Cecily Brown solo show at the Met disappoints

Brown, 53, was raised in England but lives in New York. A sincere, committed artist, she has been attracting admirers on both sides of the Atlantic for three decades. Her interest in the Old Masters, which clearly played a role in the Met’s decision to mount this show, is deep and sincere. But it’s the interest, I fear, of a fan.

Occasionally, a work based on an Old Master painting really sings. Brown’s riff, for instance, on Bruegel’s “Carnival and Lent” has both an over-brimming density and a compositional coherence often missing from her work. It’s the best painting in the show.

But other works that respond to Snyders, Soutine and Manet operate mostly as tokens of memory and admiration. They’re not the products of someone who has digested and transmuted her experience of those older artists into an original idiom, one that generates its own internal heat rather than depending on a borrowed glow.

Brown is prolific and, like most prolific artists, uneven. A lot of her early work was openly erotic: loose, brushy paintings depicting half-obscured orgies and frenzied couplings. They gained purchase by making manifest the sensuality latent in a lot of abstract expressionism.

But Met curator Ian Alteveer has filtered his selection through another of Brown’s longstanding preoccupations: the “intertwined themes of mirroring, still life, memento mori, and vanitas.” What this translates to is a lot of skulls and mirrors and still lifes. The potential for cliche is high. It’s actually more interesting than that, but the lens through which Alteveer asks us to see Brown is finally too narrow to show her at her best.

That’s a shame, because the Met had an opportunity to really make the case for Brown. Her reputation is sometimes overshadowed by the drama surrounding the reception of her early works (the erotic paintings often attracted patronizing and sexist commentary) and by her biography: Brown is the daughter of the novelist Shena Mackay and the art critic David Sylvester. A giant figure in the annals of British modern art, Sylvester was a friend (and famed interviewer) of the painter Francis Bacon. Brown was only informed that he was her father when she was at art school. Mackay and Sylvester never wed, and Brown had grown up thinking of Sylvester as a close family friend who had taken her to galleries, introduced her to Bacon and nurtured her love of art.

Brown sees the canvas as akin to a stage for a physical performance: the performance of painting. This puts her squarely in the tradition of abstract expressionism. But her works lack the formal tension of paintings by her most obvious influences, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell and Jackson Pollock. That’s because there is not a strong enough relationship between her embodied brushstrokes and the scale of her canvases.

When the canvases are big, the brushstrokes are generally small, fussy, splotchy and slack. They rarely suggest themselves as traces of the movements of her whole body (a key element in the best abstract expressionism), only of her fingers and wrist. This can become interesting when the paintings are small, but when they’re big, the tension between gesture and scale snaps, like an old rubber band.

Brown rarely allows her colors the cumulative weight or compositional importance that Krasner, for instance, gave them. At the Met exhibit, her colors are dispersed and piecemeal, more of an afterthought than something built into the structures of her work. Brown sometimes tries to unify her loosely knit structures with scattered bursts of bright primaries, conjuring de Kooning’s late works. In “Father of the Bride,” however, the powerful reds and yellows have a dejected look, like popped party balloons, pushed to the painting’s bottom and sides.

Of all the abstract expressionists, de Kooning has clearly had the biggest impact on Brown. The Dutchman used changes in speed and direction to give his loaded brushstrokes their unique vitality. Brown tries to do the same, but she doesn’t have his flair. (Who does?) You can see the influence of de Kooning’s midcentury breakthrough work, “Excavation,” most obviously in Brown’s “Father of the Bride,” which was painted in the late 1990s. But the drawing and gestures tend to be wispy and directionless. They sit on the surface rather than carving into and out of the picture plane in the ways that make de Kooning’s work so spatially exciting.

The tension in de Kooning between figuration and abstraction feels brilliantly resolved because he invented his own coherent language of hooked-line contours and “slipping glimpses.” In contrast, Brown tries to straddle two distinct idioms: abstract mark-making and impressionistic figuration. The results never really cohere.

We are invited instead to “spot” the conventional figurative elements — a body here, a cat’s face there — whenever they emerge from the welter of abstract brushstrokes. This demands that we briefly attach more importance to one idiom (representation) than the other (gestural abstraction) before mentally switching back to representation. This makes for an unhappy, flip-flopping viewer experience, like having to eat both the candy and the wrapper.

At its best, Brown’s work evokes a tension, even a violence, inherent in representation, in making brushed-on paint resemble things in the world, when it could just as easily submerge itself in the boundlessness of abstraction. Her show got me thinking, too, about the fracturing of identity we feel when we look in mirrors, and how this dissonance may relate to the tension between figuration and abstraction, even between eros and thanatos. But these were stray thoughts that mostly came to me after seeing the show. They were not specific apprehensions forced by the paintings themselves.

A label beside “Father of the Bride” quotes Brown on painters of her own generation battling “the anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom famously called it: “As white American males,” she averred, “they couldn’t paint like an Abstract Expressionist because it was too close, too recent, too American, and too macho, but as an English girl I could.”

You can see what Brown is driving at but — as an account of creative motivation — this feels a bit arch. In reality, from about 1955, everyone wanting to be part of the avant-garde was reacting against abstract expressionism until, eventually, they weren’t. Brown was one of the first of those who, in the late 1990s, seemed to say, “Well why not paint that way again?” She deserves credit for making it viable to build on the abstract expressionist legacy rather than endlessly, neurotically knocking it down, the more so because that legacy included brilliant women, Krasner, Mitchell, Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler among them. But this is not enough to absolve her of the feeling that some of her work is derivative.

Perhaps primarily for this reason, a consensus has emerged that Brown matters. Her works sell for enormous sums, and now they double as commodities, trophies and investment vehicles. (Glenstone Museum recently bought and displayed “A day! Help! Help! Another day!,” Brown’s enormous 2016 painting.) None of this is about to be reversed. But it may make dissenting views more relevant.

One of the stimulating things about viewing contemporary art — and of course, it’s one of the abiding attractions of criticism as a vocation — is sorting out our responses to new work. There is art that we think we love because it reminds us of things we already love. And then there is art that we struggle to like because it is so new, before finally coming around to loving it. I wanted to come around to loving “Death and the Maid.” I gave it time to settle. But in the end, for me, the exhibition falls into the first category.

A solo show at the Met is a special, career-making honor. If the museum is intent on showing contemporary art (and given the number of New York museums already operating in this area, I’m not convinced it should) it doesn’t need to show radically avant-garde artists. But, given its prestige, its curators do need to stake a claim, to choose artists whose work is fresh and fully resolved, fired with conviction, hot with aplomb. It shouldn’t be trumpeting work because it reminds them of artists, like Krasner and de Kooning, whose importance they notoriously failed to recognize in their heyday 70 years ago.

Sheila Hicks is 88. Why not give her the retrospective she deserves, and which the public would love? Why not place a bet on Tala Madani, whose desultory drawing and wildly rebarbative conceits might have the impact at the Met that artists like Matisse once had in Paris? Why not dare to display the videos of Mika Rottenberg, Alex da Corte or Charles Atlas, the textiles of Igshaan Adams or Diedrick Brackens, the paintings of Tomma Abts, Nina Chanel Abney, Nicole Eisenman, Mickalene Thomas, Dana Schutz or Charline von Heyl? Why not show a mind-bending installation by Samara Golden?

My own enthusiasms are not the point. The point is that the Met needs to set aside what its trustees are collecting, let go of the limiting idea that the contemporary art it shows should be self-consciously connected to its collection, and think for itself.

Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid Through Dec. 3 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. metmuseum.org.