Making the Rules – Art & Antiques Magazine

In an exhibition that considers the effect of shifting societal norms on the lives and legacies of working artists, the world of Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown is revisited

by Lilly Wei

The sympathetic black and white photo that appears in the opening pages of the hefty, generously illustrated, informative catalogue that accompanies the show made me pause. Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown, pictured about a decade before their deaths, are seated close to each other, arms similarly positioned, hands clasped in front of them, leaning forward, their legs casually aligned, comfortably touching, displaying an intimacy of longstanding, their lives and careers intertwined to an exceptional degree, although the precise directions of their creative trajectories were not entirely shared. Brown inclined toward human forms in some semblance of action and interaction; Wonner was acclaimed for his interiors, exteriors, and still lifes.

In the photograph, Wonner looks attentively outward at the viewer, his expression thoughtful, a little skeptical, as if sizing us up—or the situation. Brown’s gaze is directed elsewhere, seemingly engrossed by something beyond the picture frame, a little restive, perhaps, ready to have the session done with. Their heads are incandescent, crowned by the glorious California light. There is nothing else in the picture, except what appears to be a blown-up, softly brushed, serrated silhouette of grasses in the background. The scene has an otherworldly air, as if they were together in some kind of luminous space, enclosed in an idyllic world of their own making.

Much to the credit of Sacramento’s Crocker Museum, reminders of that lost world inhabited by Wonner and Brown can be experienced though August 27^th at the museum’s Breaking the Rules: Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown, a retrospective of paintings and works on paper that is the most ambitious presentation of the artists’ work to date.

Wonner and Brown were highly respected Californian artists, part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Scott Shields, the Crocker Art Museum’s chief curator and associate director, believes that, as original members of the movement and seminal to its creation, they have never received proper recognition for that affiliation and for their work in general. He blames the homophobia of the times as largely responsible for the oversight and hopes that in the first decades of the 21^st century—what is generally regarded as a more inclusive and enlightened era—their work might be reassessed.

In 1952, while studying for their master’s degrees in art, Wonner and Brown met at the University of California, Berkeley. They were together for nearly six decades, living openly as a gay couple in a time when homophobia was prevalent, at times vicious—the declaration of their sexuality not without consequences, personally and professionally, Shields states.

After graduating, they found studio space on Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue, a building they shared with Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and Elmer Bischoff, among others, who met there for drawing sessions. From this creative association came the movement that became known as “Bay Area Figuration” (or the Bay Area Figurative Movement) in which recognizable subject matter and the gestural bravura of Abstract Expressionism co-existed. It was the first contemporary artistic movement that achieved recognition in the United States and abroad that had originated in California, an area of the country considered by many to be the Wild West and culturally peripheral in the mid-20^th century.

William Theophilus Brown, Two Bathers and a Dog, c. 1994, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 in.
Collection of Joseph Rodota. Image © Estate of Paul Wonner and William Theophilus Brown, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento.

Their choice of male nudes as a major subject was another reason they were marginalized, Shields believes. It was a subject that made many viewers in the public (and therefore art institutions and dealers) uncomfortable in the 1950s and 1960s, and it is one art world statistic in which women rank higher than men. Their undressed male figures were often discreetly depicted, captured from the back, and posed in idealized settings. Nonetheless, they were real—naked not nude, the difference between nakedness and nudity being British art historian’s Kenneth Clark’s now rather quaint distinction between what was tasteful (i.e., nudity) and what was not. Both artists stood their ground, asserting their artistic independence.

Wonner and Brown had close ties to many other artists, writers, poets, and musicians in California, New York, other parts of the country, as well as in Europe, throughout their lives, and their frame of reference was extensive. Well aware of trends in contemporary art, the two men were also enamored of European Old Masters, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and the metaphysical painters, in addition to Abstract Expressionism. Likewise, both were searching for new ways to push painting’s boundaries.

Paul Wonner (b. Tucson, 1920; d. San Francisco, 2008) painted in a deft, gestural manner that was based on Abstract Expressionism filtered through Bay Area Figuration at first, alternating between abstraction and representation without the need to exclude one or the other. He was prescient in that regard, with the partisan divide between the two that once incited fist fights now reconciled, old news. He titled many of his early abstractions “landscapes,” from North Sea Coast (c. 1954) to paintings that originated solely in his mind, and only he knew that they referred to a particular place.

Gradually, Wonner moved wholly into the figurative camp, despite the fact that his execution remained painterly, expressive, the medium applied thickly, drips flying, with his customary virtuosic assurance but also with finesse, endowing the surface with a compelling material presence. His brushwork has always been his strength, the paintings of the 1960s some of his most riveting to my mind; notable examples include Drawing in the Studio (1964), with its aqueous ambience, and the masterful Model Drinking Coffee (1964), with its canny, fearless deployment of white to replicate light. He also has the model face us in acknowledgement, complicity, including us in the narrative in a way, say, that Edward Hopper never would. Other paintings of this period capture the light as quick slashes of white outlining the figures as in Boy and Girl in Garden (1959) and Figure by Terrace Table in Spring (1960), the outlines in pure white or elsewhere bodies patterned in stark chiaroscuro, a perceptive, persuasive equivalent for the dazzling sunlight that is synonymous with the state of California.

By the latter half of the 1960s, his Bonnard and Vuillard-inflected exteriors and interiors, which were incipient still lifes, gave way to actual still lifes. Yellow Bowl, Cup and Flowers (1966) is a gorgeous example of a series of compositionally reductive paintings from that period that is anything but austere, enriched by the sumptuousness of color, even if limited in palette. Essentially two planes of color, Yellow Bowl is divided into a deep velvety blue above an edgy, brushy chartreuse that represents a wall or blank space and a tabletop, a diagonal of sorts created by a blue-green band that seems to be a shadow. There are only two objects on the table—the cup at the far left, the bowl just off-center—the asymmetrical placement adding tautness, the carmine of the flowers half in the picture plane, half cut-off offering a spark of warmth. But most striking is the sense of vastness this easel-sized canvas imparts, like an endless, preternaturally still landscape.

By the early 1970s, Wonner shifted into the still lifes that would characterize much of the last phase of his life, such as Still Life with Flowers and a Note to KMK (1992). These domesticated beauties are sharply drawn, his skills as a draftsman and as a colorist on full display, recalling Dutch still life paintings, where the genre was invented. They seem to include everything and the kitchen sink, artfully, even ritualistically composed: place mats here, a stemmed flower there, a wedge of pie that gives Wayne Thiebaud a run for his money, a glass of champagne, an extravaganza of potted plants on chairs, like a visual diary, or a table set for guests, friends. Sometimes he includes a checklist of what’s there; at least one critic fact-checked it for accuracy.

Theophilus Brown (b. 1919, Moline, Illinois; d. 2012, San Francisco) was a more dramatic artist, perhaps even confrontational.  One charcoal self-portrait from 1969 shows him scowling, but whether the facial expression was one of displeasure or despair is hard to say. He animates his paintings through the emotions of his human subjects, pictorially establishing their relationship to one another and to the viewer. Always interested in painting human beings, his stories are told through physical manifestations and a riveting rawness of form and color, a deliberate awkwardness expressed by means of the body. While he, too, painted abstractly in the beginning (since very few artists of the period initially resisted the allure of Abstract Expressionism), he was never wholly comfortable with the non-objective, preferring to make figurative work, he later said.

Paul Wonner, Model Drinking Coffee, 1964, oil on canvas, 49 1⁄2 x 45 7⁄8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. Image © Estate of Paul Wonner and William Theophilus Brown, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento.

Brown had a more cosmopolitan background than many contemporary American artists of his generation, spending time in New York and Paris at a time when the cultural baton was being passed from the old world to the new. He devoured art and met a heady array of artists that included Picasso, Giacometti, Balthus, and the de Koonings. They, as well as others such as Cézanne, Braque, the Fauves, Matisse, Modigliani, de Chirico (and Brown made a special trip to Italy to see more de Chiricos), would shape the arc of his practice. In fact, when Brown began a series of remarkable paintings of athletes—football players, boxers, wrestlers—it was in no small part due to the influence of Elaine de Kooning and her own series of sports figures. (Both Elaine and Willem de Kooning were Brown’s mentors during his stay in New York.) Football Painting #2 (1956) and The Referee (1956) are two instances of what would be a breakthrough for him. His emphasis, however, was on the dynamics between bodies, on the visual drama of the impact as players crash into one another, knowing, he said, nothing about the game itself, taking the images from sports magazines and newspapers.

That in turn led to his lifelong preoccupation with portraits and nudes, particularly male nudes, often in the collective (in tribute to male beauty and in defiance of existing norms that refused to acknowledge homosexuality), although he claimed to have painted as many female nudes as he had male. Standing Bathers (1993), a work on paper, sees the world through an aquamarine colored lens, recalling the blue world of Wonner’s early work and a prelapsarian Eden. His figures are lithe, long-limbed, classicized, while at the same time very much of the present moment in a real locale, not some Poussinesque Arcadia.

Another of his hallmark series is devoted to scenes of abandoned industrial sites that he began to paint in the 1970s and throughout the following decade or so, such as Backward Glance (1989). Its meticulous architectural rendering is reminiscent of Charles Sheeler or Charles Demuth; its distortions in scale recalling de Chirico’s subtly disturbing dreamlike world, the dog the only inhabitant, the emptiness eerie. Brown said that he felt a growing affinity for the surreal and that it lay at the heart of most artists’ imagination.

“Breaking the Rules” does what it sets out to do—or rather, in presenting the scope of the artists’ achievements, it contradicts its premise that the two artists were not successful enough. It seems to me that they were remarkably successful, their accomplishments triumphant by almost any reasonable metric. And they were extraordinarily successful gauged by the most crucial metric of all for artists: They were able to make the art they wanted to make, and they were able to do it until the end.

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Following its stay at the Crocker, the exhibition will travel to the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (October 14, 2023–January 7, 2024) and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN (January 28–March 30, 2024).