Ink and gouache on paper for Kenward Elmslie’s collaborative volume Sung Sex (Kulchur Foundation, 1989), for which Brainard — his longtime companion – did sixty-five drawings, one for each poem. Work accomplished in 1988, signed and dated lower right, 1990. Numbered 22 to sheet verso, the work is reproduced in the book on page 20. 8.5 x 11 inches; 21.5. x 28 cm. Fine.
Born in Arkansas in 1942 and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Brainard moved to New York City in late 1960. A writer and an artist, he became associated with the New York School circle of poets. Brainard’s work often takes the form of small-scaled drawings and collages appropriating popular imagery and found materials but embracing joy and intimacy rather being marked by the cold distance commonly found in Pop art. As Liz Brown writes, “for all the comic book and commodity influence—from Nancy cartoons to Tareyton cigarettes—Brainard’s images are more giddy than ironic, more impromptu than polished.”
Made in the last years of his life, about a decade after he decided to stop exhibiting, the present work builds on the artist's longterm preoccupation with Pop Art and the use of comic and stock characters as a poetic medium. In such works, the artist appropriates recognizable styles and imagery from his fine-art contemporaries—both Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists—the suave Dick Tracy set, muscle men, product logos, and as here, racist icons.
A racist caricature based on American “blackface minstrels," the “Golliwog” story book character, a black "gnome," was invented by Florence Upton in her book 'The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls', published in London in 1895. Golliwogs became common characters in children's books, and during the twentieth century, manufacturers produced Golliwog dolls.
Brainard’s first retrospective, consisting of work from 1960-1970, took place at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago in 1970. In the mid-1970s he created over 3,000 miniature collages, paintings, and drawings for a major show at the Fischbach Gallery in Manhattan. Brainard published more than a dozen books, including the prose-poem memoir series I Remember (1975) and The Nancy Book (2008). One of Brainard’s most frequent collaborators was his longtime partner, the writer Kenward Elmslie. Of a possible gay slant to his work, Brainard once wrote, “Actually—I can’t see that being a gay painter makes any difference whatsoever, except that every now and then my work seems shockingly ‘sissy’ to me.”
From the collection of Frank Bidart, who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. Perhaps Bidart's most celebrated poem, "The Second Hour of the Night," is partly based on his relationship with Brainard. "The relationship was," as Bidart has said, both "more than friendship and less than a romance." His "In Memory of Joe Brainard" is a profound elegy for his friend who died of AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994.
Ink and gouache on paper for Kenward Elmslie’s collaborative volume Sung Sex (Kulchur Foundation, 1989), for which Brainard — his longtime companion – did sixty-five drawings, one for each poem. Work accomplished in 1988, signed and dated lower right, 1990. Numbered 22 to sheet verso, the work is reproduced in the book on page 20. 8.5 x 11 inches; 21.5. x 28 cm. Fine.
Born in Arkansas in 1942 and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Brainard moved to New York City in late 1960. A writer and an artist, he became associated with the New York School circle of poets. Brainard’s work often takes the form of small-scaled drawings and collages appropriating popular imagery and found materials but embracing joy and intimacy rather being marked by the cold distance commonly found in Pop art. As Liz Brown writes, “for all the comic book and commodity influence—from Nancy cartoons to Tareyton cigarettes—Brainard’s images are more giddy than ironic, more impromptu than polished.”
Made in the last years of his life, about a decade after he decided to stop exhibiting, the present work builds on the artist's longterm preoccupation with Pop Art and the use of comic and stock characters as a poetic medium. In such works, the artist appropriates recognizable styles and imagery from his fine-art contemporaries—both Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists—the suave Dick Tracy set, muscle men, product logos, and as here, racist icons.
A racist caricature based on American “blackface minstrels," the “Golliwog” story book character, a black "gnome," was invented by Florence Upton in her book 'The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls', published in London in 1895. Golliwogs became common characters in children's books, and during the twentieth century, manufacturers produced Golliwog dolls.
Brainard’s first retrospective, consisting of work from 1960-1970, took place at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago in 1970. In the mid-1970s he created over 3,000 miniature collages, paintings, and drawings for a major show at the Fischbach Gallery in Manhattan. Brainard published more than a dozen books, including the prose-poem memoir series I Remember (1975) and The Nancy Book (2008). One of Brainard’s most frequent collaborators was his longtime partner, the writer Kenward Elmslie. Of a possible gay slant to his work, Brainard once wrote, “Actually—I can’t see that being a gay painter makes any difference whatsoever, except that every now and then my work seems shockingly ‘sissy’ to me.”
From the collection of Frank Bidart, who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. Perhaps Bidart's most celebrated poem, "The Second Hour of the Night," is partly based on his relationship with Brainard. "The relationship was," as Bidart has said, both "more than friendship and less than a romance." His "In Memory of Joe Brainard" is a profound elegy for his friend who died of AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994.