An Evening with Cecily Brown

good evening everyone I am Ian altavir the Aaron I Fleischmann curator here in the Mets Department of modern and contemporary art it's my great pleasure to welcome you to our Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium for this evening with Cecily Brown I'm so thrilled to see such robust attendance for this great artist um and I know you'll enjoy hearing her in conversation with my wonderful colleague Adam eeker a few quick thanks in advance of my brief introduction to the exhibition we're especially grateful to our modern Circle this is the Department's special donor group who supports so many of our activities and makes exhibitions such as this very special show Cecily Brown death in the maid possible we're also endlessly grateful to the wonderful Agnes guns who has supported this exhibition and so many other things we do here at the Met and at so many other cultural institutions in this city and in the country she is a true heroin um and I'm thrilled to introduce briefly tonight um the exhibition Cecily Brown death and the maid it opened to the public on April 4th and the past few weeks have been a wonderful Whirlwind of um hosting many of you here at the Museum to celebrate the show to look at it I know many of you have already seen it um hopefully you will see it again since we have a really robust run until December 3rd the exhibition took shape largely over the past three tumultuous years and I was so struck at seeing Cecily's amazing show at Paula Cooper Gallery in the Autumn of October 2020. the extension of so many themes she had been already working on over the course of a extraordinary 25-year career all of it's been here in New York City but I was particularly struck by a painting such as this one called Selfie which is dated to 2020 painted in those early months of the pandemic and for me it crystallized so many themes I had already known the kind of crowded claustrophobic interiors that the artist had made over over the years including a whole bunch them 15 years before this picture but it also brought home to me a sensibility that I think many of us had shared that during lockdown alone often or sometimes just with our families quarantined in our Apartments surrounded by all of the objects we had accumulated over many years in a sense of kind of claustrophobia perhaps that everything was called returning to us and life and its real precarity were put into high relief it struck me that a painting like this could be an entree into an exhibition that I already knew was probably going to look at some themes of mortality and morality um and in fact my first professional encounter with the work of Cecily Brown had come many years before this um in 2009 the Met received as a gift this wonderful small-scale triptych that was painted by the artist the year before in 2008. it's called Farrah face full of Woe um a kind of abbreviation of a rhyme that sort of a kind of fortune telling rhyme Monday's Child right um and it took me not so long to figure out that the left-hand panel of this work um is derived from a source that Cecily has used many many times before and many times since then um an illustration that was published in Life magazine In 1902 by Charles Allen Gilbert called all is Vanity and here you see it paired with a painting a much larger scale painting that uses the same theme this double image visual pun that presents us with the Memento Mori right the reminder of death's presence and it struck me that these Works would gain even more resonance I think um after the moments that we had been living through I was also struck by how this theme could connect with another grand tradition of Memento Mori painting the vanitas still life and here I'm showing you the Mets um perhaps original vanitas painting um by a another language artist called from 1603 and here alongside this skull which is of course the ultimate reminder of death other things that point to Life's fragility the bubble that's so easy to burst the flame that's been snuffed out the flower that will soon fade um it struck me too that Cecily herself had been working recently on still life painting an extension of that very same Grand tradition and I'm showing here a beautiful sketch after the Flemish artist van Snyder's um Cecily had been working on his hunting scenes for a project at Blenheim Palace in the English Countryside and had shifted over to his wonderful vibrant Still Life paintings often with these bright red tablecloths and equally bright red lobsters um also with kitty cats sometimes lurking underneath the table and it struck me that that tradition of still life painting that reminder that moralistic reminder right that everything May soon come tumbling down the glasses are already broken the silver is beginning to tarnish the food begins to rot that they were also in a way such a touching reminder of the painful passage we had all had for some three years now yeah and that to begin the other side of the show or end it with this amazing um and and kaleidoscopic still life called lobsters oysters cherries and Pearls also painted in 2020 and also with its first appearance at that Paula Cooper Gallery solar show in that Autumn um would be another great bookend um to a very special and kind of intimate look at this great artist's work um I'm thrilled to welcome Cecily back to the met we had a great celebration for her at her opening but it is always such a pleasure to hear her speak and it was even more of a delight to put her in conversation with my esteemed colleague Adam eeker at for the first time for our wonderful catalog and I'm doing a Shameless plug here those give the Met store remains open tonight until nine they have many copies available um but in the catalog alongside my essay is a wonderful conversation that Adam and Cecily's initial conversation about many works that are both of their favorites in in these halls and on our walls and so it is my hope and I think we can expect a great um second part to that conversation tonight um Cecily of course hopefully needs no introduction at this point but my colleague item eaker is an associate curator in the department of European paintings where he's responsible for British and northern European painting before 1800. here at the Met his project has included in Praise of painting Dutch masterpieces at the Met which is still on view in the lower level of our Lehman collection and the tutors art and Majesty in Renaissance England which many of you may have seen in recent months he's the author of Van Dyke and the making of English portraiture published in 2022 and he is always full of extraordinary insights on paintings of All Sorts um so I'm thrilled to welcome both Adam eaker and Cecily Brown to the stage I hope you enjoy their conversation thank you [Applause] good evening it's wonderful to have a full house for our conversation tonight Cecily we started talking to each other about painting and the Mets paintings in particular a little over a year ago and I'm really looking forward to continuing this conversation and when I was putting together the slides for tonight I was inspired by two things one is this fantastic photo from the catalog which gives a sense of some of the source material that fought her for inspiration that you keep in your studio which I've been lucky enough to visit a few times now and I also read an interview with you from a few years ago where you described yourself as a magpie and I think that really informs this wonderful collecting of a wide range of source material everything from very canonical old Master paintings um to visual jokes of the Edwardian era illustrations to nursery rhymes and I wanted to to focus on that Source material tonight and particularly ways in which you've been in dialogue with paintings here at the Met from from all different eras um and I thought we would begin by talking a little bit about your your practice of drawing one of the many things that I love in the show is the inclusion of a number of your sketchbooks and I'm someone who even though I'm a paintings curator I always love looking at drawings and thinking about how they show the artist's mind at work and I think that's something we really get an insight into in the exhibition and so I couldn't resist starting with this moment of you looking at one of the most delightful pictures I think in the Mets collection um flagonar's woman with a dog and in the show we have this Sketchbook page where you've made a study both of it and of um mayonnaise Nana and I wanted to to talk with you a little bit about what Drew you first of all to this um painting and and the process of copying and how it informs your practice um hi everyone um thanks thank you for coming I am a little bit nervous so um bear with me I also wanted Adam to keep this spontaneous so we have not practiced what we're going to uh I don't know the slides he's going to show so I thought that would it would be more fun if we kept it spontaneous um I mean I think this is actually a perfect place to start because the fact that there are two images on one page kind of sum up my attitude towards other people's images um it's kind of what happens to be on the table is what I'll draw that day um I mean it's pretty casual as you'll see from the slide before there's so much sort of effluvia of like when I see pictures I like and I'll just print them out like rubbishy um printouts from the computer so um often it's just it can be anything from a news photo these days to you know Auto if I do artel and I'm like oh it's a really nice painting I didn't know and then once a week or so I'll go through and print out a ton of things off my phone now but um over the years you know I've more or less copied everything um I think it probably started with Hogarth probably around early 2000 no that's not true I think well I drew from life all the time as a kid and you know I still think students should all draw from Life um but once I'd left art school I often Drew from photographs and my early paintings I but I always prefer to have a source I like to have something to copy when I draw and I think that probably comes from years of life drawing but something outside of myself an object so I sometimes don't really like my line when it's made up like it's too fudgy and Woolly and not strong enough but if I copy my lines just much more direct and it's I don't think it started like this but it's very much become you know the way I get information and I feel um you know I don't really know a work of art till I've copied it and it's very much a way of committing it to memory but very much to your painting brain so that you can use it later on and that's where the kind of Magpie attitude comes in because if you think about walking around a Museum's collection and the number of things you'll see in a day you know I feel like painters you are sort of storing up little moments for later and they come out when you paint but but during isn't like a it's a warming up of I think your eye in hand and it feels it's very always very essential to me um because in the end it's just about looking very closely at something I love how you describe it as a process of internalization and then it becomes a resource that you can carry with you obviously copying has been a traditional part of artists educations for centuries and we have a very robust program of copying in the galleries here at the Met I was curious when you were growing up when you were training at the Slade were you actually going to the National Gallery in London and copying or is it something that you practice more I guess privately through the mediation of reproductions I always feel like the artists who copy here are very much on display and they have to really develop like a mental defense against everyone who's peering over their shoulder yeah and I appear over their shoulders when I see them always look at artists yeah funny enough it reminded me when I was in your exhibition when we were installing my show and taking a break and I'm seeing these young artists copying doing painting I could never paint like that like I don't know how to do what they were doing so I do look at them in a fascinated way but I was remembering how on the Village Green when I was little in like Suburban England painters you know amateur painter would come and paint the local church and things we'd always I'd always be really fascinated with you know looking over their shoulder but sorry that's a complete aside it just suddenly made me think of that um sorry what was the question whether copying was something you were told to do as a student or you just came I remember um going to the National Gallery a lot but I only really remembering copying one thing and El Greco um which I loved copying uh Christ in the temple um you know yeah and uh but I remember looking at our back and the copies that he'd made optician and really loving them and I think in a way those were probably super influential that I can't remember where I saw them and just in an exhibition in London I think that copies um Albert done these very Fierce copies after Titian and a lot of things in the National Gallery um and I think also Picasso seeing because uh there was a great late Picasso show when I was very young I think 21 or so that was super influential on me um at the pompidou in Paris and uh the erotic drawings and certainly the subject of late Picasso really influenced me in terms of my early subject and being drawn to you know erotic imagery um Etc but um it was also Picasso's attitude towards Manet and Raphael and Velasquez and I really feel like people like Picasso and bacon because I always love bacon talking about Velasquez so I really came to odera through the I was immedially drawn to as a teenager like Picasso or bacon yeah I think one way to make the history of art approachable is to think of it as a conversation that's happening across time and and it's one of the things that I so much love in your work is you have a lot of very interesting conversation Partners um I almost want to ask you that Icebreaker question of if you were going to have a dinner party with any any artist from the past or have a conversation about painting with with anyone um who would you invite I think money probably Goya um I don't know I don't really want to get into it because that would be a good thing yeah that would be a good starter yeah a little bit before you um began working I think with with Ian on this project for the met you had another project that was very much about the dialogue with historic art and with a very historic building you were commissioned to do a series of paintings for Blenheim Palace which is one of the most celebrated of English country houses iconic place and you did um this wonderful series of of installations um largely responding to the work of front Snyder's the 17th century French animal at Flemish excuse me animal and still life painter I could you tell us a little bit about how did that project come about and and what was it like to be working in these these very heavy Baroque Interiors with all of these um faces and paintings uh appearing over your shoulder and so to speak Nation who had like the Contemporary part of Blenheim Palace they've been doing a series of shows of people like Maurizio Catalan and um Lawrence wiener and various other people I think Jenny holtzer and um I think what happened was I can't really remember exactly how it started but they'd seen I had a show at the Louisiana and Michael from actually I do remember saw it and immediately it said oh my God I think this show would look great at Blenheim this is probably incredibly Indiscreet of me to say um but um I thought no if I'm gonna do a show at Blenheim I would you know really rather make something very specific for Blenheim which was really unusual for me because until then I'd very very rarely done anything that was could it be described as a commission in any way and always just preferred to paint without not even knowing what exhibition or where I'd be showing things but with the Blenheim I just jumped to the chance because um you know being from England it was the middle of brexit you know everything breaking down and such an interesting time and it was what 2006 17 or so so it's pretty intense time politically um and it just seemed um ideal and I think as I told you um in our interview in the catalog that you know I didn't plan paintings for specific moments so some of them we showed on these easels like this um this painting was actually the first time I've in years Alex since art school I drew out the painting and charcoal first because um I always I'm trying to be more figurative and things just get abstract really quickly so with this I was like because I was making lots of drawing copies of the Snyder's hunt um and I was you know learning so much from doing them and then when I'd go to paint them they were becoming super messy straight away so I thought well why don't I just draw it out in charcoal and um it was in a way it's more like a drawing colored in than a painting it's very thin um but I love it um it feels this feels very site-specific to me um and you know I'm a huge anti-hunting person and I can't bear that or the inner cruelty that still goes on so I loved putting the hunt in the middle of these places um and there were interventions in lots of rooms in lots of different ways and in fact the curator from Louisiana did work on the show with me as a kind of consultant we had good ideas about funny little places to put works like we had some drawings of hunts but also erotic drawings in with some China in like a porcelain cabinet um and you know it was it was wonderful but this not to go around about the pandemic but I never got to see the show it's a shame um but luckily I'd been to Blenheim twice I think for two days each time so I'd managed to spend a lot of time walking around the rooms but yeah so anyway moving on yeah the title of the show death in the maid is of course a play on this long-standing motif of death in the maiden famous from Schubert but even before that the subject of Prince going back to the northern Renaissance and another of the sketchbooks included in the show is um your study after Edward bunk's depiction and I wonder I think there's an argument to be made about this tradition um that Associates beautiful young women with with death and and eroticizes the the Embrace of uh death and and a maiden a young beautiful woman that um there is a hostility in it to to women and to female beauty and a lot of anxiety about female sexuality and I wanted to ask whether your appropriation of this imagery contains an element of subversion of critique um if you could respond to that at all I mean I don't want to try and get out of it too easily but I do think in a way that kind of reading is in the eye of the beholder I think that is a case where I think I make the images and the viewer can decide um maybe that is too fence sitting I don't know I actually haven't really thought of it like that um I always found monks women so moving I mean I've talked to we've talked a bit about you know obviously the woman as object in a painting is different from a woman's point of view so you know in a way I've often avoided painting a single female nude it's actually one of the rarest you know subjects that I ever use um people might be surprised to hear that but usually when there are nudes there are plenty and there are of all Sexes and um um then when I did paint naked women I painted like 13 of them at once and those electric lady lamb paintings but you know in in all there's been actually very little um so but I feel like I was always very sympathetic towards monks women even though they're so idealized I mean um they kind of remind me of my mother um I don't know what do you think yeah well I I was really moved by the monk show that was at Matt Boyer a few years back um and I felt like learning more of his life story how the biography informed the painting gave me new insight of course um and yeah I think there is of course this vampiric quality to some of the women but they're also very powerful um and that is is very I think they identify more with them than with the guy in the scream right you know yeah um but yeah it's complicated being the woman in the mirror and uh I mean I wonder what you're going to show next if you're I'm trying to remember this is an image that uh Ian already showed but it's a wonderful early um perhaps the earliest vanitas painting by by and in a way when this tradition starts it's it's very on the nose as Ian already said you know all the symbols of of transience are there this goal but also the extinguished lamp the soap bubble um and I just wanted to bring this pairing together to start maybe walking through some of the iconographic motifs that the exhibition is structured around um and I love that you're you're drawn to skulls but you're also drawn to the playful imagery of skulls it's not just a Macabre set of images but they're they're visual jokes they're puns and language of course is so important to you the titles that you come up with and so again I barely think of them as Macabre at all I mean you know the thing that bothers me now is that people are going to ask my opinion about death just because of the show and it's just like I just cut that question it's like it's not that I want to talk about it particularly but um I mean were you honest now I feel like the skull was stolen by Connecticut I have this real be in my Bonnet about how things became so mainstream that I think I avoided painting skulls for a long time I think in 2005 was just I just really love this image I'm gonna you know put it out there but um so in a way I just I think of this so much as the two little girls and the dog that I kind of I do almost forget that it's a skull and I think that is part of the the pleasure of looking at your peering your your paintings is that um there's a durational quality to to any great painting that we discover its layers the longer we look but I I feel like you really thematize that in adopting these motifs from visual jokes from trick images um you can't see both at the same time so you have to spend time toggling yes I mean in a way it sums up what I'm always trying to do with my painting it's almost like um if I had to illustrate what I'm trying to do with abstraction and figuration in a way of just that and that just the toggling back as you say between one reading of something and another um so this is almost like an archetype for me um a real sort of motif painting um but you know I think Hogarth again to go back to the copying um I think he was the first artist I copied from a lot and one of the things I've always loved about him is he's so funny like a lot of your Flemish and Dutch guys like house I was looking at recently and you know I just love that sort of humor and hogarth's completely hilarious um and there are so many jokes in the work um and you know I think some of these this was supposed to have kind of a light touch you know it said it's sort of tongue-in-cheek um but it's also a very appealing image to me um but you know I was obsessed with Jasper Johns and Duck Rabbit and my wife and my mother-in-law and that whole Double Image so in a way I got into them through the work of Jasper Johns because I saw that huge Exhibition at Momo I think that was mid 90s and I got kind of obsessed with the Duck Rabbit and that sort of led me to these and I think when I first stumbled across this which is a really famous image um The Orchard B Rose as is the vanity um it's funny because I think at the time I was kind of reluctant to make them because I thought it was all too obvious you know to do something so graphic but at the same time it really satisfied my need to do something more figurative and again to copy something that already exists it's almost like takes away the um Gallant yeah it's not mine it's just I'm just you know found object yeah exactly yeah you've talked in a number of interviews about feeling when you were a student in London that painting had fallen out of fashion that it was almost embarrassing to be a painter at that moment and that New York in a sense was liberating and you could really grow as a painter here I wonder if if this element of levity wit playfulness that is is so characteristic of your work is that also a way to to redeem painting to not take it so seriously yeah 100 I mean my title is at first but and you'll notice if you've seen the show that the early paintings are really shiny especially the really huge one Father of the Bride because I used to Varnish things like crazy because I was so ashamed of the amount of paint and the gesture and all those things you know it was I think a really deep art shame um that it's probably hard for a young artists to really understand how it felt like it was embarrassing it wasn't almost embarrassing um and the worst thing was kind of agreeing with the people who thought painting was a terrible thing to be doing on some level um or like understanding why it was wrong um but yeah I do think you know so varnishing them I felt like gave them some distance and made them less like ABX and everything all the art I liked at the time was really shiny um but I thought the shininess also made them a little more you know look less less like just fourth generation avex um and show that they were you know something flashy maybe no flash is the wrong word though it was you know that that painting does look flashy compared to the others because of the varnish and every time I see it I want to Varnish everything again but it's so bad for in it's so anyway I can't I'm fascinated by titles because in the period that that I study the 17th century paintings didn't usually have titles it's very rare that they were given titles by their artists but titling is such a key part of your practice and and this wit and this levity that we've discussed and I wonder if you could tell me a bit a little bit about the moment when you when you Christen a painting so to speak um is it when it leaves the studio is it while you're working on it do you have titles in your head before the painting exists um I'm going to keep an ongoing list of titles all the time so but you know they're almost always ready-made things so song lyrics or titles or more recently I used to be much stricter and use only fun things like musicals and pop songs but I have used the Bible and some more poetry in the last few years just because you've run out of you know run out of things so I think I've taken titles from nearly everything like perfumes um um I loathe Untitled from when I you know from the super pretentious like uh that was around when I was young yeah so the titles were definitely for me a way of showing levity as was signing my name on the front like just my first name um although that was Alex Katz's idea just to name drop then I he uh he suggested why don't you sign them just your first name because we were talking about signing things on the front and I thought it was hilarious because it really showed that it wasn't this Macho gestural thing that it had a sense of humor and it because it almost looked like Cecily aged 13 and a half you know it's just this childish hand just and that and the titles um just yeah because painting it felt like if you wear a painter you must have this High seriousness about it um and also that if you're a painter you were sort of rejecting everything else which wasn't the case because I was responding to Art in every medium and obviously film and you know everything this is just an example of one of your your sources um and then again this image that that Ian already showed that's been so crucial for you uh the Charles Allen Gilbert all his vanity lithograph and I love again it is a form of word play we have vanity still lives with skulls and Bubbles but then also the image of the woman at her Dressing Table her vanity I remember as as a little boy sitting fascinated while my mother would um put on her makeup at her vanity table and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the origin of your your fascination for this subject matter did it start with the found image of of the Gilbert or did the vanity table already occupy a place in your imagination I mean one reason I really loved Ian's idea for this show when he told me was because I felt like it was this little known corner of my work and that he did pluck out these moments from really early to now where the vanity had recurred over and over I hadn't really noticed quite how much I'd gone back to it because I go back to so many subjects I mean I repeat myself a lot so um but um and this was funny this was one of those paintings that was never in an exhibition so at the time so uh I felt like nobody really knew about it but um in a way the key painting is the uh the only game in town um which is the earliest thing in the show um or the earliest painting the yellow one um which is a woman looking in a mirror uh there we go because that's all about looking and I really wanted it to be about the pleasure of looking but also being looked at so it was um you know but I've I had some ladies talking about it in the exhibition and um I feel like people are reading it too much as like a young woman looking at an old woman which I didn't mean as much when I talk about like the the the form to the left is supposed to be based on my wife and my mother-in-law the optical illusion that John's used a lot but the actual figure looking in the mirror she I think I must have already known the Gibson judging by her zipper and and the chair um but it's really I think it is fairly close to a self-portrait and it's not supposed to be looking into the horror it was actually like examining under my tongue but um no it's completely it's always more complicated than that and the label is actually absolutely right it is about those things but also it's I mean the mirror has always been um fascinating to me in terms of art but also just something that's recurred so much in my work and you know again I mean I think it's some for someone else to write about but like the copy as mirror in a way and Ian writes in the catalog essay about the way I mirror drawings so one thing I've been doing more recently is not just copying Old Masters but reversing them when I copy them which is so difficult but really fun um and the Ian I think saw those around the time he started thinking about the mirroring too but um yeah I'm just so pleased that Ian paid so much attention to the mayor in my work because as I said I feel like it was had sort of slipped by unnoticed um people have often focused on other things in my work it was only when I Was preparing for this conversation that I realized that probably my favorite 17th century Dutch painting here at the mad is is an image of a woman at at a mirror at a kind of vanity table I've put it on on the right this terborg of a young woman um adjusting the laces of her bodice while her her maidservant Waits with a um a pitcher of water and one thing I've been struck by because I find this to be such a tender and and loving Act of scrutiny that that turbo has done here but the the literature on this painting really wants to moralize it oh this is an image of vanity she's you know narcissistic she's focused on herself in the beer when she should be praying or making lace or something um and that to me you kind of have to not look at the painting to make that argument I've always felt I I don't see this as a moralizing image um and again I I wonder if man maybe this is as you say a question for for the art historians to write about but there's almost a Redemption of the mirror in your work and then as you said the pleasure of scrutiny and self-scrutiny and mirrors yeah I mean I don't know what it feels like for men because you know you're just so conscious of the male gays as a woman growing up um and so when you see when I was younger I didn't have a problem I didn't really notice how it was only male white artists we were looking at because I just loved painting so much and that was just the way it was I thought you know and hadn't realized how neglected so many people have been but you know I just bought the whole story so um I feel like in a way though that a woman has an advantage when looking at painting because when you're also the subject of the painting you it's like when you're watching a movie and you if the ACT is good you think that you're them right so when you're looking at a painting in a way you know it's it can be much richer and deeper if you also identify with the person um but you also identify with being looked at but then yeah I guess with my mirror I'm looking back um it's that idea of a double Consciousness right that you're aware of yourself but you're aware of yourself as being looked at and I've always loved that cheesy thing that's in both Mary Poppins and I think Black Swan where uh you know your reflection in the mirror starts doing something different from what you're actually doing like I love little creepy things like that yeah did children in England play that game with the mirror of Bloody Mary oh this is going to be a tangent sorry everybody but this was always my my favorite and scariest thing to do at sleepover parties is you wait until the stroke of midnight and you throw water on the on the mirror and then you say Bloody Mary I don't know 30 times and she appears in the mirror well when you're eight if you think she does no there was a version of that though that I found terrifying and as soon as I heard for of it I knew I would never do it but I still frightened me to talk about it where you're supposed to I think it was like brush your hair at midnight while looking in a mirror with a candle or maybe an orange or something but you and then you'd see the devil if you did it and I was like there's no way I'm doing that but there is something about obviously with the mirror you know it's the other world but it's also the picture the painting but it is the mystery of the mirror right I mean and the puddle and you know a water the reflection and Shadow yeah there's that great line from from alberti's tree to Sun pain in the 15th century he said something like what is painting but the attempt to grasp the reflection on the water you know this idea of you you see something and then the moment you move it's it's lost yeah because that's exactly what painting is yeah see what we have up next um I think we already talked a little bit about front Snyder's but I wanted to um shift into thinking about your still life imagery and particularly your response to the great Dutch and Flemish still lives of the 17th century I couldn't resist this pairing because we have naughty cats and both um am I correcting reading Those Eyes under the table as a cat oh yes okay um I heard that someone said the cat or the devil oh no as I said it's in the eye of the beholder yeah I was curious at what stage of painting this This Magnificent still life those eyes appeared oh I think he was there pretty much from the beginning yeah because some I was copying a lot of Snyder's drawing so after I got into the Hunts um my good friend Joe Messer gave me a beautiful great big book of Snyders in German so I haven't read any of it but with absolutely wonderful pictures and I started getting really into the still lives and I was astonished that I'd never looked at them closely before but I only knew of him a little bit but anyway um but yes so one of my favorite things about Snyder's is the cat under the table and that cat has appeared as well over many years you could do a show of the cat in my work if you looked really closely um so but again with Hogarth and I love this painting of the dissolute maid or whatever the name is the dissolute household yeah um this is one of the Treasures of the Linsky collection here at the Met um not a still life proper although it contains many still life elements but we see it's actually a self-portrait so the artist is at the center clearly had a bit too much to drink as has his wife the maid is refilling her glass while he's twinning fingers with her the wife has her her foot on a book that looks a bit like the Bible um so she's really misbehaving the kids are running wild and then there's just the most refined and delicious still life in the midst of it all this blue and white porcelain bowl and all this fruit and that's what I love with with youngstane this artist is he's he's so refined in his technique and so ribald in his subject matter and he's always the joke is always on him I mean you wonder what his wife thought when she saw the painting yeah there's there's actually um his first biographer says that she was always berating him for saying you make us look like drunks you know yeah or if he was really clever the wife could have played the maid in the painting oh yeah um but yeah I love the uh I love the subject I love paintings like this but I don't think mine have a moralizing edge particularly um you know just to go back to that yeah and it's it's one of these big debates within art history so many dissertations have been written about it is an image like are we supposed to look at this yon stain and say oh I really I have to cut back on my drinking I have to behave I have to be a good good husband good uh mother or are you just supposed to laugh and I have always fallen on the and I think I'm just realizing that Dutch are probably the funniest painters of all I can't think of like you know however much I love French painting they're not that very funny are they I'm afraid not um yeah it is something so so striking that they gave themselves the permission to have fun in their painting even though if you read about the culture at the time this was a very strict calvinist State um but it's almost like painting became an escape valve and that's why I don't really buy the argument that you you spend a lot of money on this very beautiful painting to feel bad about your misbehavior you know I mean who do you want to be in the painting maybe the cat oh yeah that's what I was going to say about Hogarth and the cat because often with Hogarth the cat or the dog will be catching the eye of the viewer and you always feel like it's this little wink yeah which I love and back to we don't have to go back to it but the idea of the painting that's about looking when I was the only game in town that was very much I wanted something that was about the pleasure of looking but also and I think later that just really has become the subject of that's the the reason for this whole now you see it now you don't to put it in a crass way is to try and kind of I mean well I've said that a million times of the thing of the slow read but um maybe that's the immoralizing side it's like you've got to slow down to look at them um I was struck with this the still life on the left that um it's one of the few paintings in your body of work that that feels like it looks back at you I would say um that often there's a there's almost a sense of a of a presence there that's scrutinizing our reaction or you know are we tempted or something or am I totally off base there um would it be the cat yeah the cat looks back I mean I think you know you for me you know the fact that there's a mirror and she's looking back at you right um but yeah you're right I mean I avoided doing faces and eyes for so long because I always find that the face you know pinned things down pins the meaning down too much so I've really grappled with that uh I guess this sort of writes that large by putting the Gaze under the table but um I think at the moment there are a lot of things gazing back at you in my work so but no you're probably right um there's a wonderful book by the poet Mark Doty which is about a single still life um in the Mets collection and he it launches him on this whole meditation about memory and collecting and things and he has this line in there that he says still life is a genre that points to the Human by leaving the human out and I have always kept that in my head that these meals are they didn't manifest themselves they were put there by a person and so often when I look at still lives I think about who's just gotten up from the table um I wonder if that resonates I like that idea um I mean like a lot of people I used to find but some people still do find still life really boring you know like growing up it would be my one of the last things I'd be drawn to um but now I'm obsessed with it and can't understand how I never well I wasn't always um but yeah I mean I think in a way I love um the debris of a meal or a restaurant or a bar or you know and what it shows like the pool and tablecloths and the um remains of things um yeah I'm a sort of flabbergasted to see my painting beside that well um do you ever stage your own still lives to to work from or is it always mediated I can't work from life I can't paint from life I would kill myself if I it's too hard it's just too hard and I'd never do it to a standard or I'd be happy with it so I would draw from life um but no what I've done in the past a few times is um like I once sorted out a couple of paintings that I was really struggling with because I think it had been my birthday so I'd had a lot of flowers and I just had them in front of a painting and I was still in there and the light was going down and um the Shadows of the flowers suddenly really made the painting look fantastic and I realized oh so I basically just painted them right in like as they were from life and they really worked like as a device to have these quite realistic semi-realistic flowers in the front but um no it's that thing of like I don't want to see my version of that because I mean I do think I mean if I'm playing a still life from Life I'd want it to look like that and it just never would so you know I wasn't taught to paint in an academic way and I know a lot of people who were feel imprisoned by it and think I'm quite lucky that I wasn't taught in a super tight way because but sometimes you know you know I could not do that to save my life basically yeah me neither yeah um finally I just wanted to um ask you a little bit about your your relationship to the mat um you're a transplant to New York as are many of us and um sort of How It's functioned for you over over the years that you've spent in this city I think I said to you on the phone that actually when I first lived here I didn't come here a lot because I think I was so in love with the idea of New York and America being new that you know I grew up in Europe and I've been to many European cities and spent so much time in museums in London and I almost feel like going to the National Gallery a lot as a student it was almost like I had my paintings you know that I had my favorites and I'd been to the it's so lucky if you grew up in Europe you know I'd been to The Prado and you know Louvre and everything and you fits you before I moved here so I don't think I felt like I needed European painting particularly and I was more interested in like going to the supermarket and seeing you know than coming to the met so it took me a while to be honest I mean I came here but I didn't spend a lot of time here till later and then of course I'd come and I was thinking after our conversation I usually when I'd come I'd come and see some great show so I had saw most of the huge wonderful painting shows over many years but did not get to know the collection that well until I'd say the last 10 15 years well I've only been I've been here 25 years or so 28 years so yeah and a lot of it was after my daughter and um where I've gotten to know much more of the collection like arms and armor spent many happy hours in arms and armor it's the Gateway garage yeah so I figured you can bring kids to museums if you don't force them to look at contemporary art if they want to but you know I I think the trick is to let them decide what to look at to make them love museums so um but now I know the collection pretty well and you know I absolutely love them and also since she was little we come every year to see the Christmas tree which is one of my I mean that aesthetic of those Italian if people haven't seen it it's just you have to see this most beautiful it's like a tintoretto come to life right dear fellow come to life it's absolutely gorgeous anyway so that was a big thing and then you know obviously over the years I've come many many times and but um I was thinking about the exhibitions that have meant the most and there were a lot at the broyer actually like the monk was incredible amazing show the assailment and just things of the last few years and Kerry James Marshall um but also the delacroix show here was a huge favorite of mine um that wasn't that long ago no um and there was a friend's house but there wasn't that much house in it I remember yeah it was before my time yeah yeah I think it's time for another friend's house show all right um well I think that is a nice note to end on and and a wonderful invitation and the museum is open for a couple more hours so please go um make your own way through the Galleries and and make sure to visit Cecily's wonderful show if you haven't thank you so much Cecily [Applause]

Channel: The Met

Views: 5,681

Keywords: The Met, Art, Museum, History, New York, New York City, Education

Id: kR5Kj0FSlzo

Length: 52min 7sec (3127 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023