Carnegie Museum exhibit explores the work of artist Joan Brown
PITTSBURGH – If there was a fundamental trait that painter and sculptor Joan Brown carried throughout her life, it was restlessness.
She shifted passions and partners and poured her obsessions into her work. Her output from the time she first broke through on the art scene in the early 1960s until her untimely death in a freak accident in 1990 was uniquely autobiographical and deeply idiosyncratic. To art aficionados, a Joan Brown work is easy to spot.
“There’s a strong feeling that her art and life are connected,” said Cynthia Stucki, a curatorial assistant in contemporary art and photography at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Stucki added that she used her art as “part of an effort to understand the world around her and the things around her.”
Until Sunday, Sept. 24, the museum is hosting the exhibit “Joan Brown,” a survey of her life and art in 44 different paintings and sculptures. Brown spent most of her life in the San Francisco area, and the exhibit originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Widely known on the West Coast, Stucki explained that showing Brown’s work at the Carnegie Museum of Art will shine the spotlight on Brown in this part of the country.
Brown’s career got off to a roaring start by anyone’s estimation. She first took a class at the California School of Fine Arts in 1956, when she was 18, and within four years her work was being displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at a gallery in the city. With a rebellious spirit in keeping with the ethos of the time, Brown resisted fulfilling the expectations of the art world and decided to pursue her own vision. And just as fashions radically changed throughout the 1960s, Brown shifted her style in her first decade as an artist, going from painting abstract works to figurative ones, going from paintings drenched in color to stark black and white and then back to color again. The subject matter could also veer all over the map, going from the whimsical to the weighty.
Above all, Brown is perhaps best-known for the way she incorporated herself and the people, pastimes and ideas that preoccupied her into her work. After the birth of her son, Noel Neri, in 1962, he made his way into her paintings. Passionate about dancing, those images also turned up. In the 1970s, Brown became an obsessive swimmer, and a handful of paintings from the time confront her own post-traumatic stress after she almost drowned while swimming in the San Francisco Bay.
In a 1979 interview, Brown characterized her art as “self portraits, whether they are conscious or unconscious, they are self-portraits,” adding that they contained “facts and fantasies” and “everyday situations.”
As many people did in the 1970s, Brown developed a fascination with spirituality and New Age ideas, and became an acolyte of Sathya Sai Babba, an Indian guru whose followers believed he carried out miracles. Hindu and Egyptian symbols started appearing in her work, and she died while at Sai Babba’s Eternal Heritage Museum in India on Oct. 26, 1990, when a concrete turret fell on her and three other disciples. She was only 52.
Brown herself explained, “I really feel that I paint about the human condition, or, I hope I do. That’s what I try and do. That can be thoughts, feelings, ideas, hopefully all together. Sometimes a little more on one side than the other, but things that we all experience or think about or dream about or hope for…”
“Joan Brown” is in the Heinz Galleries at the Carnegie Museum of Art. For additional information and museum hours, go online to carnegieart.org.