Joan Brown
In the late 1950’s, the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) began a series of exhibitions under the heading of ‘The Arts of San Francisco.’ Occurring roughly every four years, the Summer of 1971 marked the fourth such undertaking. Conceived as a survey of art in the greater Bay Area, the program included both solo presentations and group exhibitions, intended to provide a cross-section of the diverse perspectives to be found across the region. Among the artists whose work was featured that year were Manuel Neri, Don Campbell, Leo Valledor, Roy Gover, Jan Evans and Joan Brown.
Brown’s exhibition coincided with a return to the studio by an artist who had rejected her early fame, providing an overview of the new and novel direction she was experimenting with. While consisting mainly the large, 4’x8’ masonite paintings Brown was focused on in 1970-71, interspersed are whimsical-yet-serious studies of everyday items on brightly patterned grounds. These flat and colorful works were in sharp contrast to the paintings Brown had become well-known for, the thickly painted, expressionistic scenes from the late ’50s and early ‘60s. Yet curator Suzanne Foley considers Brown’s new technique to be an evolution, where Brown “consciously employs opposites,” and where “the tensions between two-dimensional, pattern-like representation and three-dimensional description of form are vitalizing elements.” Certainly her subject matter had retained much of the honesty and personal references from that earlier period, subjects which would go on to define her work thereafter. As an inflection point in her career though, it was transformative, a validation of her new direction. In prescient terms, Foley sums up these paintings as “[presenting] basic statements about experience in such a direct way that they transcend a personal exposition and become statements of joy and delight in living, remembering - and painting.”
Installation view of Joan Brown’s first exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1971.
© The Estate of Joan Brown. Image courtesy George Adams Gallery Archives.
In the late 1950’s, the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) began a series of exhibitions under the heading of ‘The Arts of San Francisco.’ Occurring roughly every four years, the Summer of 1971 marked the fourth such undertaking. Conceived as a survey of art in the greater Bay Area, the program included both solo presentations and group exhibitions, intended to provide a cross-section of the diverse perspectives to be found across the region. Among the artists whose work was featured that year were Manuel Neri, Don Campbell, Leo Valledor, Roy Gover, Jan Evans and Joan Brown.
Joan Brown: Paintings coincided with a return to the studio by an artist who had rejected her early fame, providing an overview of the new and novel direction she was experimenting with. While consisting mainly the large, 4’x8’ masonite paintings Brown was focused on in 1970-71, interspersed are whimsical-yet-serious studies of everyday items on brightly patterned grounds. These flat and colorful works were in sharp contrast to the paintings Brown had become well-known for, the thickly painted, expressionistic scenes from the late ’50s and early ‘60s. Yet curator Suzanne Foley considers Brown’s new technique to be an evolution, where Brown “consciously employs opposites,” and where “the tensions between two-dimensional, pattern-like representation and three-dimensional description of form are vitalizing elements.” Certainly her subject matter had retained much of the honesty and personal references from that earlier period, subjects which would go on to define her work thereafter. As an inflection point in her career though, it was transformative, a validation of her new direction. In prescient terms, Foley sums up these paintings as “[presenting] basic statements about experience in such a direct way that they transcend a personal exposition and become statements of joy and delight in living, remembering - and painting.”