Cecily Brown’s energetic brushwork comes to a boil at the center of her 2006-08 painting, Memento Mori I, a highlight of her current retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum identifies the roiling mass of white, blue and pinkish tones in the foreground as a tablecloth and place settings being yanked from the table, a reference to an English poem meant to instruct young people not to tip their chairs back. Elsewhere, a female nude dances with death (inspired by an Edvard Munch print), a tabletop still life proffers an enormous, blood red lobster claw and the heads of two children are positioned to form a skull. Such reminders of mortality and offers of moral instruction recall highlights from the Met’s historic European painting collections, suggesting the themes’ the continued resonance. (On view on the Upper East Side through Dec 3rd).
