Joan Brown at SF MOMA

I have my friend Gale Jesi, photography teacher extraordinaire, to thank for introducing me to Joan Brown’s work. I don’t know how I missed it, as it was a prominent part of the 60s and 70s Bay Area art scene Joan Brown was a luminary.

So when I saw a Joan Brown retrospective being held at San Francisco’s MOMA I had to go. I’m sensitive to painting, and picky. The exhibit is basically in three parts, corresponding to periods in her work.

The first part, from the late 1950s to somewhere in the 60s, is Brown’s version of Abstract Expressionism, or something close to it, maybe a West Coast version. Darker colors, very (very!) heavy oil impastos that threaten to fall off the canvas. I liked them a lot better than most AbEx, finding her semi-hidden figuration appealing. Brown had the fortune, or misfortune, to become a ‘museum’ artist very early in her career. That meant always painting large canvases, as that seems to be what museums like.

The second part, my favorite by far, sees her dropping the AbEx and moving into a ‘modernist’ (whatever that means) phase, with limited perspective and flat planes. Her colors became pastels, and vivid red, blues and oranges. Still working in oils, Brown went even bigger in size. She painted the most delightful animals, her cats and fish in particular, along with, and often stealing the show from her human figures in the same painting. The oil paint, rendered flat and in broad areas of sky and water, shows a great subtlety, and looking closely you see a lush garden of even more subtle detail throughout. As a painter, I took note of the time and effort she expended to give these canvases their…. well, life. And they do have life. Tremendous life. Most of her media reproductions are of these paintings.

Then, apparently after running out of proper artist oil paint, and she must have gone through a lot of it given the broad expanses and size of these paintings, she went to the hardware store and bought oil enamel by the gallon. Thrilled by this discovery, she dropped all her previous painting style (but not her designs) and from then on used hardware paint, and the pictures got even bigger, now approaching wall size. My personal view is that this was the beginning of a period in which her designs became simpler and simpler and finally cartoonish, with essentially no detail painted into the broad expanses of enamel. These, while not bad, to me simply don’t have the joy of the middle period. One can’t but wonder where her restless energy would have taken her next. She died in 1990, in India, at the age of 52. Such a loss.