Estate of Joe Brainard
Tibor de Nagy is pleased to present Joe Brainard - 100 Works, the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Brainard's work since his retrospective at MoMA PS1 in 2001.
The current exhibition is comprised of collages, watercolors, oil paintings, and drawings, from large-scale to miniature. Many of these works have never been publicly shown. The exhibition brings together Brainard's classic subjects such as Nancy (based on the Ernie Bushmiller comic strip), Madonnas (inspired by Ukrainian shops on the Lower East side where he lived when he first moved to New York and by cathedrals he saw in Mexico), his iconic Flowers (pansies, poppies, and daisies), and Erotic works (male torsos and diving figures), as well as a serene oil painting of a whippet. One of Brainard's favorite pastimes was smoking, and he based many works on this activity—some in the exhibition contain actual butts, and one is a large, multipanel depiction of the classic Cinzano ashtray, a subject he returned to often.
Often remembered as gentle, generous, and affectionate, he was described by John Ashbery as "one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person, nice as an artist." But he was far more than simply nice. As Peter Schjeldahl put it, he was "touched by genius." Brainard was a friend and ally of poets since his youth in Oklahoma, and continued to be throughout his life in New York. In fact he became a writer himself. His memoir I Remember, continuously in print since 1970, has been translated into eight languages, and his Collected Writings were issued by the prestigious Library of America.
Brainard grew up in Tulsa and moved to New York in 1960. He gained early recognition with his first solo exhibition in 1965 in New York. Over the next decade he exhibited regularly and his work was included in numerous museum exhibitions in the United States and abroad. In his mid-30s he gradually stopped making and exhibiting art and devoted much of his time thereafter to reading. Brainard’s work was the subject of a traveling retrospective curated by Constance Lewallen at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2001. His drawings, collages, assemblages, and paintings are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others.
Those needing a dose of gaiety—both the festive and the faggy kinds—should make their way to “100 Works,” a survey of paintings, drawings, and collages by the late Joe Brainard(1942–1994). Most are no bigger than a notebook page, and the dense hang is perfectly in keeping with the artist’s aesthetic of accumulation. He was, after all, the author of I Remember (1975), an expansive inventory of memories ranging from sad to sexy, beautiful to banal.
May 2019
Minor Master or Master of the Minor?One reason Joe Brainard made so many small works was to convey that modesty and ambition were not mutually exclusive.
Joe Brainard’s last New York show in his lifetime was legendary because of the sheer number of works it included. It was in 1975 at the Fishbach Gallery and Brainard was in his early 30s. Rather than making large works, as did many of his contemporaries, he cheerfully did the opposite: within a period of a few years, Brainard made more than 3,000 tiny collages. The gallery managed to exhibit 1,500 of them, which was quite a logistical feat.
Brainard’s reason for making small, affordable works is revealing. Talking to Lee Wohlfert about his students at the School of Visual Arts and about his motivations for working small, Brainard stated:
Most of the students agree that the art scene has gotten too big, too serious, too sacred, too self-important and too expensive.Already a bad situation in Brainard’s lifetime, the art world’s self-importance has become appalling since his death in 1994. The triumph of obscene wealth, bulbous frivolity, and swell-headed immodesty is not something the art world should be proud of, yet it is. (Maybe it is time that critics start calling out curators who seem to chase and champion only financially successful artists who make large works.)
Beyond the fact that Brainard reveled in making art, I think one reason he made so many small works was to convey that modesty and ambition were not mutually exclusive. To this combination he added a large dose of relentlessness, heightened by his inclination to be thorough. He once wrote me that he was going to read all of Charles Dickens’s novels again.