The Muscatine Diver,1962-3
[1] “At a time when in thehands of other many other artists, Philip Pearlstein or Tom Wesselman for example, the nude was presented as inert or ironicallyobjectified, Brown celebrated the human body as lyrical, vital andecstatic.
As a student of Amedée Ozenfant in New York and Fernand Léger in Paris in the lateforties, and later at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earnedan M.A. in art in 1953, Brown was well trained in modernist abstraction, but healso has a deep sympathy for figuration. Brown lived intermittently inNew York City for six years before he settled in 1952 in the Bay Area, where hequickly became an integral part of the figurative movement and oftenparticipated in a drawing group that included RichardDiebenkorn, David Park and Elmer Bischoff. The group, which first beganmeeting to draw from life in 1955, wished to reject academic poses for themodels in favor of something more informal. At the time, Brown wasproducing gestural paintings of football playersand other athletes, derived from photographs in newspapers and magazines. Talking about the sports paintings in 1957 with the art historian Paul Mills,but equally valid for the nudes, Brown announced, , “I wanted to dofigure compositions, but I was tired of the classic kind with everybody juststanding around, so I used photographs in sports magazines as a starting point.”
Self-Portrait, 1994
[2] "William Theophilus Brown, an elegant and irreverent American painter and member of thevenerated figurative movement who met and befriended some of history's greatartists, from PabloPicasso to Igor Stravinsky, diedWednesday at his home in San Francisco. He was 92.
Mr. Brown, who lived inthe opulent San Francisco Towers, which he christened the "Versailles of retirement communities," was painting untilthe end, said his friend and galleristThomas Reynolds. He had a studio a few blocks from his home and continued to takedrawing classes.
'Theophilus Brown wasone of those rare artists who was successful at every stage of his career,'Reynolds said. 'And he was always at the center of the action - in France with Picasso, in New York with (Mark) Rothko and (Willem) de Kooning, in California with the Bay Area figurative painters.'
Reynolds added, 'He waseverybody's favorite dinner companion - charming to theladies and bawdy with the boys.'
Matt Gonzalez, the attorney, artist and former city supervisor, met Mr. Brownnearly a decade ago, and the two developed a close bond.
'We started working inhis studio together,' Gonzalez said. 'Our routine was we'd get together on theweekend, start working at around noon, and at 4:30,we'd pack up and go eat oysters - and drink single malt whiskey'"
'I took him 36 oysters Saturday night and we shared dinner,' Gonzalez said.'He had a good appetite and was in good spirits. But he couldn't leave theapartment, and he was clear that if he couldn't go tohis studio and make art anymore, he didn't want to live. So it was time. Hewas comfortable with where he was. He was due to turn 93 in April, and lived afull life.'"
William TheophilusBrown
[3] "Brown’s now famous joiede vivre was severely tested during the war years. He was drafted just twomonths after his college graduation, and would spend the next four and a half years in the middle of some of the mostferocious fighting of World War II, including the Battle of the Bulge. Admittedly, Brownwas not a natural soldier. 'I hated it'” he says simply. 'I went from privateto corporal in four and a half years. I don’t know anybody who rose so little. Being a graduate from a college like Yale was just poison forthe old sergeants. They were not kind to me' But he endured, and along the waygained perspective he otherwise might never have found. 'I like what Norman Mailer said about the war,' says Brown about a period in hislife he rarely talks about. 'Mailer spent two years in the army, and he said, ‘They were the worst years of my life, but the most important.’That’s how I feel about it, too. It was a big corrective for me. I had lived a veryprivileged life. The war put things into perspective for me.'”
Self-Portrait, 1964
[4] "Four months before hisdeath, Brown gave an interview in which hefact-checked his Wikipedia entry. He found the entry accurate, on the whole, but termed his classification as an abstract expressionist"horseshit."
Football Players Sketch, 1954
Reading about the life ofWilliam Theophilus Brown yesterday -- his long career and devotion to painting,music and his friends; the careful, graceful way he lived as anoutsider/insider -- and reviewing the broad range of his work -- was engrossing, moving and amusing.
David McCarthy's article cited below is well worth seeking out both for its account of aspects of life in the1950s that few people think or write about any more, but mainly for its exploration of how Bill Brown, WynnChamberlain and Diane Arbus found theirway forward with subject and form.
I failed to find, as I hoped I would, something “quotable” to include here from Brown’sgreat friend Christopher Isherwood, so unless and until I do I think Brown's own words (especially his comment about his Wikipedia biography -- notwithstanding the good Football Players sketch above) -- and those of his other friends will suffice.
Citations:
[1] David McCarthy, Social Nudism, Masculinity and the Male Nude in the Work ofWilliam Theo Brown and Wynn Chamberlain in the 1960s. Archives of American ArtJournal 38, nos. 1-2 (1998), 28-38.
[2] JulianGuthrie, William Theophilus Brown, SanFrancisco Chronicle, Friday, February 10, 2012
[3] B.Bamsey, William Theophilus Brown,Artworks Magazine, 4-7-10.
[4] Wikipediaentry, “William Theophilus Brown.”
