Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal
by John Yau
 

I remember Joe Brainard. I never met him, and when I first felt his
influence I had no idea who he was or where he came from, but the
influence went deep. It came across stealthily and through scattered
channels, apprehended in the corner of the eye, in cartoons that
appeared in The East Village Other or back issues of his own C Comics
(including an unforgettable and much-shared creation called “People
of the World: Relax!”) or covers designed for the work of poets such as
Ron Padgett and Anne Waldman or flyers for the St. Mark’s Poetry
Project.

A

CLEAR

SKY…

THATS

WHAT IS

IMPORTANT

NOW-A-DAYS

IN BOSTON…

WHERE… …

“EVERYONE

OWNS A RAIN-

COAT!” BUT ME. (JOE)

This is text taken from a pencil-on-paper self-portrait by Joe Brainard from January of 1963, sized at 4 ¾ by 3 ¼ inches, featured in both John Yau’s Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal, and Joe Brainard: a box of hearts and other works at Tibor de Nagy. It’s one of the first works seen upon entering the show.

ME. (JOE).

That parenthetical (JOE) is representative of much of Joe Brainard’s writing, assemblages, paintings, drawings, and miniatures (etc.). He was earnest about being himself on the page, but never assumed that we must necessarily know that self. He never considered himself to have attained stardom, and thought of others first—something much to be noted when discussing the man who wrote I Remember, whose subject was identifiably “himself and everything he touched, saw, or cared about—a world that was simultaneously private and public, personal and anonymous,” in Yau’s words.

Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal, poet and critic John Yau’s new monograph of the artist and writer, is a love letter from someone who knew Joe to those of us who wish we did—who feel like we must have. John Yau’s 73-page essay is referential, personal, and context-heavy, illustrating and mirroring the nature of Brainard’s work and life, providing a framework for the nearly 150 pages of plates that follow. Throughout his essay, Yau focuses on individual works sparingly, extrapolating key points in the pieces to contextualize the trajectory of Brainard’s life and practice. The book was released alongside a show of Brainard’s works at Tibor de Nagy on the Lower East Side, an early favorite gallery of the Tulsa cohort of the New York School, just eight blocks away from Joe’s first apartment in the city (a storefront on 6th Street that now functions as a dry cleaner’s). The show, Joe Brainard: a box of hearts and other works, was on view from October 22 through December 3, 2022, and included many of the drawings and paintings that are featured in the book, a majority of which have not been exhibited previously.

The art of Joe Brainard is having a moment.

Joe Brainard, who to some is better known as a writer and poet, was perhaps under appreciated as a visual artist. This tide appears to be turning. In October Rizzoli published Joe Brainard: The Art of The Personal, a beautiful monograph about Brainard’s visual art. In the past year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art received a gift of 16 important works by Brainard, making the Met the largest public collection holder of Brainard’s artwork, with 42 pieces. Word on the street is that an exhibition from their collection of Brainard works is on the drawing board. In November three works on paper by Brainard came up for auction at Sotheby’s New York. The first, a mixed-media collage, with an estimate of $5,000–$7,000, achieved a winning bid of $44,100. Then two drawings, both with estimates of $2,000–$3,000, sold for $44,100 and $94,500, respectively.

If you were in New York City this fall, you also would have had a chance to see a lovely jewel box of an exhibition of Brainard’s work at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. The exhibition, called “Joe Brainard: a box of hearts and other works,” consisted of 68 artworks. As someone familiar with Brainard's work would expect, the items ranged from not too large to very small. The largest pieces in the show were two untitled cut-paper works, one 29 x 23 inches, and the other, 29 x 23 ¾ inches. In each, paper is delicately cut into botanical silhouettes, and then the silhouettes are layered into a frame to create something that is at once a drawing and, in a way, a sculpture. The light in the room as well as the viewer’s movement around the pieces create subtle shadows and motion. These works are vague monochromes when viewed in passing or from afar. But in his poem, “Out in the Hamptons,” Brainard puts things this way:

By Deborah Solomon

Nov. 16, 2022

Joe Brainard sought to take up as little space as possible. He specialized in small-scale works — collages, drawings, and occasional paintings that relate more to the proportions of a writer’s desk than an artist’s looming studio. “There is something I lack as a painter that de Kooning and Alex Katz have,” he jotted in his diary in 1967. “I wish I had that. I’d tell you what it was except that I don’t know.”

However much he may have lamented his perceived shortcomings, Brainard was ahead of his time in acknowledging his feelings of marginalization. Unable or unwilling to advance the grand tradition of painting, he created a major body of work by questioning the prevalent belief that artists should have an instantly recognizable, money-in-the-bank style. And he understood how cheapo things (comic books, cigarette packaging, gift tags, restaurant receipts, etc.) can be an expression of authentic emotion.

“Joe Brainard: A Box of Hearts and Other Works,” a fascinating and substantial survey show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, arrives right on time. It coincides with the publication of a new monograph on the artist by the critic John Yau, as well as with the much-praised Alex Katz retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, in which Brainard happens to materialize as an unmistakable portrait subject. There he stands on the Guggenheim ramps, in two painted sculptures from 1966, a rangy, slightly nerdy young man with curly brown hair, tortoiseshell glasses and an oversized shirt collar jutting from his V-neck sweater.

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.