Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid

The catalogue of Cecily Brown's first full museum survey in the city she has painted in for thirty years, and an argument for reading her work through the vanitas rather than through gesture alone.

Published for the exhibition at The Met Fifth Avenue, April 4 to December 3, 2023, the book gathers 21 paintings and 26 works on paper (drawings, watercolours, sketchbooks, and monotypes) across 140 pages and 81 colour plates, including recently finished and never-before-published works. Ian Alteveer, who organised the exhibition, contributes the essay, and Adam Eaker of the museum's European Paintings department is in conversation with the artist. The title alters Schubert's Der Tod und das Mädchen from maiden to maid, and the selection follows that shift through still life, memento mori, and the mirror.

Brown (born 1969, London) trained at the Slade and moved to New York in 1994. The book situates her between the modern painters she absorbed early (de Kooning, Guston, Mitchell) and the Old Masters she keeps returning to, among them Goya, Hogarth, Manet, and Rubens.