Emily
Writing, painting and taking pictures ...
For older posts, click 'Always painting' link below. More recent additions, scroll down.
For older posts, click 'Always painting' link below. More recent additions, scroll down.
 What the heck? In January, my husband and I took a long cruise around South America. At about 7 p.m. on Feb 20, a night and a day’s sail from Puerto Madryn and heading SE to the Falkland Islands, my husband Si was in the shower and I was gazing from our balcony at the empty Argentine Sea. Suddenly I noticed what looked like an upright whale, standing on its tail. Breaching? Practicing its ballet moves? Why didn’t it move? I got out my not-great binoculars and stared at the thing. Looked like a single black sail, torn, with a mast a few feet higher than it. Lurching? If a wreck, why was it leaning along rather cleverly in the heavy wind? Was that a person clinging to the line, counterweighing the sail? Then it looked like two sails. Impossible to tell. I think we were about 300 miles from Argentina; I know we were about 180 miles NW of the Falklands. Any windsurfer out there would be in serious trouble. But was it anything other than a weird wreck? If a wreck, why hadn’t it sunk? The Captain of the cruise ship was usually chatty, cheerfully announcing things several times a day, like “You see these rocks here; this is not the Horn” and “Dolphins on the Starboard side.” So as we left the lone black sailing thing in our wake, I expected to hear some kind of explanation. None came. Five minutes passed, and I decided to call someone. What if I were a windsurfer near death from cold and exhaustion, and a cruise ship chugged merrily by without even radioing hello? I would be very discouraged. I checked out my options on the cabin telephone. Messages, Housekeeping, Room Service … I opted for Passenger Services and got the usual harried yet bored individual. I stammered that I saw a Thing, a black sail-like Thing, way out to sea…. The dude said he’d tell the Captain right away. So I hung up. Beat of 10, and a call came from the head of Passenger Services. Could I describe the thing my husband saw? I said I saw it, and it looked like two black sails or a whale standing on its toes. Five minutes later, a tall and flustered Aussie, second or third Mate or something, burst into the cabin and straight through onto our deck, introducing himself as he ran. Would I hurry up and show him what I saw? I said it was long gone, behind us. He grabbed our phone, punched some numbers and gabbled, apparently to the Bridge. The captain had already turned the ship around (!), and they told him to take me to the other side of the ship. The Mate grabbed my hand and we ran across the barky to the other side. He grabbed a steward in the hallway with his other hand, telling him to watch us as we broke and entered the nearest cabin. We had turned around, and I hadn’t felt it in the slightest. There, right in front of us, was the sailboat. The black sails were now dark blue, with a logo, and there was a sailor on it. “Is that what you saw?” asked the mate, rather superfluously. I was greatly relieved that I had really seen something, if people were going to go turning giant cruise ships around on a dime. They might have thrown me overboard if I’d seen nothing at all. Mate got on and off the phone and told me, while running away again, that the captain said he’d been in radio contact with the sailor. He was fine, an Irishman going “Around Alone,” headed from France to New Zealand…. I didn’t have the bandwidth to find out if they meant the “Around Alone” race, or if the sailor was just alone and going around. Anyway, I felt very proud and special for no good reason other than being vaguely involved in a momentarily interesting event. It was impressive how quickly the Captain had turned our great big wallowing cruise ship around; yet unsettling that no one on his watch, nor any of the other passengers, noticed or cared about the lone black sail. As Keanu Reeves's character says in the movie “River's Edge” (1986), “I didn’t think I’d be the only one to call.”  A closer look after our cruise ship turned around
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Thanks to my aunt Rebecca, another Brewton painting has been found! Here it is, "Cabin, Stream, and Willow Tree" (1963):  Jim and my mother, Barbara Holland, spent much of 1962 in Denmark, where Jim worked with Erik Nyholm and Asger Jorn. Barbara wrote a short story called "Cabin, Stream, and Willow Tree," published in Seventeen magazine's November 1962 issue. Although she kept most of her published stories, I can't find this one in her files. The New York Public Library doesn't have it, and Seventeen didn't answer my query.
I was just looking for the story a few months ago, and never expected the painting to pop up! A thousand thanks to Rebecca Holland Snyder for finding it in Virginia, and shipping it to me in New York! I hope someday to read the story. At Armstrong, Joe ran the most unconventional of corporate offices. There was a hiring freeze when I started, so I was freelance, then part-time, then eased into actual employment. During my part-time days, I also worked part-time at the Fulton Opera House, as its public relations manager. Joe clipped a photo of the Fulton staff from a mailer (that's me on the far left, in the back), and left this on my desk at Armstrong:  Joe had a life-sized cardboard cutout of Marilyn Monroe in his office; she was skimpily dressed for, I think, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." She was there for years before Joe's boss said, "Too naked for corporate office: She must go!" Joe was despairing, so I brought in a spaghetti-strap red gown I owned for some reason, and we dressed Marilyn in it. Problem solved. In 1991, an artist created a very costly rust-and-boulder installation in the square below our office windows, and Joe was wroth. He didn't like the art, and he didn't like the expense, and it annoyed him to have it arrayed under his nose....
Before I moved to Lancaster, I'd worked as a PR flack for an arts organization, so I knew just the sort of pretentious press releases, artist's statements and invitations to openings that would cause maximum horror when I created a complementary installation in Joe's office. The Armstrong advertising department's props were stored down the hall from our offices--a warehouse-sized wonderland. There I borrowed fake boulders and twisted-up bits of ceiling grid, elements of my first installation: "Movement and Stasis," at "Joe's Casa del Arte." I don't have pictures of it, but Joe had a wire mesh in-box on his desk, which I filled with river rocks. Hilarity ensued when Joe came into the office.
 Looking back on those days, I'm surprised our neighboring departments didn't complain more often about the noise coming from our area.
Besides laughter, we made a lot of noise rummaging and moving furniture around. From his days in the Air Force, Joe brought a very enjoyable practice of "repositioning" to his department at Armstrong. When we saw furniture or equipment going to waste in another department, we'd reposition it in two stages. First, we'd reposition it to a conference room. After a suitable interval, if no one seemed to notice, we'd reposition it to the employee communications compound. We got a really cool light table that way, and desks and chairs and lamps and things. A whiteboard. Good times. Thank you, Joe. In his office at Armstrong...1993-ish.
(LEFT/TOP) The caption we wrote for the photo is "This century's most powerful mind puts it all together." The quote behind him is '"No passion on earth, neither love nor hate, is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." - H.G. Wells'
(RIGHT) Must have had a meeting somewhere; hence the tie. I learned today that my all-time favorite boss died, more than a year ago. I'm so sorry. Working for Joseph R. DiSanto was a privilege: I got paid to learn about writing and editing from him, and he was a stellar teacher. We sometimes fought about politics, but mostly we laughed. He was one of the most brilliant, stoic, gallant people I have ever known. During one harrowing, months-long editing project, our scribbles back and forth became so sarcastic that I made four large collages out of the clippings. I don't know if I still have those collages, but here is one little memory of Joe that I'll always save. I'd submitted the stories for a newsletter, and I was so bored by one of them that I was too lazy to give it a decent headline. This is what was returned to my desk:  ... Philadelphia, circa 1968. I used to be able to see William Penn's statue atop City Hall, from my attic bedroom window at Lombard and Hutchinson Streets. First pass at artifying the "prize babies" series.
For months I've been obsessed by old photographs of children who later became famous artists. Looking into their little faces was such a deep and poignant experience, I decided to choose them (based on six criteria), make multiple copies as if they were contact sheets, paint around them and on them, then paint around them in black again and varnish the results. They're mounted on canvas or cardboard. The brand names of the "film" used are appropriate to their country of origin, and the numbers also have meaning. All in all, there are nine constraints and one clinamen. Finally, they are ready for me to start working on! They will be ARTIFIED.  In 1962 and 1965, Jim Brewton traveled to Denmark, working with Erik Nyholm and Asger Jorn in Silkeborg. In 1965 he was also resident artist at Aage Damgaard’s shirt factory-studio in Herning, and showed his work at Galerie AP in Copenhagen (“Graffiti Pataphysic: The American Dream-Girl”).
We now believe Jim painted his Trine series of graffiti works in Silkeborg in 1965, naming them for Katrine Nyholm (Erik and Janet’s daughter, nicknamed “Trine”). Just as he encouraged young Emily to scribble graffiti on his paintings at home in Philadelphia, Jim asked Trine to contribute on this series. In January, Maggie Worsdale gave us Trine 4, which had been given to her by collector Barbara Miller Fine. When we spread the news of Trine 4, another collector told us the previously unknown titles of two abstracts: Trines 3 and 6. Where is Trine 5, and are there any more?  'Communing with Asger Jorn: Jim Brewton's journeys to Denmark in 1962 and 1965' by Emily Brewton Schilling
Jim’s full biography is on our website; or, even better, you can hear Michael Taylor’s talk about him from last year’s “Philadelphia a la Pataphysique,” conference on Slought’s website, at {https://slought.org/resources/james_brewton}. The focus of this article is my father’s effort to gather and circulateavant-garde art-making practices and thinking, between his artist friends at home in Philadelphia, and his artist friends in Denmark, beginning in 1962 until his death five years later. For an artist whose work Inquirer critic Victoria Donohoe said posed a “threat to equilibrium,” Jim came from a conventional background, born in Ohio in 1930. His father was a factory superintendent and his mother, a housewife. Jim was a Marine in the Korean War and then studied at very traditional art schools, on the G.I. Bill—Ruskin in Oxford and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Artists of ideas inspired Jim, and he riffed off of Marcel Duchamp’s work all of his life. Andre Breton and the tenets of Surrealism also influenced him. We haven’t yet pinpointed when Jim first heard of Alfred Jarry and his work, but he was creating artwork about Faustroll and Ubu by 1962, and he owned a couple of cahiers du college Pataphysique. While at the Academy, Jim was mentored by Franklin Watkins, Hobson Pittman and Ted Seigl, who began to train him as a conservator. The chemicals bothered my father, though, and he moved on to a student job at The Print Club (now Print Center), which was lucky. There he encountered the wildly expressionistic work of CoBrA artists. Berthe Von Moschzisker, director at the time, was a fan of the northern Europeans’ work, and had exhibited Erik Nyholm’s ceramics in 1952. Erik, a friend of Asger Jorn’s since their childhoods in Silkeborg, a tiny town near Aarhus, owned a trout farm there, which funded his own ceramics and painting, and allowed him to host a community of artists which, over the years, included the CoBrAs and the Situationists. Jim would also have gravitated to the CoBrAs’ experimental methods of artistic inquiry, as described by Pierre Alechinsky: “The important thing is to discover an inner script within ourselves … with which we can explore…”. Hobson Pittman recognized a similar quest in Jim Brewton, writing, “from his earliest work, [Jim] gave evidence of a peculiar and constant search for the nebulous and metaphysical symbol.” Although the CoBrA group had disbanded in ’51, Jim exulted in their ideas and artwork, especially that of the charismatic Asger Jorn—who was also a great admirer of Jarry. Jorn had a way of inspiring artists’ groups and projects, co-founding Helhesten, CoBrA, the Institute of Comparative Vandalism, and the Situationists. Claire Van Vliet, a close friend of Jim’s who had family ties in Denmark, introduced Jim to Erik Nyholm. The Danish artist was visiting Philadelphia, preparing for a January 1962 solo at Makler Gallery. Erik and his American wife, Janet, moved into an abandoned house with their children and stayed for weeks. In the spring of 1962, Claire was sailing to Denmark, to visit the Nyholms in Silkeborg. Jim had by then met my mother Barbara Holland, and they were pregnant with me. At Jim’s impulsive insistence, they bought last-minute tickets and sailed to Copenhagen with Claire. All three of them showed up on the Nyholms’ doorstep. My parents soon rented a barn to live in, in nearby Funder, and I was born that fall. While Barbara dealt with a new baby in a strange country, Jim had the time of his life, riding off on a bike every day to make art with Erik and the artists in Silkeborg. The paintings Jim created while in Denmark show an explosion of color. In late November 1962, the Brewton family returned to an apartment on Pine Street in Philadelphia, and Jim began to promote what he’d learned, and play with his new ideas. Between 1963 and 1965, Jim synthesized ‘Pataphysics, Surrealism, chance procedures and graffiti into his own artistic method. He called it “Graffiti Pataphysic,” and the practice became the highly ludic engine of his innovations. He continued to pay tribute to artists he admired, including Duchamp, Alban Berg, Jorn and Jarry. “Asger Jorn, pour tous les hommes,” painted in 1964, is one of Jim’s most elaborate portraits, with a salute to Jean Dubuffet in the graphics surrounding Jorn. In her review of Jim’s show last year at Slought, Edith Newhall said of this painting, it “depicts the Danish painter … as if the viewer might be his subject.” Jim lent works to, and I believe helped organize, a show of Asger Jorn’s graphic works at the Philadelphia Museum, in early 1964. In 1965 Jim returned to Denmark, landing in Copenhagen on February 27, and staying through April 3. From what I gather, during those weeks he helped Erik mount a show; enjoyed a residency at Aage Damgaard’s shirt factory/art museum, and created works for his solo at Galerie AP in Copenhagen. Jim helped with Jorn’s Institute of Comparative Vandalism, and possibly the Silkeborg Museum of Art, now the Museum Jorn, which took over an old school building, where it had only staged exhibits before, in 1965. It’s possible Jim met Dubuffet in Silkeborg during one of his trips; there are clear tributes to him in “The Pataphysics Times,” “The Situationist Times” and a missing portrait of the triumviratet, three Silkeborg officials who gave Asger Jorn the space to store his Comparative Vandalism project materials and served on the art museum’s board. By a great stroke of luck, I was able to get a near-contemporary description—in English—of the remarkable shirt factory-artist residency. A friend of Jim’s, the writer Charles Oberdorf, went to Denmark after Jim died and met with Aage Damgaard at his shirt factory-museum. Although Charles was suffering from emphysema, and died about a year after I found him, he wrote up his Brewton stories for me. Here are excerpts from his story of meeting Mr. Damgaard. Charles had become a Jarry fan in college, and first met Jim through Ronald and Patricia Weingrad, friends of Jim’s who later saved a great many of his artworks. Charles wrote, “I think it was my response to the Weingrads’ copy of “The Pataphysics Times” that prompted them to introduce me to Jimmy. We were instant friends. “One Saturday or Sunday morning in Philadelphia, I heard an unexpected knock at my front door at 24th and Pine Streets. I expected to find a couple of evangelists, but instead there was Jimmy, almost filling the doorframe. I urged him in and offered coffee, but he had something else in mind.” Jim was looking to borrow money to fly to Copenhagen and surprise his friends. They’d sent him an invitation to an exhibit, saying how sorry they were that Jim couldn’t be there. Charles remembered, Jim “knew they’d be hanging the show on Thursday, and when they hung shows they always went to the same place for lunch. He wanted to be there when they walked in. All he needed was the airfare. I really couldn’t help, but I wished him luck, and with no hard feelings he was on his way. “A few days later I heard he’d pulled it off. And after he got back, I ran into him on the street. “He had indeed surprised his Danish buddies—great moment, worth the cost of the trip all by itself. And—because, like most painters, he was never quite as uninterested in money [and recognition] as he seemed—he had taken along some slides of his work and had shown them to the gallery [owner]. [He] said he’d love to exhibit Jimmy’s work whenever he had enough paintings to put together a show. To which Jimmy apparently replied, ‘Find me a studio and I’ll paint you a show here.’ “As it happened, his friends did know of an available studio—an extraordinary one—in a shirt factory. ‘“You mean a building that had once been a shirt factory,’ I said. ‘“No,’ said Jimmy. ‘That’s the neat part. It’s still a shirt factory. The owner is a big fan of contemporary art, and he wants his employees to know about it, too, so he’s got this artist-in-residence program. Great studio. And when you leave, you owe the factory owner one piece. And the great part is, he puts that art out in the factory. Not in some gallery or in glass cases, but right out among the sewing machine ladies. And they really were interested in what I was doing. We couldn’t talk much, but they wanted to know. So I got some of them involved—got them to sew on some canvases for me, sew pleats into them, sew on buttons.’ “In a matter of weeks, he had produced enough new work for a show, and the dealer had given him one.” (This would have been “Graffiti Pataphysic: The American Dream-Girl,” at Galerie AP in Copenhagen. A few of the pieces from that suite have popped up in the last couple of years.) Charles continued, “The story doesn’t quite end there, though, because a few years later, shortly after Jimmy died, I made a working trip to Scandinavia and decided to find out more about that factory owner. At the time I was producing radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and he sounded like a good story. “Aage Damgaard grew up on a farm in Jutland, but left as a young man to seek his fortune. After World War II he came back, and started … the Angli shirt company which, by the time I visited in the 1960s, was Denmark’s leading shirt maker, with a growing export trade. “Damgaard had set up that art studio in his factory, about as Jimmy described it. When I was there, he was about to move his seamstresses and their machines to a new, architect-designed factory—a circular building, shaped sort of like a shirt collar, with a small opening leading to a big courtyard in the middle. He had commissioned Danish artist Carl-Henning Pedersen to decorate the courtyard wall, and he’d responded with a 200-meter-long ceramic frieze. The old factory would be given to Herning as a small art museum, Damgaard said. He planned to leave behind the paintings and sculptures already there, and start the gathering process over again.” (Since then, the Herning Kunstmuseum has moved a second time and been renamed HEART Museum.) “Forty years later, I clearly recall Damgaard as a stocky man, shorter than average, with a workingman’s meaty hands. He was certainly without pretension, with a keen amateur’s enthusiasm for the works of his artist-guests. “He especially liked pieces that related directly to the factory, such as one witty kinetic sculpture that was, he said, a genuine collaboration between the artist and one of the factory’s [mechanics]. The employee had been exhilarated to engineer an elaborate machine that had no practical function at all.” Apparently Damgaard often allowed employees to work with the visiting artists. Besides the sculpture Charles saw, we know Jim collaborated with the employees. The Brewton piece that Charles bought, “Five,” from 1965, has shirtly aspects, as does a Sven Dalsgaard work from 1968. I’m very grateful to Charles for writing his stories about Jim. The others are more personal, or about individual paintings. Back in Philadelphia in the early spring of 1965, Jim wrote: “In 1964 I founded the J.E. Brewton Institute of Comparative Vandalism for our College of Pataphysics to correspond to the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism, Asger Jorn, Founder-Director. … We are also further investigating soap-bubble dynamics for the late C.V. Boys, rules of vertical stance, how to affirme and deny a wall or canvas, reductions and four-legged tripods.” (All direct allusions to Jarry’s life and works.) Dan Miller, a close friend of Jim’s from their days as Academy students, said: “On returning from Denmark [Jim] undoubtedly felt that he could create a revolution, but conservative Philadelphia resisted.” In fact, Jim’s artist friends—Claire, Dan, and Joe Amarotico—were pursuing their own diverse directions, and not interested in working as a group. My parents and the Amaroticos did spend a summer together in the country, and the idea of an art colony was raised. That’s as far as it got. Undaunted, Jim continued to converse with Asger Jorn through painting. Besides the portrait of Jorn himself, in 1964 he painted “Letter to My Daughter,” corresponding to Jorn’s “Letter to My Son,” from 1956-57, owned by the Tate. Among Jim’s later mixed media works is the one he considered his masterpiece, “The Bombardment of Kobenhavn by Lord Admiral Nelson, or the mad laughter of courage,” which he exhibited shortly before his death, in 1967. The piece is a response to Jorn’s massive “Stalingrad, le non-lieu ou le fou rire du courage” with what I think are nods to Picasso’s “Guernica” and to Jasper Johns, another hero of Jim’s. Jorn worked on his “Stalingrad” between 1957 and 1972, inspired by an Italian friend who had fought in the World War II battle. Jim’s “Kobenhavn” takes up the protest of war’s senseless destruction, and he expanded on it in “No Birds in the Sky” and “Last Game,” which were about the bombing of Hiroshima. During the mid-’60s, Jim was represented by Harry Kulkowitz’s Kenmore Galleries, and had a solo there, “Graffiti Pataphysic,” in February 1965. Victoria Donohoe wrote a Sunday Inquirer review that must have stung at the time, but now reads like high praise: “Preoccupied with experimentation in several media … Brewton has invented a mumbo-jumbo language of his own, on the smarty-smart side, to describe scribbled inscriptions.” While admitting that, “these are painted imaginatively and expressionistically,” she didn’t like graffiti or the direction Jim was taking. Today, happily, interest in CoBrA art is reviving. The centennial of Asger Jorn’s birth was celebrated by large exhibitions last year, at both Denmark’s Statens Museum for Kunst and Museum Jorn. American Jorn scholar Karen Kurzcynski co-curated. Two CoBrA exhibits were up in October 2015 in New York, including one at Blum & Poe gallery, curated by Alison Gingeras, that will travel to the gallery’s Los Angeles branch Nov. 5 through Dec. 23. The CoBrA Museum in Amsterdam has a show visiting Sharjah Art Museum near Dubai, through Nov. And NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale has a show about Helhesten, curated by Kerry Greaves, up through Feb. 7, 2016. The University of Pennsylvania’s Michael Leja contributed an essay to the Helhesten show catalogue. As these curators look for contemporary artists inspired by CoBrA, I hope they’ll also look back to the ’60s, at Philadelphia’s own Jim Brewton. Reassessing Jim’s work in 1971, Victoria Donohoe wrote that his work had posed a “threat to easy equilibrium,” but that “Jim Brewton was not trying to put art down. Rather he was just trying to swing it around a bit.” Jim did find one Philadelphia artist who was involved in the avant garde and enjoyed collaboration: Jim McWilliams. A designer and Fluxus performance artist, McWilliams ran the print department at the Philadelphia College of Art in the mid-60s. The dean encouraged McWilliams to do whatever he wanted, and he wanted to let his artist friends come in at night and use the fancy printing equipment. My father was one of those artists. In 1966 and early ’67, Jim’s health fell apart and his personal life unraveled. He shot himself on May 11, 1967. On May 15, Jim’s work was in a group show with Jim McWilliams and Thomas Chimes, at Socrates Perakis Gallery. After the show came down, Jim’s work was dispersed. Devastated by the loss of my father, I wasn’t able to talk about him coherently, let alone research his life, until recently. Then Michael Taylor curated “Thomas Chimes: A Life in ’Pataphysics,” at the Philadelphia Museum in 2007. I was living in Florida at the time, but I saw an ad for the show inARTNews magazine. The word “Pataphysics” grabbed my attention; I remembered seeing “The Pataphysics Times” at my aunt’s house when I was a kid. I read the book Michael wrote, and realized that Jim Brewton had been among an artistic vanguard at the time. And that he’d been largely forgotten. I was inspired--compelled--to try to restore Jim Brewton's legacy. With Michael Taylor's encouragement, I began to contact family, old friends, and galleries. When I started the hunt for Jim’s artwork, I knew of fewer than twenty pictures. Today, we’ve located hundreds, and we know there are more to be found. Many of the works were in two families’ keeping: Ronald and Patricia Weingrad; and Nanie Lafitte and Gerry Larrison, located and saved thanks to Gerry’s sister, Patricia Wright. I am forever grateful to them for rescuing so much. These works are now in art storage in Philadelphia, and we pulled from those pieces and private collections for the 2014 show at Slought. Thanks to the show, and increased interest in Brewton’s work, the tragic end of Jim’s life is less painful to contemplate. It’s no longer the end of his story. The James E. Brewton Foundation’s tasks are: first, to locate and safeguard the artwork; second, to collaborate with educational and cultural institutions--such as PASC. There are many facets of Jim’s legacy we offer for research and study through PASC. For instance:
Emily Brewton Schilling October 23, 2015 |
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