Morbid Anatomy Museum a dead interesting place to visit in Brooklyn, New York

Focus on death: Visitors can leaf through a diverse collection of books on death, mourning and related topics at the Morbid Anatomy Museum. Photo: Tim Richards

"One of the things I love is the death mask," says Colin Dickey, managing director of New York's Morbid Anatomy Museum. "She was a drowning victim in the Seine and her face was later used as the model for CPR dummies, so she became known as the face that kissed a thousand lips."

The mask with a Mona Lisa smile that hints at secrets known only to its owner is one of the museum's more compelling exhibits. Founded in 2007 by photographer Joanna Ebenstein as an art project, this combined exhibition space, library and cafe explores the intersection of death and beauty. It is housed within a former nightclub in the gritty Gowanus district of Brooklyn.

"There are overlapping constellations of ideas," Dickey says. "Obviously there's the history of anatomy in medicine, death and dying, spectacle, the macabre. But there are also the things that fall through the cracks, that wouldn't have a home in a more traditional museum."

Death mask: L'Inconnue de la Seine attracts interest because of her beatific smile. Photo: Photo courtesy of The Morbid Anatomy Museum

The core of the museum is its second-floor gallery, where the current exhibition The Art of Mourning features decorative arts related to death. It's here that I find the death mask of L'Inconnue de la Seine, the unidentified woman pulled from the river in the 1880s.

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In an effort to establish her identity, the body was put on public display in the Paris mortuary, and became a sensation because of its beatific smile. Copies of the death mask were sold in large numbers, adorning parlours across France.

Nearby are more memorable memento mori works, set on white panels fixed to stripped-back brick walls. It was a common 19th-century practice to commission paintings of deceased loved ones, including children, and a selection of these are on display.

There are paintings of babies from 1830 to 1903, sharing a similar ethereal style. Their subjects float chest-high in clouds, with one girl from 1830 bearing a decidedly grim expression.

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Morbid Anatomy Museum a dead interesting place to visit in Brooklyn, New York