Engaging retrospective a deep dive into S.F. artist’s evolution
SFMOMA exhibition showcases bold, figurative style that defined Joan Brown until her death at 52 in 1990
For a few seconds, the pleasurable cold of San Francisco Bay gripped me while viewing the Joan Brown retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
After works that show the San Francisco artist’s evolution from abstraction in the late 1950s and early ’60s to the bold, fantastical figurative style that would define her until her death in 1990 at age 52, you’re suddenly plunged in the water.
Not literally, of course, but walking into the gallery devoted to Brown’s swim-related works is just as affecting. The paintings collected here each tell a story about Brown, including her swim lessons with Hall of Fame coach Charlie Sava, her win in a 1976 swimBrown’s ming championship, and a near-death experience during a race from Alcatraz to Aquatic Park in 1975.
Suspended in the center of the gallery is the 1974 sheet metal and wood sculpture “Divers,” depicting from above and below a female figure breaking through the water, and a second woman mid-swim. You can easily spend minutes with each of works throughout the exhibition absorbing their stories, because of the thorough texts by curators Janet Bishop and Nancy Lim and also the deeply personal nature of each painting and sculpture.
“She was an incredible storyteller,” Lim said. “That’s something we try to emphasize in the way that we organized each of the galleries and how the galleries string together. … This impulse that she had to share all that happens to her is part of what makes (her work) such a rich viewing experience.”
Bishop and Lim’s riveting exhibition demonstrates Brown’s storytelling skill, with many of those stories
centered in San Francisco. The artist was a native of the city and spent decades painting and presenting work in Northern California. A graduate of the California School of Fine Arts (later the now-closed San Francisco Art Institute), she also had a long relationship with SFMOMA. The more than 80 works on view make this the most significant re-evaluation of the artist in two decades.
Brown’s origins in abstraction lay an interesting foundation for what was to come. You see figures emerge throughout her paintings with works such as “Girl in the Surf With the Moon Casting a Shadow” from 1962 and “Noel’s First Christmas” (depicting her son) offering an enticing preview of what will fully flower. These works are especially interesting when considered with the companion show “Joan Brown and Friends” on the second floor, which better contextualizes some of the layering techniques and blown-out shapes Brown explored in this period, a la Beat artist Jay DeFeo.
By the late 1960s, Brown’s vivid, cartoonlike style of figuration is fully formed. “Grey Cat with Madrone and Birch Trees” from 1968 is a signature animal painting for the artist (she revisits animals often) showing the feline against an orange sky with fog rolling in behind. “Gordon, Joan + Rufus in Front of S.F. Opera House,” a selfportrait from 1969 with her third husband, Gordon Cook, and their dog, introduces Brown as her own subject.
Beyond the swim series, works such as “Christmas Time 1970 Joan + Noel,” showing Brown against changing leaves, her young son clad in a San Francisco Giants cap, and her depiction of herself as a child in “Portrait of a Girl” with a young Brown shown against a glittering Chinatown dragon, also strongly convey that idiosyncratic attention to story. Her paintings in the later “Journey” series depict Brown’s relationship with Modesto Lanzone, a San Francisco restaurateur with whom she traveled to Italy. The paintings show the two in transit, dancing and kissing, and feel as intimate as diary pages.
“There was such a seamlessness between her art and her life,” Bishop said. “Whatever she was passionate about would show up in her in her paintings; it’s one of the things that really distinguishes her. There’s a kind of fearlessness in her subject matter. They might even be seen as corny, and yet she didn’t hold back.”
By the time you reach the final works done before her death in the collapse of an ashram in Puttaparthi, India, in 1990, you feel as though you’ve experienced a series of vignettes. Works such as the “Bather” series (don’t miss the “Bather” on the third floor near the museum’s Steps Coffee), which shows her as versions of human-feline hybrids, her “St. Francis + St. Claire” from 1989 and her columned triptych “Ganesha, the Lesson, Hanuman” from 1981 all feel serene while sacrificing none of joy of her earlier work.
Appropriately, the last piece you see before exit is Brown’s 1981 “Cat and Rat Obelisk,” which combines the artist’s spiritual searching with the unexpected humor that makes her work so rewarding on repeat viewings.