Passionate Ambivalence

Julius Eastman at 92NY; Cecily Brown at The Met

This is a post about ambivalence, not as indecisive wishy-washiness but as a condition of strongly held, competing commitments. And so it’s appropriate that it’s also the post where I turn on the option of paid subscriptions for this newsletter, something about which I feel an awful lot of ambivalence. On one hand, I love the freedom of this space, the lack of pressure, the playfulness; I like the kind of thinking that happens when I feel free to be a little less responsible than for more formal writing and reviewing. I suspect that freedom is tied to the fact that I’m not asking anybody to pay anything to be here. I also like the idea of preserving a space for writing that’s not monetized, for an endeavor that resists a logic of maximal “productivity.”

And yet. I’m also committed to the idea that writers should be paid for their work, and these essays are work, though they’re also sources of pleasure and satisfaction. It’s also true that opera tickets are expensive, and I would love for this Substack to help support my habit. The compromise I’ve arrived at, at least for now, is to open up the possibility of paid subscriptions, but not to put up a paywall. If you enjoy these pieces and you’re able to afford five bucks a month, I’ll be immensely grateful for your support. And if a paid subscription isn’t something you can manage, I am still very happy and grateful that you’re here.

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I’ve written before in this space that I think of myself as an enthusiast, by which I mean both that I love to love things, and also that I think loving things has provided my most important experiences of artistic education. Love makes me want to figure out how art works. This isn’t true for everyone. Some people realize what they want to do through disliking things they encounter; their education happens through a kind of disidentification. Neither way is right or wrong, it’s probably just a question of temperament. But even as I identify as an enthusiast, it’s also true that very often my response to art is a kind of impassioned ambivalence, which is a state I don’t see modeled very often in criticism, my own criticism included. We tend to give authority to the most strongly stated, the most self-assured judgments. My judgments are seldom self-assured; I’m always second-guessing them, whether I like something or not, and often I don’t know whether I like something or not. I think we often feel an anxiety about this not knowing; we want to resolve ambivalence—which is a dynamic state of response, shifting this way and that—for some settled verdict. This is even more true in the age of social media, I think; just to cut through the noise one needs a clarion voice.

But I think ambivalence is a valuable state of mind; I think it allows for kinds of thinking that aren’t necessarily spurred by either enthusiasm or—what’s the opposite of enthusiasm? Disdain? Dismissal? Disidentification? Or indignation, which I do feel sometimes, and which mostly shuts down thinking. Maybe in America especially, maybe especially in our media moment, we like to cultivate both enthusiasm—the standing ovations that have become obligatory in New York—and dismissal. But maybe it’s a better practice to cultivate ambivalence, to resist the impulse to shut down contrary responses, to try instead to coax them to a kind of fullness, exercising the discipline of honoring multiple commitments. We love bandwagons and teams, both of which devastate our faculties of judgment; ambivalence impedes that kind of identification. That can be difficult, in a climate where a doctrine of If you’re not with us you’re against us reigns, and where we’ve stoked our sensitivities to such a pitch that any reservation seems like an attack. A political climate, I mean; but we’ve so eroded any boundary between the political and the aesthetic that responses to art can seem like indices of political righteousness. This is not a healthy state of cultural affairs.

I think of what happened after the Oscars this year, when Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture. That was one of my two favorite Hollywood pictures of the year (the other was Nope, which was locked out of the Oscars), and I was hugely relieved when it won, if only because—speaking of indignation—it meant that Tár didn’t. And, speaking of ambivalence, if Cate Blanchett, whom I love, had won Best Actress instead of Michelle Yeoh I would have set something on fire. But Everything Everywhere All at Once is an interesting movie because it’s absolutely unhinged (especially in its first half, which was the half I liked best); it should be polarizing. It was dismaying to see anyone who expressed reservations about it be pilloried on social media, and especially to see those reservations, regardless of how they were contextualized, be dismissed as racist. Come on. None of us wants to live in a world where everybody likes the same things, or none of us should; aesthetic response should never be constrained in this way.

Anyway, three cheers for ambivalence. The rest of this post is about two aesthetic experiences I’ve had over the past month that made me feel every which way: Wild Up’s celebration of Julius Eastman at the 92^nd Street Y, and Cecily Brown’s show Death and the Maid currently up at the Met.

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I can’t remember when I first heard of the composer Julius Eastman. It couldn’t have been while I was in music school, since his work went essentially unheard between his death in 1990, at the age of 49, and the release in 2005 of Unjust Malaise, archival recordings of performances of his work, almost all of which feature Eastman himself. The composer Kyle Gann claims that his broadcast of two of Eastman’s major works, on an internet radio station in 2004, was the first time Eastman’s music had been heard publicly since his death. This was a remarkable state of affairs for a stunningly brilliant musician who had been at the center of some of the most exciting musical communities in the United States.

Born in Ithaca, Eastman was educated at the Curtis Institute (first as a pianist, then a composer), where—in a convergence that blows my mind—the great pianist Richard Goode played on his graduation recital in 1963. After a few years in New York (where he gave a well-received debut Town Hall recital), he spent several of his most productive years in Buffalo. Eastman was a gifted singer, and he quickly made a name for himself, touring one summer with the Gregg Smith Singers and performing as a soloist with the Buffalo Philharmonic, which was conducted by the composer Lukas Foss. Foss encouraged him to join the thriving experimental music scene at SUNY Buffalo, where Eastman would soon work with or encounter several important composers, including Morton Feldman, John Cage, and David Del Tredici; Buffalo had also welcomed, in the same Creative Associates program that would give Eastman an artistic home, composers who would have a key influence on Eastman’s music, including Terry Riley and Frederic Rzewski. Riley’s In C and especially Rzewski’s Coming Together, written in response to the 1971 Attica prison uprising, would be landmarks for Eastman.

I did encounter Eastman as a singer when I was in music school, through his bravura recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, the piece that brought him the greatest fame in his lifetime. (The recording was nominated for a Grammy, and Eastman would perform the work with the LA Philharmonic, conducted by Zubin Mehta, and the NY Philharmonic, conducted by Pierre Boulez.) It’s not too surprising that I had to be reminded of Eastman’s involvement, when I got interested in his music several years ago, since Eastman, alone among the primary artists, wasn’t given a bio in the liner notes. This detail is recorded in the invaluable Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, an essay collection edited by Mary Jane Leach, who is probably most responsible for the Eastman revival, and Renée Levine Packer, whose biographical essay in the volume is my primary source for details of Eastman’s life.

Boulez, Mehta, Lukas Foss, Morton Feldman: this is a starry world, and the fact that Eastman would end his life so far from it, and be for so long lost from its view, is a little shocking. But Eastman was always an outsider insider: he studied and performed in the elite musical world, but as a Black gay man was never fully at ease there. This isn’t to suggest, in any easy way, that identity is destiny. R. Nemo Hill, who lived with Eastman in romantic cohabitation in 1980 and 81 (Eastman’s unfinished Second Symphony was dedicated to him, and it’s not clear that Eastman ever had a longer domestic relationship) insists on Eastman’s agency in constructing his life: “To this day, I have never met anyone who was more an architect of his own fate,” Hill says. Eastman was inspiring for the integrity with which he lived his determination, as he said in an interview in 1976, “to be what I am to the fullest—Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”

This determination was both existential and aesthetic, manifesting in his engagement with Black and queer musical idioms and performance traditions, and in an increasingly assertive, confrontational stance toward the largely white and straight spaces he inhabited. In a famous episode, he outraged the typically gentle John Cage in realizing a cue in Cage’s Song Books—“perform a disciplined action”—by delivering a lecture on a “new system of love,” which involved undressing a young man from the audience and campily leering over his physique. (“Well,” Eastman explained, “it says ‘perform a disciplined act,’ so I gave this lecture on how to make love. What could be more disciplined? And with a pointer, I noted the various parts involved.”) This was in 1975, and might be understood as a moment of incomprehension between two gay generations: Eastman’s of loud, post-Stonewall assertiveness and Cage’s of silence, open secrets, and uneasy tolerance. (The best discussion of the episode is in this essay by Ryan Dohoney.) More generally, Eastman lacked that insincerity so fundamental to life: an ability to feign interest. He neglected his teaching duties at SUNY Buffalo and in 1975, just a couple of months before the Cage performance, his appointment was not renewed.

At first, this seemed to spur Eastman’s artistic output. In some ways he had outgrown the community at SUNY Buffalo—in his exuberant explorations of queerness, and especially in his desire to engage more deeply with jazz performance and improvisation. He moved back to New York City, where Lukas Foss was now conducting the Brooklyn Philharmonia; Eastman joined with other Black composers, including Tania León and Talib Hakim, to curate concerts under the Philarmonia’s auspices of music by Black composers. He also began collaborating with downtown luminaries like Arthur Russell and Meredith Monk; you can hear him on Monk’s wonderful Dolmen Music and in Russell’s art disco project Dinosaur L. Eastman was also working on his own music, including the major pieces he called his “N— Series.” The titles of these pieces—Evil N— and N— Faggot among them— would provoke protests on college campuses and were often censored, as I’ve censored them here.

Eastman lived with his grandmother for the first year he was back in New York, but as his behavior grew more erratic he alienated those around him. Some of this behavior can be seen as a kind of terrifying integrity, as in his insistence on keeping his apartment unlocked, even after he was robbed by a homeless man he had welcomed into his home. Maybe it was Christ-like for him to offer pedicures at a men’s shelter, maybe it was a little unhinged; maybe the difference is hard to tell, or maybe there isn’t much difference. R. Nemo Hill’s essay in Gay Guerrilla is fascinating for its (self-aware) mythmaking, for his insistence that Eastman’s eccentricities were “the pathological opera of the religious life played out in its starkest form.” “For Julius,” he writes, “the often disastrous practical consequences of such unorthodox behavior were but minor irritations that had to be dealt with—and not, as they are for less disciplined souls like the rest of us poor mortals, the projected fears that keep us in line with social norms.” (The writing in Hill’s essay, full of melodrama and cliché, is moving because it’s so clearly an attempt to be commensurate to his sense of Eastman’s scale, to the impression Eastman made on him.) In my favorite story from the essay, Hill recounts a day when Julius took him cruising at the bathrooms at the 125^th Street station. They’re standing at the urinals with a bunch of other guys; a cop comes in and starts harassing them; Hill tries to slink away. “Wheeeere the hell do you think you’re going?” Eastman says, in his booming baritone. “Get back in here and face it like a man.” Amazing. (The cop, cowed, left after giving them a warning; Eastman and Hill stayed and had a bunch of sex. Hill recalls blowing a guy that day who was holding “a large birdcage with two parakeets in it.” Now that’s the real New York!)

Other details are a little more harrowing. He taste-tested his cats’ cans of food; he brushed his teeth with Comet. He became unreliable in rehearsal and performances; eventually, in 1981, shortly after Hill moved out, Eastman was evicted from his apartment. Religious pathology, maybe; others recount increasing reliance on alcohol and other drugs. Heartbreakingly, when he was forced out of his apartment, his scores and other papers were bagged up by the marshal and discarded. The narrative becomes spotty at this point, as Eastman, who kept everyone at a distance, was largely lost to his friends.

He stayed with acquaintances and lovers when he could, but also had recourse to shelters; at times he lived in Tompkins Park. He kept performing and composing, but less and less reliably. For a piano recital he gave at a church in New Jersey, he smeared dirt over the keys—it gave him better traction, he said—leaving his hosts in shock. At a performance of Bach’s Christmas oratorio, Eastman, with no warning, improvised an aria “in a style somewhere between John Coltrane and Bobby McFerrin.” Afterwards, the conductor was “wide-eyed and speechless”; I can only imagine his terror. Opportunities to work, naturally, fell off; according to the composer George Lewis, already by 1982 Eastman’s old collaborators were shying away. It seems Eastman may have had periods of stability—he lived with a psychiatrist for a while, apparently—but information is sketchy. He would appear at friends’ houses unannounced; he took to wearing a white toga; he once interrupted a pianist friend, on stage about to play a recital, to ask him for money for wine. Friends wondered if he was using crack; they wondered if he might be HIV positive. (His family denies this, though his brother says he suspected Julius had syphilis.) He was in Buffalo when he died, of a heart attack, in May 1990. His friends in the musical world wouldn’t hear of his passing for months.

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It’s heartbreaking to think of what Eastman might have done had he lived another twenty or thirty years, all the music we might have. But it’s a source of wonder that so much has been recovered. There has been an extraordinary effort in recent years to compile and make available Eastman’s surviving scores, and several pieces have now been recorded multiple times. The series of three concerts offered by the LA-based collective Wild Up at 92NY last month felt like a sort of culmination. The series, collectively titled Radical Adornment, mostly presented works that Wild Up has recorded to great acclaim in recent years. I hadn’t listened to those recordings before attending the first two concerts (I didn’t make it to the third, a five-hour performance of Buddha); I was excited to hear how they would realize Eastman’s challenging, raucous, exciting, sometimes terrifying scores.

Because most of Eastman’s music isn’t written like concert music in the western tradition tends to be, with a score that carries you from beginning to end, notating as fully as possible the composer’s intentions. Instead, Eastman offers a kind of framework that performers fill. This wasn’t uncommon for musicians in the downtown scene, where performances were often led by the composer; much of the work of reconstructing Eastman’s scores has involved interviewing players about the instructions he gave in rehearsal. Eastman thought of his collaborators as being “not performers, but realizers. They are given movements, music, and rules; they take their materials and make their own dance.” While influenced by the minimalism of Terry Riley and Steve Reich—“a school of music which tries to bring the beat back into music,” he said once—Eastman’s music is wilder than theirs, not just because it’s full of improvisation but because it’s full of affect. Early minimalism often aspired to almost machine-like expressionlessness; Eastman’s music writhes, it seeks intensities. As George Lewis notes in his introduction to Gay Guerrilla, Eastman’s aesthetic in this respect had more to do with late Coltrane than with the Reich of Music for 18 Musicians.

It was heartening to see Kaufmann Concert Hall at 92NY absolutely packed, and with a very different crowd—radically younger and more diverse, with many more flavors of queer—than you usually find on the Upper East Side on a Friday night. One felt the electric buzz of people sure they were at an event, more typical of a hip gallery opening than a classical music concert. It’s a feeling that often makes me uncomfortable, honestly, since it can seem more about preening than aesthetic experience, everyone wanting to see and be seen. There was some of that at 92NY, and it put me in an uncharitable mood. Keep that in mind in what follows.

But I was excited, too, and the evening started well, if more than fashionably late. Femenine begins with mechanically shaken sleigh bells from the back of the hall, noise that runs through the whole piece. In Wild Up’s rendition, the sound started up while the stage was empty, and the noise was overwhelming, defamiliarized; it sounded organic, like an inconceivable number of insects at night. It created a sense of ritual, of a space removed from the everyday; it suggested a real happening, I thought. This went on for an uncomfortable amount of time (which was great, I thought, just right), and then the first instrumentalist walked—processed, rather, adding to the sense of ritual—onto the stage and played a simple, repeating riff on the vibraphone: a quickly reiterated tone followed by an ascending skip. This too runs through the whole evening, the spine of the piece.

The problems started with the second player to take the stage, the pianist, who bears a lot of responsibility for how the piece will unfold. That Friday night the piano playing, which is largely unnotated, was very poppy, a kind of EZ listening vamp; it domesticated the weird wildness established by the bells, the relentlessness of the vibraphone lick. More players came to the stage, adding drones, taking up and then departing from the theme; the texture of the sound began to thicken. A long section of tutti repetitions of the theme feels interminable, until finally a sax begins to break free. Eastman’s music is often built up out of small ideas that repeat and repeat aleatorically; this gives the sense of more and more information being laid down until it reaches a kind of cacophony. Things fall apart, then regroup, often by returning to tutti repetitions of the main motif; the process starts over. Change is gradual, evolutionary. The music establishes a series of polarities—limpid, thick; contemplative, wild; quiet, loud—and drifts between them. Other instruments rise out of this texture in wailing solos before being subsumed again.

In Wild Up’s performance at 92NY this was exciting at first but came to feel dreadfully monotonous; I was numbed and bored. But everyone around me was having a great time; why was I so locked out? The players were extremely good, and they seemed to be having a good time, too, smiling and jiving with each other in a way that might have been as genuine as it was performative. Part of the problem was that I was too close to the stage; back further in the hall there might have been a richer mix. And part of the problem was the amplification, which was wildly overbearing in the small space. But part of it was Wild Up’s performance itself, which was extremely polished and slick, smooth and professionalized, and which felt, finally, a little neutered.

Things got worse when the collective’s leader, Christopher Rountree, bounded on stage to conduct (sort of) the last twenty minutes or so, when the climaxes got bigger, the tuttis more assertive. Is Eastman really just messified, warmed-over Reich, I wondered, as the singers took up repetitive n-n-n-n-n-n-n patterns, like the singers in Music for 18 Musicians, and as the ensemble struck huge amplified pedal tones, à la Tehillim. It seemed at once too cool and too strenuous as the ensemble worked toward a catharsis that never arrived; it felt like the music had been run through the sharpest, most intense Instagram filter, everything turned bright as candy. When it ended—there was rapturous applause as people leapt to their feet, I’ve already said how I feel about that—I felt like someone had tried to sell me counterfeit goods, that I had resisted giving the music a response that I felt it was coercing. I was bummed out. There had been a lot of jamming, a lot of vibing, but not a lot of thinking, it seemed to me. Is a vibe enough to fuel 70 minutes of music? Was anybody on stage asking a question?

There’s a recording of Julius Eastman leading Femenine you can find on YouTube; I listened to it again right after Wild Up’s performance, and was shocked by how different it is. Eastman is at the piano, and he plays brilliantly, restrainedly; his contribution is much more astringent, much more questing. The whole piece is more subtle, stranger, less recognizable; it doesn’t really sound very much like Reich at all. I find it almost unbearably moving; while the playing doesn’t come close to the standard of Wild Up, and while the ensemble isn’t as sharp, it achieves for me what Wild Up’s performance didn’t: it arrives somewhere; something has been transformed; an urgent question has been asked.

I’ve been thinking about how to be more clear about what it means for music to ask a question. I think the best, most contained example I can offer is actually from a different Eastman performance, a 70-minute improvised solo piano concert he gave in Zurich. It’s maybe the best possible introduction to Eastman and his astounding gifts; it’s also one of the most extraordinary musical documents I know. About ten minutes from the end of the piece (this YouTube link should start you there), Eastman presents a new idea: two discordant chords, then a weird, unsettling jangling motif. He repeats the motif obsessively, slightly altering what happens around it. It feels like thinking to me, like discovery; having found a pattern that interests him, he asks what he can do with it, all the different ways he can make it sound, the variations he can make it run; finally, he starts asking how he can escape it. It creates a line of energy that carries the performance to its end, and makes the solemn, single note on which the piece closes feel like—well, I don’t know if it feels like an answer exactly, but it feels like an arrival. It satisfies in a way that nothing I heard from Wild Up did.

Being so resolutely unmoved by something that gives other people pleasure makes you feel like an asshole, and I was relieved that I liked the second concert, on Saturday afternoon, much better. The ensemble played some of Eastman’s more famous pieces: the joyful, raucous Stay On It, and Evil N—, a piece that I love and that cuts right to the bone. It was ferociously helmed by Adam Tendler and Devonté Hynes (who has released several excellent albums as Blood Orange), who faced each other across grand pianos. The most moving performance of the whole festival, though, was Richard Valitutto’s thoughtful, sensitive reading of the three-movement Piano 2, the only fully notated piece on either program, which owes more to European modernism than to American minimalism. (Valitutto hasn’t recorded this, to my knowledge; but you can listen to it performed by Joseph Kubera, one of Eastman’s collaborators, on this album.) Even as I enjoyed that afternoon, I still felt that something had been lost, or some element of Eastman’s vision betrayed. Everyone seemed so pleased with themselves for being there, everyone enjoyed themselves so much; something of Eastman’s confrontation had fallen out.

Maybe this is just a matter of historical shifts, evidence of progress: a once confrontational, countercultural aesthetic practice being assimilated. Which is the fate of all experimental art, I guess: either to be assimilated or to be forgotten. We’ve learned how to play Eastman, at least a little bit; he doesn’t challenge us now quite the way he did. Maybe that’s inevitable, maybe it’s to be celebrated; maybe, even if we celebrate it, we can acknowledge that something has been lost. The laughter at the beginning of Eastman’s recording of Femenine, the looseness, the sense at once that it’s not trying as hard and also that it is much more excitingly at risk: how beautiful that all is; surely a great performance will capture it again, as great musicians capture the sense of experiment and risk in Beethoven and Monteverdi. It’s lovely to think that Eastman would have felt vindicated by the recognition he’s receiving now, the slick, luxuriously rehearsed performances he’s getting. But I think he would have been a little disdainful of it, too, that he would have wanted to smear dirt all over it, to seek refuge in new provocations. Maybe his own words offer the best gloss on my feeling about Wild Up’s Femenine: “The only trouble is that you master something so well you get tired of it.”

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It wasn’t exactly ambivalence I felt when I walked through the unwindowed institutional chambers where the Metropolitan Museum keeps many of the treasures of modern art, wandering past masterpieces by Giacometti and Soutine, and stepped into Death and the Maid, Cecily Brown’s current show. My first response was to feel utterly locked out by everything I saw, almost to recoil. No one should take this response seriously. Brown has been celebrated for decades; this was my first experience of her work, and it’s a small selection from a significant career. (That said, the show feels crowded, and I wish I could have encountered fewer paintings at once; some of the pictures don’t have room to breathe.) Brown has claimed an interesting aesthetic space, troubling the line, sometimes no more than a hair’s breadth, between figuration and abstraction. The mostly large canvasses in the Met show are equally indebted to abstract expressionism, 17^th-century Dutch and Flemish still life painting, and Victorian illustration.

That’s a fascinating combination, at least in the abstract. Rachel Cusk offers a very generous assessment of Brown’s practice in a somewhat curious essay that pairs Brown and Celia Paul to talk about the fates of female artists: “With paintings of the highest canonical refinement, Cecily’s art appeared to have tunneled up through the continuum of Western art history and emerged into the light-trailing, kaleidoscopic sense-memories of everything we had ever looked at.” I don’t know what the first phrase means, exactly, but the rest of the sentence points in the right direction, at least toward the paintings’ aspirations. And yet at first glimpse, and sometimes in sustained consideration, Brown’s work in the Met show seems chaotic, collapsing into smears of garish color. The mark-making itself is chaotic, with huge muscular sweeps of paint next to ill-defined puddles and tiny intricate brush work. It felt a little like Wild Up’s Femenine, actually, messy and indistinct, at once aleatoric and over-determined.

But I didn’t recoil from the show, I stayed; I’ve been back now four times. My response to some of the work hasn’t changed, though it may only be a matter of time. The show’s organizing principle is vanitas—the old moralizing All is vanity, think only on Death schtick, which is, to be fair, true—manifested most clearly in groupings at either end of the gallery space. At one end there are the references to those still lifes; at the other, a group of paintings featuring one of Brown’s enduring motifs: a woman at her vanity table, gazing in the mirror. Several of these latter paintings are riffs on Charles Allan Gilbert’s punning “All Is Vanity,” from 1892, in which the image of a woman at a vanity table becomes the image of a skull; a variation on the theme makes the same pun from the image of two young girls. I really don’t like these paintings, or not yet (a good example is “Aujourd’hui Rose,” reproduced in the NYT review); they feel overbearingly legible hung in the same space as Brown’s near abstractions, especially since there are so many of them. And they feel tonally incoherent to me, the cliché unenlivened, the critique of sexist tropes and half-ironic, half-earnest meditation on death finally inert.

But other paintings have gotten under my skin; I’m not sure how much I like them, exactly, but I can’t stop thinking about them. Which is a more interesting response, really, a surer sign of a work’s strength. In a wonderful interview included in the exhibition catalog, where Brown walks through the Met’s galleries with a curator, discussing what they see, she talks about being “interested in this idea of where you can enter into a picture visually, and where it pushes you away.” Several of her paintings still push me away. But a painting like “Father of the Bride,” one of my favorites in the show, does draw me in. In the paintings I find less compelling, Brown’s very packed compositions feel unorganized to me, by which I mean that I feel that energy doesn’t seem directed, that there’s not just an overall approach to the canvas but an unmodulated one. Everything everywhere all at once, I guess.

In “Father of the Bride,” a wonderful elegant white form at the middle of the canvas, suggestive of a woman’s body, is both a door into the painting and an organizing principle. The brushwork is intricate, careful, painstaking in a way that I admire, and there’s a sense of distributed weight, of some moments being worked more heavily, others more lightly. I like the sense of gravity this gives, of my eyes being drawn this way and that. (“I love trying to think of how my gaze is moving,” Brown says of looking at great paintings, “as if it’s leaving a trace.”) For instance, a unique—at least I think it’s unique; the paintings open up over time—thin spot to the left of the figure, probably impossible to notice in a reproduction, is like a void left unconquered where your eye can rest. I like that; it feels hospitable. And there are beautiful effects everywhere. My favorite might be the horse’s tail of color in the lower left corner, like an elegantly melted box of crayons. Sometimes Brown’s palette is a little uncongenial for me, it feels overly primary, overly garish, like some of Bonnard’s late landscapes (more coming about Bonnard in a future dispatch); but here there’s an unusual restraint and delicacy in the color. It’s a painting you feel like you could live with, like it wouldn’t be exhausted even after years of looking.

I like Brown’s interiors, too, like “Hangover Square” and maybe especially “Selfie.” In these paintings figuration is a little more settled, imposing an order without feeling like a constraint; in “Hangover Square” the objects in the room—a sofa, a table, a chair, a suggestion of a human figure, a mirror—help to organize the disparate brushwork Brown tends toward. There’s also a wonderful balance in the vertical violet-pink marks that make up the wall against the absolutely sensational horizontal streams of color that create the floorboards. It’s a terrific picture. “Selfie” is even better, achieving what seems to me pretty much a perfect equilibrium between a quite tight sense of order—the windows and canvases that create almost a grid in the upper half of the canvas—and the sensual disorder of the bed, the marks that only become intelligible (for me anyway) as a body when you stumble upon the very legible woman’s face almost at the right edge of the canvas.

Brown’s engagement with Dutch still life painting didn’t entirely convince me; a more successful conversation with the canon came with “Carnival and Lent,” a play on Bruegel and the most ambitious piece in the show. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this painting; I’ve barely begun to see it. The canvas is packed, but though I can’t exactly see it yet, I intuit a structure; energy seems directed, organized. It’s very pleasurable to stumble upon tiny quotations—a face, a suggestion of architecture—which emerge from the general texture and then are lost again. There’s something very playful in it, and also something harrowing. I think it might be a great painting. Just before seeing it for the first time, I had been reviewing a passage in Denys Turner’s wonderful The Darkness of God, in which he talks about a form of apophatic discourse that, paradoxically, works not by negation but instead by profusion: one speaks and speaks about God, piling up predicates until the spine of language snaps. I felt something like this while gazing at Brown’s painting, that she was after something on the other side of all the painting’s noise, that she was straining toward something she couldn’t reach in any other way.

The feelings “Carnival and Lent” provokes, that sense of play and terror, marks it out in the show. My main reservation about Brown’s work, even the work I admire, is that it makes me feel so little. Again, this might change as I see more of her work. The poems of Wallace Stevens left me cold for years, until I finally learned how to read them, how to unlock their particular encoding of emotion—which, once unlocked, is overwhelming. For now, only one painting in Brown’s show strikes me to the quick, one of the earliest canvases included: “The Only Game in Town,” from 1997. It’s one of the vanity table paintings, and though it’s not playing with the skull pun, the lovely woman gazing at her grotesque image in the glass references a different moralizing Victorian trope: think of Portrait of Dorian Gray.

It’s by far the sparest canvas in the Met show, the world beyond the mirror bathed in a pale, thinly painted yellow; the woman is suggested by black outlines, drawn more than painted. This focuses the energy of the painting in the extraordinary rendering of the image in the mirror, queasily packed with color. The marks here owe a lot to Francis Bacon; it’s as though someone put their hand on a heavily made-up face and smeared the flesh like paint. It’s grotesque, it’s terrifying, it’s weirdly beautiful. The lines connecting the woman’s face with its image suggest something like her soul being sucked out. It’s all viscerally very effective.

Maybe my favorite thing about the painting is the one vibrant mark outside the mirror, the red blotch to the left of the woman’s form. What is this? It looks like blood; it could almost be a heart, ripped out of someone’s chest. It’s deeply disturbing; and the black lines like cracks to the left of it, the energetic loop of yellow, suggest that it has disturbed the painting, too, cracked its surface, shifted its gravity. The painting terrifies me, less for its moralizing image than for the violence of its mark-making. I love it. Brown’s show is up until December, and I’ll be visiting this painting many more times. If you’re in New York, don’t miss it.

Again, if you’re able to upgrade to a paid subscription, I’m very grateful for your support of my work.

And as always, thank you for reading—

G.