Glenn Brown

Patrick Painter, Los Angeles

Bobbi and Walter Zifkin, Los Angeles

Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 2006

Los Angeles, Patrick Painter, Glenn Brown, 2001

Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou; Vienna, Kunsthalle Wien; and Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, “Dear Painter, Paint Me...”: Painting the Figure since Late Picabia, 2002, p. 90, illustrated in colour

London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 70, illustrated in colour 

Liverpool, Tate Gallery; and Turin, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Glenn Brown, 2009, p. 148, illustrated in colour

Uta Grosenick and Burkhard Riemschneider, Eds., Art Now: 137 Artists at the Rise of the New Millennium, Cologne 2002, p. 68, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the yellow tonalities are not as strong in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals minute wear to the top right and bottom left corner tips, some light spots of rubbing in a few places to the extreme left edge, and a tiny speck of loss to the left nostril of the figure. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Upholding the legacy of Appropriation art and proving Glenn Brown’s unmatched mastery of oil paint, Joseph Beuys from 2001 is a masterful conflation of the art historical and the photographic as subject to painterly mutation. Although titled after the giant of conceptual art, Joseph Beuys, the present work nonetheless depicts an effeminate portrait of a young boy rendered as though victim to some catastrophic radioactive fall-out. In-keeping with Brown’s time-travelling oeuvre, the origin of this painting dates back to the Seventeenth Century. Intriguingly however, in this instance Brown takes as his point of departure a painting of his own created 5 years previously – I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper. This painting from 1996 is itself based on a portrait of the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn’s son Titus, created by a pupil of the Rembrandt school, that has been combined with a Gabriele Münter portrait from 1909. Encapsulating a re-appropriation of his own work and extolling an immaculate mastery of fine brushwork, Joseph Beuys from 2001 is thus utterly emblematic of the many layers of painterly borrowing and mutation that form the core of Brown’s extraordinary post-modern practice. Exhibited in both major museum retrospectives of the artist’s career – at the Serpentine Gallery in 2004 and Tate Liverpool in 2009 – Joseph Beuys stands at the very apex of Brown’s corpus of ‘portraits’ of art historical masterworks.

Reference, appropriation, and transformation are key words that encapsulate Glenn Brown’s practice. Adopting these strategies Brown transcends the post-modern quotation of the original image and through an alteration and combination of different works he playfully modifies compositions and creates new ones via the work of venerated painters. His borrowings hail from the work of such artistic luminaries as Fragonard, Dalí, Rubens, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet, and Frank Auerbach as well as from illustrators of science fiction novels. As for Joseph Beuys, its brilliance comes from the painting’s exquisite execution: possessing the sheen of a cibachrome print, this painting embodies an immaculate collation of fine brushstrokes, equal to those by any virtuoso Old Master painter, yet rendered in an acidic and toxic colour palette. In its application of thin, dynamically sinuous and psychedelic swirls of paint, Brown has created the illusion of a photographically flat surface along with an atmosphere of decay. To explain the use of such a colour palette Brown has stated that it best embodies the idea of putrefaction and evokes the presence of death, both of which are recurring themes in this body of work. As he affirms: “I like my paintings to have one foot in the grave, as it were, and to be not quite of this world. I would like them to exist in a dream world, which I think of as being the place that they occupy, a world that is made up of the accumulation of images that we have stored in our subconscious, and that coagulate and mutate when we sleep" (Glenn Brown quoted in: New York and London, Gagosian Gallery, Glenn Brown: Three Exhibitions, 2009, p. 70). The title, as well as the image, is another mutation and borrowing. In keeping with the majority of his titles, some of which denote an explicit reference to albums, film titles, or a specific dedication to a person, these names are not conceived to be explanatory, rather they function as a complementary appropriationist tools: the present work thus communicates Brown’s own admiration for the German father of conceptual art.

In this work Brown points out a fundamental shift in how the history of visual cultures can be accessed and experienced across time. Herein, the way we will perceive the original source of Joseph Beuys will not be the same after we acknowledge the artist’s manipulation.