Artists & Works |
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| Roger Brown American (b.1941) LOT'S WIFE (1981) oil on canvas 72.25" x 48.25" |
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| STYLE: Chicago Imagists |
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Roger Brown is loosely associated with the Chicago Imagists, a
group of artists known for painting recognizable imagery, often
in confrontational ways. Although Lot's Wife is not an openly
political work, Brown has often used his painting to comment on
a diverse array of subjects—including Central America, environmental
damage, AIDS, and art critics. Brown's tendency to express his opinions
in his artwork, as well as his skill at designing the elements of
a painting in flat symmetry, make symbolic representational imagery
a natural and effective outlet. Brown often works in an allegorical
format; Lot's Wife belongs to a series of paintings Brown
has completed of scenes from the Bible. |
CRITICAL EXCERPTS |
| Colin Westerbeck, ARTFORUM, 1/87 "These spiky lines of foliage, which Brown uses to suggest everything from underbrush to treetops, run across the paintings like a succession of cogwheels. They give his paintings the primitive, mechanical look of stencil landscapes in American folk art...In much of Brown's earlier work, America seems to be the same kind of peaceable kingdom that it is in the decorative arts of previous centuries...He sees America whole as the violent, innocent, antic, frantic place it is." |
| Roger Brown, in Sidney Lawrence, Roger Brown, George Braziller, New York and the Hirschorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 1987 “Look at O’Keefe’s flowers. She paints that reverse kind of way, as if the forms are reversed. Instead of the light hitting so the high surfaces are lit, it’s the opposite. All the high surfaces become darker and behind is where the light comes out. It’s really something I learned from her. ...I used to think that maybe I’d be a minister. A lot of kids growing up think that. Religion is sort of pounded into your head. When I did those religious [paintings] it wasn’t about religion. I just went back and used [religious stories] as excuses for painting...I really felt they are the myths of our culture—religious stories.” |
| John Yau, in Sidney Lawrence, Roger Brown, George Braziller, New York and the Hirschorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 1987 “Since his first exhibition in 1968 at Chicago’s Hyde Park Center, Brown has been preoccupied with the idea of spectacle. He has responded to grand displays, familiar sights, deplorable events, and imagined instances with an unrivaled intensity. In doing so, he has revealed the disturbing extent to which various states—horror, irony, and boredom—mesh. Another condition his work addresses is how society’s mechanisms, particularly the mass media, trivialize all events by reducing them to dramatic occasions.” |
| Paul Richard, Washington Post, 8/12/87 "Two things give Brown's best paintings their considerable wallop. One is their sheer beauty, the way their colors seem to glow as if from hidden lights, a glow that's reinforced by the power and correctness of their admirable designs....Something else is going on in Brown's strongest pictures gradual unfolding, a layering of memories and complicated references to other sorts of art...Large portions of his pictures work just fine as abstractions...in a retrospective, wholly on his own, his art—despite its memorable virtues, its gradual advances,its polishing and honing—begins to seem a bit too formulaic. It is easy to admire the art of Roger Brown." |
| Susan Freudenheim, San Diego Tribune, 12/87 "He is probably the best known of a group of Chicago painters called the "imagists," ...their name highlights their interest in making paintings with subjects, rather than abstractions...Brown's flat and linear approach to painting makes the world look unreal, like an architect's model. His subjects, however, are well-known and very real...Brown's paintings digest the evening news and make art out of it. They are inextricably linked with this moment, freezing our pain and anxiety into clear-cut visions. |
| Edward J. Sozanski, Des Moines Sunday Register, 8/23/87 "Sometimes he goes over the line, either visually or philosophically. There's a fundamentalist tic to his makeup, political rather than religious, that can make him seem sanctimonious. When he expresses his feelings directly, in the form of captionlike texts incorporated into certain paintings, he tends to belabor the obvious...His light, even in his outdoor scenes, is completely artificial and arbitrary. It doesn't illuminate surfaces that project, as real light would, but negative space. The effect of this trick, which Brown says he learned from Georgia O'Keefe, is to flatten forms and space so that each picture looks like a succession of backlit planes...the style is both an achievement and a handicap...History painting as a genre went out of fashion in the 19th century, but here we find Roger Brown practicing his updates version....Unlike many of his contemporaries, he's able and willing to speak to a mass audience as well as the usual in-crowd of dealers, collectors, critics, and other artists." |
| Daniel Barbiero, New Art Examiner, 10/87 "Outside of Chicago, Roger Brown has become synonymous with Chicago art...Brown's promiscuous mix of facility and pseudo-primitivism ultimately undermines his work's aesthetic validity...A persistent trash culture point of reference pervades Brown's paintings—as if Dante could be found in a dustbin—...Brown's accomplished technique and deft handling of color undermine the authenticity of his faux naive approach; his work gives the impression of a diamond trying to pass itself off as a rhinestone...Brown's problem isn't one of technical facility but of credibility...As Brown is neither scholastic nor visionary, his work is interesting as something of a curiosity, but it is a curiosity lacking in authenticity...Brown's generally frivolous subject matter tends to trivialize his sources—and does them a disservice in the process. Some hybrids don't ring true...—and Brown's art is one of them." |
| John Loughery, Arts Magazine, 11/87 "...many people today are suspicious of the idea that art stands sublimely and necessarily removed from the tenor and social conflicts of its time. From Daumier to Ben Shahn to Fernando Botero, political art has made its mark and is here to stay...Of all the Chicago Imagists who found a national audience in the 1970s, he is probably the one most likely to last...Studying his pictures, one becomes aware of a critique of current politics that is as leery of lest wing claims to righteousness as it is to right-wing meddling...For the sympathetic viewer of Brown's paintings, an unresolved dilemma arises in their very success as open, communicative works..there is a gap, in danger of widening, between his subject matter and the reactions the paintings inspire: they can be enjoyable and entertaining to a fault...Private evil seems to stir in Brown a greater capacity than public wrong...to create a true unease in his audience." |
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Jane Bell, ARTnews, 10/79
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