Estate of Joe Brainard
Tibor de Nagy is pleased to present Joe Brainard - a box of hearts and other works, an exhibition of over 50 works, many never or rarely exhibited before. Among those are Tulips and Oranges (pictured above), a newly discovered large Nancy collage made for the Art News Annual cover in 1968, and the early Pop painting 7-Up. Two miniature works, A Box of Hearts and Little Letters, will be also on view for the first time.
Coinciding with the exhibition is Rizzoli's publication of Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal by John Yau, a gorgeous compendium of Brainard's work with 225 illustrations, mostly in color, many of them never published before. Yau will be present at the opening to sign copies of the book from 3-6pm on Saturday, October 22nd.
Joe Brainard (1942-1994) grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to New York in 1960. He gained early recognition with his first solo exhibition in 1965 at the Alan Gallery. Over the next decade he exhibited regularly, including serveral shows at Fischbach Gallery and his work was included in numerous museum exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Brainard’s work was the subject of a traveling retrospective curated by Constance Lewallen at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2001. In 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired 15 major works through donation and his drawings, collages, assemblages, and paintings are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Morgan Library and many other museums. Tibor de Nagy Gallery has represented the estate of Joe Brainard since 1997.
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.