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Standing Nude
1972
20th Century
53 in. x 17 1/2 in. (134.62 cm x 44.45 cm)
Joan Brown
(San Francisco, California, 1938 - 1990, Prasanthinilayam, India)
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Drawing |
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pencil and wash on paper |
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Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection:
Purchased with a bequest from Louise Long, 1991. 91.023.001 |
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| Accession Number: |
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1991.023.001 |
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Joan Brown was killed at the age of fifty-two when a tower collapsed at the site of her obelisk installation at Eternal Heritage Museum in Prasanthinilayam, India, in 1990. Even at her untimely death, Brown had enjoyed an outstanding career in painting, having won NEA, Guggenheim, and Tiffany fellowships among many other awards, and exhibiting in avant?garde galleries and prestigious museums internationally for more than thirty years. She was also the first woman of her generation to receive wide?scale public recognition.
Brown's success is the more notable when we consider the stylistically irreverent and insistently personal nature of her work. As New Museum director Marcia Tucker wrote in a memorial publication for the artist, Brown "fearlessly explored every aspect of her experience in her work. Nothing escaped her amused and critical scrutiny, especially not her own actions, foibles, and passions."1 Brown painted herself, her friends, dogs, wolves, her travels to Mexico, the Yucatan, and Central America??anything and everything that she chose to render became a record of her existence.
The daring of Standing Nude is best illuminated by its relationships to some of the details of its historical and artistic environments. Made in 1972, this straightforward figure painting from life was completed during the year that Brown showed at the Whitney Museum Annual. That same year, anthropologists Richard Leakey and Glynn Issac found a skull in northern Kenya that dated the first people to 2.5 million B.C. and opened a new controversy about the age of humankind. Although the body Brown depicts is contemporary, its references are ancient--to Egyptian figures in pose and in the integrity of the perimeter form; and to even older art in her strict economy of means. Yet this figure is also fully in the present moment??candid, as if snapped with a Brownie camera. The stretch from past to present gives the personage painted a breadth and a species life that extends far beyond individual characteristics.
Standing Nude banishes the psychic distance that a depicted figure can establish with her audience without resorting to the mythologies or narcissism common to most representations of female nudes in any era. Brown's application of paint is immediate and spontaneous; her imagery, direct.
The magnitude and range of Brown's visual humanism extended to every area of her life. The artist was an inspiring teacher, an articulate lecturer about her work and about animal rights, and a compassionate friend to the homeless. "Farewell, Noble Troubadour, miniature Knight of the Round Table, peerless visual poet," Roy DeForest hailed Brown in a tribute. "May your melody continue to sing softly throughout all eternity."2
1. Marcia Tucker, in A Memorial Exhibition, p. 1.
2. Roy DeForest, ibid., p. 4.
References:
Chadwick, Whitney. Working Together: Joan Brown and Manuel Neri, 1959?1964 (exhibition catalogue). Belmont, California: Wiegand Gallery, The College of Notre Dame, 1995.
Tucker, Marcia, Roy DeForest, Sandford Schwartz, and Allan Frumkin. A Memorial Exhibition (exhibition catalogue). New York: Frumkin/Adams Gallery, 1991.
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