‘Joan Would not Give a Rattling’ | Regina Marler

Among the many ephemera displayed within the Joan Brown retrospective on the San Francisco Museum of Trendy Artwork is the wall telephone that hung in her studio, its bone-colored receiver an earth-toned summary with cadmium yellow dabs. A blue patch on the telephone’s higher proper nook suggests hurried snatches on the handpiece, extensive of goal. Buddies bear in mind Joan Brown “lined from head to toe with paint.” Whereas nonetheless an undergraduate she discovered success with summary and figurative work so thick with paint that their surfaces sag and ripple, betraying how moist they remained beneath the crust—for years. She slapped on shade with trowels and house-painting brushes, at occasions nearly sculpting.

Even after she deserted impasto for the monochrome enamel surfaces of her self-portraits—the extremely private work for which she is now higher recognized—the sensual materiality of paint remained a continuing for her, because it did for different artists, together with her lecturers David Park and Elmer Bischoff, related to the Bay Space Figurative Motion. A lot of this texture is misplaced in copy, together with Brown’s delicate incorporations of combined media, reminiscent of glitter. One other pleasure in viewing the eighty works in “Joan Brown” (the present travels subsequent to the Carnegie Museum of Artwork in Pittsburgh) is the shock of their scale and the vibrating depth of their sweet colours.

Over twenty-five years Brown portrayed herself dancing, swimming, portray, and touring, interacting with males, pets, and her younger son. She dons night and marriage ceremony robes, swimsuits, lingerie, and informal garments, and seems many occasions as an animal or hybrid, clothed in fur or a pelt or sporting a masks. It says a lot for the feline inscrutability of Brown’s expression in most of those portraits that we calmly settle for the substitute of a cat’s head in The Bride (1970). However in Brown’s portraits of herself at work there may be little sense of costume or efficiency. Regardless of the brilliant colours and fast, energetic strains Brown favors, these paint-spattered figures gaze soberly from the canvas at their maker, interpretive instruments for an primarily non-public, looking character. “Wanting in a mirror,” Brown wrote, “turning into a spectator, actually describing myself, is a really graphic method of being introspective.”

Brown’s mom, who had hoped for a instructing profession as an alternative of marriage and motherhood, was depressed and resentful; her father, a financial institution worker, drank. The household’s three-room Marina District residence supplied little privateness or calm. Joan, an solely baby, slept within the eating room together with her maternal grandmother however was usually woken at evening by her mom’s epileptic seizures. She was shunted by Catholic ladies’ colleges, the place she felt she realized little (exterior the classroom she learn continuously, significantly in historical historical past and cultures). “It was darkish. I imply darkish within the psychological method,” she recalled of her childhood residence. “All I wished to do was develop up and get the hell out of there.”

She drew, however had no artwork instruction. After graduating from highschool in 1955 she visited the California College of High-quality Arts (later the San Francisco Artwork Institute) on a whim.¹ Dazzled by the ambiance of freedom and vitality—college students portray within the hallways and taking part in bongos within the courtyard—she purchased a pair of arty earrings and submitted a portfolio of her pencil sketches of film stars. She began lessons that fall. Though she suffered in her drawing class and deliberate to drop out earlier than summer time, by the following semester she had met and begun relationship Invoice Brown, a figurative painter and Korean Warfare veteran who inspired her to take a summer time course with Bischoff.

Having outgrown two of the dominant colleges of his day, Surrealism and Summary Expressionism, Bischoff (like his friends David Parks and Richard Diebenkorn) was feeling his method into figuration, a motion Willem de Kooning had spearheaded on the East Coast when he launched his controversial Girl work after a profitable interval of nonobjective gestural abstraction. For many avant-garde midcentury artists and critics within the US, illustration was hopelessly passé. De Kooning’s return to figuration prompted a disgusted outburst from Clement Greenberg, the apostle of the New York College: “In as we speak’s world, it’s unimaginable to color a face.” Bischoff urged his college students to work intuitively and spontaneously—in brief, like Summary Expressionists—however to note the unusual objects round them.

Satisfied she had “no expertise,” Brown threw herself nonetheless right into a collection of exuberant work. She found she most well-liked giant canvases. “I paint the dimensions I do as a result of I really feel like a participant,” she later stated, “like I can step into the photographs. After I paint small…I’m at all times a spectator.” She married Brown in August 1956 and the following yr gained second place and fifty {dollars} in a neighborhood juried present during which her lecturers gained honorable mentions. She quickly featured in SFMoMA’s annual exhibitions of Bay Space artwork, in addition to within the artist-run galleries within the Fillmore, amongst them the Six Gallery, the place Allen Ginsberg first learn Howl in 1955.

In 1958 she moved with Invoice into an residence subsequent door to Jay DeFeo and her husband, Wally Hedrick, in a tenement constructing at 2330 Fillmore Avenue generally known as Painterland: a black and white Beat Period reel of chain-smoking, bathtub beer-drinking, and fixed limit-pushing.² As Hedrick recalled, it “vibrated with all of those combined personalities…the poets came visiting lots and there was a variety of bongo and chanting and form of spontaneous musical drumming.” Jay and Joan grew shut, and the 2 {couples} knocked a gap within the wall between their flats. These have been the years during which DeFeo was endlessly remodeling her immense opus, finally known as The Rose; its deep impasto, as many as two thousand layers of principally lead white and darkish gray paint, was stiffened with wood dowels.³ As she carved into its floor, DeFeo would save slices of The Rose to mount on black velvet and provides as birthday presents.

When George Staempfli, David Park’s New York supplier, got here to see DeFeo’s work in 1959 at Park’s suggestion, she took him by the wall to see Joan’s work as properly. He instantly purchased two canvases. The subsequent yr he signed her, supplying a month-to-month stipend of 300 {dollars}. She was the youngest artist within the Whitney’s 1960 Younger America exhibition (and one in every of 5 girls out of thirty-six artists included). Her first New York solo present, in 1961, featured her mysterious semiabstract Factor work, blurring determine and floor. By then she had already offered Thanksgiving Turkey (1959), a patchy however decisive summary, to the Museum of Trendy Artwork. She was twenty-two. Hedrick later remarked that Joan Brown was the one artist he knew who had cash; her success “appeared like a fairytale.” San Francisco had no severe marketplace for artwork, just some galleries promoting “clowns and panorama work,” because the sculptor Manuel Neri put it: “in the event you have been being profitable then there was one thing kinda incorrect along with your work.”⁴

After Brown’s marriage broke down she moved in with Neri, a graduate scholar at CSFA and the director of Six Gallery. They shared a studio near the Embarcadero and a risky, mutually influential relationship. Brown modeled her slight, narrow-hipped physique for sculptures like Joan Brown Seated (1959/solid 1963), shaping Neri’s conception of the best feminine type.⁵ Working beside him pulled the feminine determine to the middle of Brown’s canvases. They traveled to Europe in 1961 for a four-month artwork tour that “knocked me out,” as Brown recalled, together with a Rembrandt exhibition in London and Goya and Velázquez on the Prado. Her figuration over the following two years reveals a profound response to the Previous Masters, echoing and borrowing from their work in addition to paying direct homage. One in all these work, Flora, was chosen for the duvet of Artforum in July 1963. Her more and more dramatic use of shade—usually in brilliant blocks that intensify however fail to outline physique elements (the cobalt triangle on the chest of the determine in Lady Sitting)—owes extra to Neri’s affect and to the push–pull between abstraction and figuration.

They married in 1962, and Brown gave start to their son that summer time. Noel Elmer Neri was the inspiration for a collection of painterly semiautobiographical home interiors in heat roses, reds, and yellows—the paint nonetheless far too thick for high-quality element—together with whimsical nonetheless lifes of cookie trays. The grid emerges, together with the checkerboard, anticipating the tile strips and the carpet-like borders of her later work, one purpose Brown is typically related with the Sample and Ornament motion.

Brown’s stylistic improvement may be roughly periodized into her 4 marriages, or into her three predominant eras of labor: lush semiabstraction; flat, diary-like self-portraits; and symbolically wealthy late works drawing on historical religions. And her whole profession may be cleaved into earlier than and after 1964, when on the verge of reaching a nationwide status she selected to cease exhibiting her work and experiment as an alternative. She had misplaced curiosity within the impasto that collectors wished from her; it was “getting monotonous,” she recalled. Surprised, Staempfli launched her. Brown and Neri divorced two years later, however Brown’s stepdaughter Ruby Neri remembers how a lot her father admired Brown’s indifference to the artwork market: “Joan doesn’t give a rattling.”

Brown had warned Staempfli earlier that her motives weren’t industrial: “I’d by no means sacrifice what I need to do and what’s crucial for me to do, even when I’ve to gather rubbish for a dwelling.” Her choice was not unprecedented in her circle. DeFeo had withdrawn from the artwork world in 1963 and stopped making artwork fully for 4 years after her eviction from Painterland compelled her, heartbroken, to “full” The Rose in 1965.⁶ Each girls continued to show. This was one of many few areas during which Brown conceded she had been held again as a lady: she needed to piece collectively a dwelling from small instructing gigs, usually working nights and weekends, since faculty artwork departments most well-liked to rent male artists. After securing an assistant professorship at Berkeley in 1974, she got here to treat instructing as a vocation equal to portray.

Property of Joan Brown/Museum of High-quality Arts, Boston

Joan Brown: Gray Cat with Madrone and Birch Bushes, 1968

Property of Joan Brown/Assortment of Noel Neri

Joan Brown: Tempus Fugit, 1970

Within the studio she started from scratch, attempting to attain management with out dropping vitality. Skeptical responses to some small nonetheless lifes didn’t faze her: “I used to be turned on, I used to be excited, I didn’t care.” She painted a collection of dreamlike animal-themed works within the late Nineteen Sixties, the results of day by day life drawing on the zoo and Golden Gate Park and intense identification with particular animals: the cat is to Joan Brown because the bull is to Picasso. Though these “fantasy” works, as Brown termed them, have been panned when she exhibited them regionally, she got here to treat them as the primary of her extra non secular work, related together with her longstanding curiosity in historical symbology. They led her again to the human type, however in addition they prefigure the animals and cat-human hybrids all through her later work, explorations of our twin nature: “It was at all times very poignant, that play between half animal and half human.” Probably the most spectacular of those hybrids, a diptych known as The Bather #5 (1982), with its sinuous odalisque foregrounded towards a tiled fountain, is simply too giant for the exhibition and hangs elsewhere at SFMoMA. The determine’s placid, Ingres-inspired head rests sphinx-like on a tiger-striped physique, each factor of which, besides the tail, merges the human with the animal. The supplier George Adams remembers Toby, one in every of Brown’s cats, observing their dialog throughout a studio go to, turning his head between Adams and Brown as they spoke. When he pointed this out, she replied nonchalantly: “He is aware of precisely what we’re speaking about.”

Along with her third husband, Gordon Cook dinner, a longtime pal who taught printmaking on the San Francisco Artwork Institute, Brown moved to a home alongside the Sacramento Delta. Whereas there, she picked up a can of enamel home paint and eventually achieved the flatness and shade saturation she had been working towards since abandoning the troweled work. In a rush, the monumental self-portraits began appearing—greater than eighty over the following 20 years—ceaselessly processing and documenting her concepts, main life occasions, and relationships, usually towards backgrounds that included Bay Space landmarks or the downtown San Francisco skyline. These have been quick, fluid work, though one in every of her most arresting from this era, Portrait of a Lady (1971), a self-portrait as a baby towards an impressive Chinese language dragon mural, reveals that she may decelerate to include semi-legible symbols (and ideograms, on this case) from cultures that impressed her. The Mayan frieze behind the animals in The Golden Age: The Tapir + The Jaguar (1985) is one other instance, as is The Finish of the Affair (1976), not included on this present, a story work divided into two scenes. The left is of a solitary male determine in black, seen from behind; the rosier proper half reveals a pair sitting on a mattress collectively, the male determine lined fully with hieroglyphs, an assortment of which encompass his feminine associate on the mattress like collage scraps. Meant as homages, these cultural borrowings are, Marci Kwon argues within the catalog, “decreased to totems of distinction and turn into equipment to the story of Brown’s life.”

Cook dinner launched Brown to open-water swimming within the frigid San Francisco Bay, which led to a brand new collection painted with much more financial system, impressed by her coach Charlie Sava’s critique of her swimming strokes. As a member of the all-male Dolphin Membership at Aquatic Park Cove, Cook dinner may enter the water from the clubhouse, however girls needed to disguise their garments and keys and swim from the seaside, then construct small fires afterward to heat themselves. In 1974 Brown spearheaded a profitable class motion lawsuit towards the Dolphin Membership and two different all-male water golf equipment at Aquatic Park.

Property of Joan Brown/San Fransisco Museum of Trendy Artwork

Joan Brown: After the Alcatraz Swim #1, 1975

Property of Joan Brown/Anglim Trimble, San Francisco/Museum of Trendy Artwork

Joan Brown: The Bicentennial Champion, 1976

Property of Joan Brown/Venus Over Manhattan, New York

Joan Brown: Girl Getting ready for a Bathe, 1975

Property of Joan Brown/Matthew Marks Gallery

Joan Brown: Summer time Solstice, 1982

Probably the most transferring of Brown’s swim work report the 1975 Alcatraz swim, an annual girls’s occasion during which she nearly drowned after a freighter handed among the many swimmers. Brown and eight different girls needed to be hauled from the water into rescue boats. In every of the three numbered works that adopted, Brown contained the emergency to a portray inside a portray. Stoic, solitary feminine figures in nautical clothes sit or stand in easy interiors, their backs to a scene of chaos, uneven water, and near-death. Wealthy carpets below their ft reinforce the pleasures of terra firma. Brown continued to strip again quantity and extraneous element, in order that in these work and the joyful Dancers collection (1972–1976) her figures are decreased to deft brush drawings coloured in with uniform washes or left as ghostly unfilled outlines.

These have been the works that started to reengage critics and sellers, and in the course of the Seventies they confirmed at SFMoMA, the Whitney, and Berkeley. (Berkeley and the Oakland Museum of California additionally mounted her largest retrospective so far, “Transformation: The Artwork of Joan Brown,” in 1998.) After a visit to Italy in 1976, the Dancers transitioned right into a quieter and extra private collection exploring romance—together with one in every of Brown’s few photos of herself smiling, in The Dinner Date #2 (1973). However this was not a resting place, both. “Joan being Joan,” as George Adams recalled, “she was solely involved in what she was doing subsequent.”

Cook dinner and Brown divorced in 1976, not lengthy after Brown took Noel on an extended European tour funded by an NEA Visible Artists’ Fellowship. The subsequent yr a Guggenheim Fellowship took her to Egypt. She traveled the world—Mexico, Africa, China, India—usually returning to sacred websites or these of archaeological significance. She pored over theosophical texts, the favored Seth books by Jane Roberts, and works like Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975) that drew parallels between Western science and Jap mysticism. At this level her research of fable and faith discovered an echo within the New Age motion—a synthesis of assorted Jap beliefs with the West Coast antiestablishment ethos of the late Fifties and Nineteen Sixties.

What Adams calls “journey” is code for the unsettling metaphysical material of Brown’s later work, the temple settings and spiritual imagery by which she superior her rising conviction that historical perception techniques had an underlying unity. She noticed this unity expressed formally as properly, remarking on the similarities in architectural kinds (the ziggurat, the pyramids) and using line and area in two-dimensional works throughout disparate cultures. Her Egypt-inspired work have been dismissed as “vapid” and “corny,” however she had moved past aesthetic evaluations; her works have been not about that.

In 1979 she met Mike Hebel, a metropolis police officer and fellow seeker, on the Ananda Group Home in San Francisco. They married the following yr in a Hindu ceremony at SFMoMA. Joan wore a sari, as her scholar Bob Brokl recalled, and “was borne in on a litter. She picked probably the most engaging male artwork college students.” After their first journey to India collectively Brown and Hebel grew to become devotees of the guru Sathya Sai Baba. From this level on Brown held a mystical worldview, open to indicators and wonders. On return visits to Sai Baba’s complicated in Puttaparthi, she held on her transient moments of contact with him. She launched Jay DeFeo to his teachings and tried to carry her to India to fulfill him. She got here to imagine that Sai Baba directed all her creative endeavors and took on a number of public commissions, together with three surviving tiled obelisks in San Francisco, supposed to democratize her work and unfold her guru’s humanitarian message. These site-specific works mix animal imagery with native parts and delicate non secular symbolism, as if to check the non secular ease of the animal world with the turmoil and materials strivings of humanity. When Brown was lastly granted an viewers with Sai Baba in 1988, all she requested was his assist in therapeutic DeFeo, who had most cancers.

In September 1990 a name got here into the artwork division at Berkeley with the information that Brown had died in India. “We have been devastated,” her colleague Katherine Sherwood remembers, till “Joan known as.” Nobody ever came upon who had reported her dying. A month later, Brown and her two American assistants have been crushed by a concrete turret that fell into the courtyard of the Everlasting Heritage Museum in Puttaparthi whereas they have been putting in a thirteen-foot obelisk, her reward to Sai Baba. She was fifty-two. Some years earlier Brown was requested what saved her portray. Her reply would have made becoming final phrases: “To simply continue to grow and altering, and simply preserve letting go, letting go, letting go of any sort of boundaries or guidelines and laws that I or anybody units up. However what I primarily need is to be shocked. The joyousness of that shock. Going previous what .”