When he was in high school, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joe Brainard (b. 1942, in Salem, Arkansas) helped found an arts and literary magazine with his classmates Ron Padgett and Richard “Dick” Gallup. The White Dove Review solicited contributions from such shining Beats as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, which accompanied the students’ own artwork and poetry, including poems from Ted Berrigan, who was at Tulsa University on the G.I. Bill. Brainard moved to New York City in 1960, at age 18, where he found a community of artistic collaborators among the New York School painters and poets, including James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, and John Ashbery. Prolific in a spectrum of painting, drawing, collage, writing, and poetry — from “30 One-Liners”: “WINTER / More time is spent at the window” — Brainard had an eye and ear for everyday experience presented simply, with humor and feeling.
American Art Catalogues has gathered together seven of Joe Brainard’s small, compelling oil paintings from the 1970s. Whippoorwill (1973), one of his meticulously observed portraits of his partner Kenward Elmslie’s pet whippet, presents a dog with an anatomy like a complicated landscape. Untitled (Male Figure II) (1974) zeroes in on a different anatomy, with a looser, more sensuous hand. Cherries (1973) is an exercise in beautiful simplicity, the edges of the ruby orbs partially buried in the white ground as if dropped into a snowdrift. In Untitled (Pansies) (1974), the lightly painted blooms feel expectant and animated.
Brainard was only 52 when he died, of AIDS-related complications, in 1994.
A limited number of out-of-print copies of Brainard’s monograph Paintings, published by American Art Catalogues in 2021, are available, along with a 12-color silkscreen poster (Du-Good Press). The publication features 39 paintings, letters from Brainard to Fairfield Porter, and The Language of Flowers, a concrete poem by Alex Da Corte. ❖
Joe Brainard
American Art Catalogues
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Through August 31