Joe Brainard
Untitled (Black Pansies)
1989
Mixed media and ink on paper in the artist's frame
3 ⅝ x 2 ⅓ in; 9.2 x 5.7 cm
Joe Brainard (b. 1942, Arkansas – d. 1994, New York), grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and moved to New York in 1961, where he began his writing, set design, and visual art practice as part of 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.”
Untitled (Black Pansies) features one of Brainard’s earliest and most enduring motifs, that of the pansy flower. He began incorporating pansy flower imagery in his collages of the late 1960s. Made in the last years of his life, about a decade after he decided to stop exhibiting, these black pansies can be seen as a stylized shadow or memory of his earliest and very colorful flower works. A “pansy” is also a derogatory term for a gay man, coopted by drag queens in the 1930s who called themselves “pansy performers.”
Though overflowing with gay signifiers, [Brainard’s work] short-circuits any tidy notion or classification of a “gay” aesthetic… Even when Brainard’s images border on being twee, they never slip into outright mawkishness. The artist always made a habit of slipping razors into his frosting.
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.”
Brainard died of AIDS-related causes at the age of 52.
Provenance
The Estate of Renee S. Neu
Christie’s New York, May 12, 2011
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
Private collection, Connecticut
New York, Swann Auction Galleries, Lot 199, Sale 2677, August 22, 2024
See also
Joe Brainard Archive at the University of California San Diego
Brad Gooch, “Nancy Ideas: Joe Brainard in Retrospect,” Artforum, No. 39, No. 6, February 2001
Wojciech Drag, “Embraceable Joe: Notes on Joe Brainard’s Art,” Electronic Book Review, June 7, 2020
Joe Brainard in the collection of the Whitney Museum of Art, New York