work has typically been overstressed,” he says. “It’s usually additionally what of us can deal with first with out permitting themselves to dig in additional. And so for me it was a deliberate selection to indicate some actually figurative stuff—there’s nonetheless numerous erotics within the exhibition, and I feel that that rigidity continues to be held in there.”

At occasions within the exhibition, Alteveer’s curation looks like a love letter to portray itself that posits Brown as a steward of bracing magnificence and political ennui. “There are such a lot of methods into the present, however I used to be eager about the methods by which her profession has been assessed so far, each by way of this moralising about success, but in addition by way of her being an artist who occurs to be a girl,” he says. “There’s a highly effective feminism within the observe, too. It got here collectively holistically, organically and likewise urgently.”

• Cecily Brown: Demise and the Maid, Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, till 3 December