Estate of Joe Brainard
Joe Brainard
Pansies, 1968
watercolor and collage on paper
28 x 22 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled (Toothbrushes), 1973-74
oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled (Easel), 1976
watercolor, ink and collage
14 x 11 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled (Whippet on Green Couch), 1973
oil on linen
9 x 12 inches
Joe Brainard
White Owl, n.d.
mixed media collage
11 x 9 x 3 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled (White Dog), 1978
gouache, watercolor, graphite and collage on paper
24 x 19 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled, n.d.
mixed media collage
9 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches
Joe Brainard
Chewing Gum Wrappers, 1971
mixed media collage on paper
7 x 5 inches
Joe Brainard
Cigarette, 1969
graphite, gouache and mixed media on paper
7 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitle (Puppy), 1972
mixed media and gouache on paper
13 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled (Tomato Juice), n.d.
mixed media collage
13 x 10 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled, 1970
paper cut-out
29 x 23 3/4 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled (Lucky Strike), n.d.
mixed media collage
13 x 10 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled, 1974
Oil on canvas
18 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches
Joe Brainard
Kenward, Happy Labor Day, Vermont, 1966
mixed media collage
11 x 5 3/4 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled, 1962
ink on paper
16 x 22 1/2 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitld, 1977
mixed media collage
9 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled (Owl Cat), 1971
mixed media collage
7 x 5 inches
Joe Brainard
Nancy as Mona Lisa, 1968
graphite, colored pencil and collage on paper
9 x 7 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled (Cigarettes), n.d.
mixed media assemblage
13 x 10 inches
Joe Brainard
30 Squares, 1975
mixed media
13 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches
Joe Brainard
Bouquet, 1975
gouache and mixed media collage on paper
6 x 4 inches
Joe Brainard
Flowers, 1969
mixed media collage
13 1/2 x 10 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled (Pepsi-Coila Black-eyed Susans), 1969
gouache on paper
13 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled (Madonna and Child), 1967
mixed media on paper
13 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches
Joe Brainard
Untitled (Portrait of Joe), n.d.
mixed media collage
11 x 9 1/2 inches
Joe Brainard
Madonna, 1966
mixed media
21 x 16 inches
Joe Brainard
Still Life, 1968
watercolor on paper
14 x 11 inches
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.