“It’s like 1967,” said a visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as artists, writers, friends and art patrons assembled to celebrate British painter Cecily Brown, who came to Manhattan in the early 1990s and was this month gifted a “career survey” at the civilisation-spanning institution. The last time this accolade was offered to a living British artist was Lucian Freud in the mid-90s.
The reception that followed the Brown opening was described by one New York critic as an “oestrogen-fuelled, generational-shifting thrill, artistically and socially”. An early review noted that Brown “makes everything old new again”.
