Frederick J. Brown: The Sound of Color at Berry Campbell Gallery

FREDERICK J. BROWN THE

SOUND

OF

COLOR

F R E D E R I C K J. B R O W N I N H I S N E W YO R K S T U D I O, c . 197 0

FREDERICK J. BROWN THE

SOUND

OF

COLOR

September 9 – October 9, 2021 Curated by Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims Essay by Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims and Bentley E. Brown

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A L L I M A G E S © E S TAT E O F F R E D E R I C K J. B R O W N E S S AY © D R . L O W E R Y S T O K E S S I M S A N D B E N T L E Y E . B R O W N

C OV E R: I N T H E B E G I N N I N G (D E TA I L ), 1971, O I L O N C A N VA S, 92¾ X 13 6½ I N .

FRED BROWN: DOING HIS OWN THING by Lowery Stokes Sims and Bentley E. Brown After midnight, that’s when the creative spirits are loose. —­Frederick J. Brown1

W

hen he first arrived in New York in 1970, Fred Brown asked the musicians he met if they thought he could make it in the City.2 Dewey Redman told him that all he had to do was to contribute something to be part of the creative community. Brown had come to SoHo at the suggestion of a cohort of Chicago musicians including Anthony Braxton and LeRoy Jenkins who were following Ornette Coleman’s experimentations in free-jazz. Brown also reunited with a longtime friend from Chicago, Sherry Brewer, who had come to New York after studying at the Goodman School in Chicago to pursue a career in dancing.3 Almost immediately Brown was introduced to jazzman Ornette Coleman by Braxton and Jenkins. Brown recalled, “Ornette’s place…[in SoHo]…was the headquarters. It was the center where everyone gravitated.

He was also recording there.”4 Coleman, who had predicted that SoHo would soon be the center of the art world, helped Brown secure a sublet up the street from him on Prince Street. In retrospect, this area offered the best space of incubation for the creative and ambitious young artist. During his first night in his Prince Street sublet, Brown started a

FIG. 1. ANTHONY BR A X TON, 1970, OIL ON C ANVAS, 87 X 63 IN.

triptych and worked on it all night. The next day he started a painting of Anthony Braxton (1970) [fig. 1]. This work is a symphony of broad, gestural strokes and timely veins of dripping color. In a few brush loads of black paint, he sketched in Braxton’s figure. Details are at a minimum: no distinguishing features or details, the silhouette of the musicians’ characteristic Afro hairdo. The figure is integrated within what seems to be a landscape—two strong black bands extend from either side of Braxton’s head—with a yellow sky and a ground with large areas of red, blue, soiled white, and purplish brown.

Shared creative interests bound Brown and Braxton together during their early formative years in SoHo. They had known each other since the 1950s when they met in high school. They shared resources, went to museums together, and Braxton played his music as Brown painted. This was the first of many collaborative and enduring relationships that Brown established. Coleman continued to midwife Brown’s career and advised him that securing a gallery was essential to the development of his career.

Brown went first to FlatsFixed Gallery where Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns had shown their work. The owner, Mark Gabor, struck a deal with Brown to sell his watercolors for $80.50 each, although in Chicago they were being sold for $160 with half going to Brown.5 But more characteristic of Brown’s work at this time is Untitled, 1970 [plate 1]. Brown creates upward thrusts of paint which light up the rest of the composition like fireworks ascending into the night sky.

While his associations with jazz musicians characterized his initial landing in New York, Brown soon surrounded himself with a cohort of visual artists while living and working in and around the Bowery. Daniel LaRue Johnson was one of the first visual artists he met during the seminal visit to Coleman’s loft. Johnson, in turn, introduced Brown to Larry Rivers, Al Loving, Kenneth Noland, Bill Hutson, Frank Bowling, and Gerald Jackson, all of whom lived in the vicinity. During this time Brown was—by his own account—working eight hours a day.

As seen in works such as Glaxtic Dust, Inside the Galaxie [plate 3], and In the Beginning [plate 4]—also from 1971—he gradually moved into color field and “splash” techniques in his painting, with the goading of his new artistic associates. These paintings both reflected the free, gestural and uncon-

scious tendencies of the 1950s and the “color field” tendencies of the 1960s and early 1970s.6 These were typical of the paintings that had attracted some of Brown’s earliest patrons.

In 1971, Danny Johnson brought collector Larry Aldrich to Brown’s studio. He chose one of the splash paintings to purchase. This acquisition was timely because Aldrich included the painting in a group show, Contemporary Reflections, at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, which opened in the spring of 1972. From this exhibition, Brown got his first commission to do an eighteen by twelve-foot painting for the home of Harold and Ruth Spelke in Connecticut which led to another commission in 1977 from Tom and Tulita Hume.

Eventually, Brown left the Bowery, and as he observed in 1998: “My friend Claude Lawrence came by and we went looking for another place. And we were walking down Wooster Street and found the loft at 120 Wooster.”7 “The loft” would become the site of some of Brown’s transition into figuration in the late 1970s, as well as his broadbased involvement in performance and happenings. He collaborated with a number of artists, musicians and dancers during that halcyon decade, as he widened his circle of acquaintances in New York City. Notably among them were musician and arts administrator James Jordan, poet/political activist and television journalist Felipe (Phil) Luciano, painters Grégoire Müller and Edvin Stratmanus.

Müller became an important comrade in arms for Brown during the mid to late 1970s. Brown met him through painter Frank Bowling. At the time, Müller was writing and working as editor of Arts Magazine. Brown appreciated Müller’s savvy in the art world: he was especially aware of the various camps in the art world and was consequently adept in planning strategies to promote one’s career.8 For artists in the 1960s and ‘70s, the idea of having a theoretical basis for their work became more important. The long-time career of Clement Greenberg had created the model: a critic reviewing and editing an artist’s work according to a vision of art history.

Bowling tried to get Brown involved in writing, thinking that he would do as Bowling did: take an active role in defining his position and that of other artists in the art world.

Bowling doggedly pursued the idea that he, Brown and Johnson would form a group

P L AT E 1. U N T I T L E D, 1970, AC RY L I C O N C A N VA S, 8 4¼ X 8 3½ I N.

with a common purpose and work towards being recognized in the art world. The idea was that there would be strength in numbers and by expanding their spheres of contact they could attract critics as a readymade group, so to speak.9 While Bowling focused on Brown’s potential as a writer, Danny Johnson continued to focus on Brown’s art. He impressed upon Brown that it would be useful if he would maximize the reception of his natural sense of color and harmony by learning to speak about his art on a more formal basis. He specifically recommended that Brown look into the color theory of the 19th-century French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreuil, whose publication, Laws of Simultaneous Color Contrasts, had greatly influenced the French Pointillist artists, such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, in its observations of how colors were influenced by those placed in juxtaposition to them. Brown noted that it took him “years to get through the book.” He went through it “methodically and learned the physics behind color.”10 This interest in color theory certainly informs works such as Untitled (1972) [fig. 3].

In this work the arc and “handle” of yellow dominates the composition at the left and serves as a barrier to the field of blue at the right, while being beguiled by two flings of red. Encrusted pools of color contrast with scattered washes of pigment. It is a perfect exploration of the visual interaction among

the three primary colors. In another Untitled painting of the same year, the surface of the painting resembles a white plane that has been sheared and scratched away to reveal an underlying layer of hues of pinkish maroon, olive green and “dirty” yellow. But as seen in two works from 1973—both Untitled—Brown has not yet abandoned his splashy, splotchy and staining techniques, and in the black and white painting lingers his earlier Zen sensibility as well as references to cosmic phenomena.

Brown also maintained an active exhibition schedule in group shows at the Cinque Gallery in New York, Chicago’s Deson-Zaks Gallery, and the Libreria Internazionale in Milan. He also began to exhibit with the Noah Goldowsky Gallery, through whom he met Willem de Kooning, who became an important influence on his work at this time.

The contact with Goldowsky had been engineered by Clement Greenberg who arranged a meeting in 1973. This association with the Noah Goldowsky Gallery helped to solidify Brown’s career in the Downtown New York art scene. Goldowsky would put Brown’s work into group exhibitions with paintings by artists whom Brown admired such as de Kooning and Franz Kline. As Brown observed: “I would see where I really fit and how I competed with them on the same wall.” He also told Goldowsky that he “really knew how to make these color field paintings,” but the pressing question in his mind

was “What is it that Olitski and Rothko are really after?” Goldowksy described their work as encompassing “a religious experience, a deep and profound religious experience.”

When Brown asked how did one come to that experience, Goldowsky told him, “Either you come to it or you don’t.”11 This exchange would have resonance for Brown as he pursued spiritual and religious themes as subject matter in his work later in his career.

In the midst of all the dialogues about painting that Brown found himself embroiled in, Grégoire Müller was always someone with whom to pace himself in his development.

Like Brown, Müller was also exploring the possibilities of color field painting,12 but, as would become quickly evident, the abstraction and minimalism of the 1960s was on the wane and the figure would soon reemerge in art. In hindsight, the interests of the Pattern and Decoration group in California, currents in feminism, and indeed the ideological and stylistic innovations among African American artists and other artists of color interested in cultural referencing in their work, led the way to post-modernism and New Image painting.13 Brown would prove to have an instinct for what would be coming in art.

This is evident in the mid to late 1970s, when Brown was beginning to solidify his colors into more cohesive shapes, as seen in Time (1974) [plate 7], figural elements had begun to emerge from the abstract ambiances such as those seen in Untitled (1977)

FIG. 2. GENESIS—DEDICATED TO NOAH GOLDOWSKY, 1978, OIL ON CANVAS, 77 X 188 IN. COLLECTION OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK. GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. KENDALL G. CHEN, 1979.

[plate 5]. As It Comes (1977) [fig. 5], of the same year, show a more “organized” placement of color areas, that would coalesce into the articulated architectural and landscape segments that form the background of paintings such as Brown’s 1978 Genesis— Dedicated to Noah Goldowsky [fig. 2], in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both Untitled (1976) and Lands of the Mind (1979) [plate 6] present a potent prelude to that figuration in the more into defined brushstrokes of color laid side by side in occasional horizontal, semi-vertical and dynamically directed color. Despite the gestural quality of the paint application and the seeming helter-skelter organization, we can perhaps still discern Brown’s interpretation of Chevreuil’s Laws of Simultaneous Color Contrasts at work.

Brown’s abstract phase was far from over, however, as seen in Second Time on the Wall (1974) [plate 2], Whispers (1975), and Untitled (1974), where he presents a subtly modulated surface, and the halo-ed, softly articulated horizontal elements and rectangles that are positively Rothko-esque in character. In another vein, we can consider Things Go On (1975) and Over Tone (1977) in which the emerging rectangular shapes represent elements that often appear in the center of the composition, that suggest windows, or what Megan Bowman, the artist’s collaborator proposes: “a door to another dimension.” “From his architectural training…[Fred]…was always aware of making space three-dimensional. He used this technique in his color field painting. In his figurative work, he used doors and windows to lead the viewer back in space.”14 Such architectural elements were predicted in the black and white composition Out Lines (1971) [fig. 4], where the squares and rectangles and chevron shapes laid out like remnants of a civilization or an archaeological site.

As Brown was evolving into a key figure in the re-emergence of figuration in the art world of the 1970s, he was also inevitably caught up in the polemics around the political and financial status of African American artists at that time. Questions about the relationship of African American artists to their African heritage, as well as, whether they should work figuratively or abstract foregrounded this debate regarding the defining qualities of “Black Art” and “Black artists.”

Although it would have been assumed that African American abstractionists such as Bowling, Johnson, William T. Williams, How-

FIG. 3. UNTITLED, 1972, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 28½ X 26 IN.

ardena Pindell, and Sam Gilliam (who was working in Washington, D.C.) were indeed willing to “subordinate their blackness” in exchange for acceptance by and more opportunities within the “larger, wider and…whiter art world,”15 the ideological divide between them and more activist groups such as AfriCobra and the Weusi group did not manifest itself in such clear-cut ways. In fact, most survey exhibitions of African American artists during this period showed figurative and abstract tendencies side-by-side.

Brown, on the other hand, just wanted to be “respected for…what I was but that was just the way I was raised…I just went on to do what I chose to do. Gerald [Jackson] was on another plane, however, doing his own thing. [Ellsworth] Ausby…once said to me, ‘Fred,…just go ahead and break the ice, just do it. You have the brains, the talent,

the ability.’”16 Brown found his own path within the prevailing perceptions of African American artists in the larger art context.

However, as he experimented with introducing figural elements and content into his

FIG. 4. OUT LINES, 1971, OIL ON CANVAS, 71 X 96 IN.

F I G . 5. A S I T C O M E S, 197 7, O I L O N C A N VA S, 3 8 X 5 4½ I N.

painting, Brown’s own artistic journey was not documented in the histories of these developments because of his solitary stance.

During the second half of the 1970s, Brown continued to make contacts and find opportunities that were advantageous for his career. He had a solo exhibition at the Jane Haslem Gallery in Washington D.C. and participated in group exhibitions at the SoHo Center for Visual Arts and a group exhibition toured by the American Federation of Arts. The following year he was commissioned to do three paintings for the Government of Liberia. He had briefly taught at the School of Visual Arts in 1976, and that same year his work was also included in group exhibitions at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, the Noah

1

Fredrick J. Brown quoted in John Howell, “Painting the Blues,” Elle Decor (August 1990), 27.

2

We would like to acknowledge the on-going collaboration of Marcy Flynn and Megan Bowman Brown in our research and writing on the work of Fred Brown.

3

Sherry Brewer Bronfman, interview with Lowery Stokes Sims, December 20, 2016.

4

Frederick J. Brown (FJB), interview with Lowery Stokes Sims (LSS), Scottsdale, Arizona, July 12, 1998.

5

FlatsFixed Gallery was one of the first to open in Soho in 1970 along with Reese Paley and Paula Cooper Galleries. For more information see the feature on the Gallery: https://sohomemory.org/ almost-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time-

Goldowsky Gallery, Soho Center for Visual Arts, New York, and as part of a traveling exhibition of the Museum of Drawers, an ongoing project of the Swiss artist Herbert Distel, who was based in Bern. In 1977, Brown was included in another group exhibition at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art.17 His architectural background led also to commissions to design and build two artists’ studios exploring the concept of architecture as sculpture.

Noah Goldowsky died in 1978. Brown recalled that his stalwart supporter had always said that he would not retire until Brown got settled in the art world, and after Goldowsky’s death, Brown had an opportunity to join Marlborough Gallery through an introduction of an acquaintance who

flatsfixed-gallery. Accessed by Bentley Brown, July 5, 2021.

6

To save money Brown confessed that he painted on bedsheets that he cut in half. Even after he could afford large watercolor paper sheets, he would cut some in half and in quarters to do works that could be priced at different levels.

7

FB, interview with LSS, New York, June 16, 1998.

8

FJB, interview with LSS, New York, June 16, 1998.

9

FJB, interview with LSS, New York, June 16, 1998

10 Ibid.

11 FJB, 12 Ibid.

worked in the gallery. In retrospect, Brown and Goldowsky had a good run together. As noted earlier, the dealer was instrumental in introducing Brown to his idol Willem de Kooning. This came about when Goldowsky had asked Brown what he wanted as a gift for his thirtieth birthday in 1975. That visit with de Kooning was especially catalytic for Brown. He reminisced in 1998: “…as with Ornette, something clicked and I realized that this was about divine intervention…I asked how do you know when you’re really an artist?…Bill said…’As far as being an artist is concerned, people will consider you to be an artist if they see you put on your clothes every day and paint every day.’”18 By the end of the 1970s Brown, was, in the words of Megan Bowman, coming, “into his own in a certain style that had a certain feeling to it.” [Frederick’s] forté in his abstract paintings was that they were very lyrical and textural…In his figurative work, he loved to tell a story. His feelings came out in the story. He had a richness to his stroke.”19 By the time of his first solo exhibition at Marlborough Gallery in 1983, then, Brown was firmly focused on figuration, and was poised to produce some of his most iconic images inspired by the jazz musicians he had known and admired since the 1970s.

(This manuscript is based on a longer verison written by Lowery Stokes Sims in 1998 which was based on interviews with Frederick J. Brown and Megan Bowman Brown in Carefree, Arizona, and New York.

Sims’s research was funded by the Armitage and Taylor Family Foundations. The original manuscript has been updated by Bentley E. Brown, based on his M. A. thesis at New York University and additional information and fact-checking has been the work of Marcy Flynn and Megan Bowman Brown.)

for example, Connie Robins Romano, The Pluralist Era, American Art, 1968-81. (Joanna Cotler Books, 1984).

13 See,

14 Megan

Bowman (MB), interview with LSS, on the road to Sedona, Arizona, July 13, 1998; updated Aug. 17, 2014.

J Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997, p. 102.

15 Richard

16 FB,

interview with LSS, Scottsdale, Arizona, July 12, 1998.

17 FB,

interview with LSS, Scottsdale, Arizona, July 11, 1998.

18 Ibid.

interview with LSS, New York, June 16, 1998

19 MB,

interview with LSS, on road to Sedona, Arizona, July 13, 1998.

P L AT E 2. S E C O N D T I M E O N T H E WA L L , 1974, O I L O N C A N VA S, 91¼ X 69¼ I N.

P L AT E 3. I N S I D E T H E G A L A X I E , 1971, AC RY L I C O N C A N VA S, 45½ X 10 4 I N .

P L AT E 4. I N T H E B E G I N N I N G, 1971, O I L O N C A N VA S, 92¾ X 13 6½ I N.

P L AT E 5. U N T I T L E D, 197 7, O I L O N L I N E N, 33¼ X 8 0 I N .

PL ATE 6. L ANDS OF THE MIND, 1979, OIL ON C ANVAS, 72¼ X 48¼ IN.

U N T I T L E D, 1970, WAT E R C O L O R O N PA P E R , 21¾ X 29 ¾ I N.

ABOUT THE GALLERY Christine Berry and Martha Campbell opened Berry Campbell Gallery in the heart of Chelsea on the ground floor in 2013. The gallery has a fine-tuned program representing artists of post-war American painting that have been over-looked or neglected, particularly women of Abstract Expressionism. Since its inception, the gallery has developed a strong emphasis in research to bring to light artists overlooked due to race, gender or geography. This unique perspective has been increasingly recognized by curators, collectors, and the press. In March of this year, Roberta Smith reviewed Ida Kohlmeyer: Cloistered for the New York Times. This rare group of paintings from the artist’s estate had not been on view together since they were created in the late 1960s.

Berry and Campbell share a curatorial vision that continues with its contemporary program. Recently the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston acquired works by abstract painter, Jill Nathanson. Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of Modern art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. chose a painting by Judith Godwin from the 1950s to hang in their Abstract Expressionist galleries. Works by Frank Wimberley were acquired by the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. Berry Campbell has been included and reviewed in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Artforum, Art & Antiques, The Brooklyn Rail, the Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, East Hampton Star, Artcritical, the New Criterion, the New York Times, Vogue and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art. Not only did the program expand, but in 2015, the gallery physically expanded, doubling its size to 2,000 sq feet. Berry Campbell is located at 530 W 24th Street in the heart of Chelsea, New York, on the ground floor.

P L AT E 7. T I M E , 1974, O I L O N L I N E N, 71 X 56 I N.

C OV E R: I N T H E B E G I N N I N G (D E TA I L ), 1971, O I L O N C A N VA S, 92¾ X 13 6½ I N.

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