Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid

Alteveer, Ian, with a contribution by Adam Eaker (2023)

This title is in print.

Publication Details

Description

Cecily Brown (b. 1969) transfixes viewers with sumptuous color, bravura brushwork, and complex narratives that relate to some of European painting’s grandest and most time-honored themes, including still life motifs and meditations on mortality through vanitas This intimate survey of the acclaimed British painter reexamines the work of an artist whose influential output references both modern heavyweights, such as Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Joan Mitchell, and Old Masters like Goya, Hogarth, Manet, and Rubens. The book features 21 paintings and 26 works on paper—drawings, watercolors, sketchbooks, and monotypes—that span the three decades of Brown’s career to date, including recently completed and never-before-published works. A conversation with the artist provides insight into her process and sources, while an insightful essay situates Brown in the lineage of the great artists of the last five hundred years.

Table of contents

Director’s Foreword

A Dance With Death
Ian Alteveer

Plates

Window, Mirror, Stage: A Conversation With Cecily Brown
Adam Eaker

Notes
Works In The Exhibition
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
Photography Credits

About the authors

Ian Alteveer is Aaron I Fleischman Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Adam Eaker is associate curator in the Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (20)

Essays (15)

Édouard Manet (1832–1883)

The Aesthetic of the Sketch in Nineteenth-Century France

Art Nouveau

Claude Monet (1840–1926)

Henri Matisse (1869–1954)

Impressionism: Art and Modernity

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806)

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)

Lithography in the Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth-Century French Realism

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641): Paintings

The Print in the Nineteenth Century

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Timelines (5)

Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, 1800–1900 A.D.

France, 1600–1800 A.D.

France, 1800–1900 A.D.

Great Britain and Ireland, 1900 A.D.–present

Low Countries, 1400–1600 A.D.

Exhibition

Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid

April 4–December 3, 2023

For more than twenty-five years, Cecily Brown (b. 1969) has transfixed viewers with sumptuous color, bravura brushwork, and complex narratives that relate to some of Western art history’s grandest and oldest themes. After moving to New York from London in the 1990s, she revived painting for a new generation alongside a handful of other artists—many of them also women—at the very moment critics were questioning its import and relevance. The first full-fledged museum survey of Brown’s work in New York since she made the city her home, Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid assembles a select group of some fifty paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes from across her career to explore the intertwined themes of still life, memento mori, mirroring, and vanitas—symbolic depictions of human vanity or life’s brevity—that have propelled her dynamic and impactful practice for decades.

Plan Ahead

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