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拍品專文
Joan Brown’s After the Alcatraz Swim #2, painted in 1975, stands as a striking example of personal narrative, psychological symbolism, and stylistic innovation, converging within an enigmatic and deceptively simple composition. Painted during a pivotal period of her life and career, Brown’s commanding self-portrait synthesizes the influences of non-Western artistic traditions, autobiographical storytelling, and introspective portraiture. More than just a record of a traumatic event, After the Alcatraz Swim #2 becomes a meditative sanctuary of resilience, identity, and self-reflection.
At the heart of After the Alcatraz Swim #2 lies Brown’s own near-death experience. An avid swimmer, Brown trained with Olympic swim coach Charlie Sava and participated in open-water swims in the San Francisco Bay, often without a wetsuit or goggles and fully immersed in the elements of the extreme environment. Along with five other women, Brown successfully sued the various swim clubs in the Bay Area to admit women. In 1975, Brown competed for the first time in the all-women’s Alcatraz Swim, a one-and-a-half mile race from Alcatraz Island to Aquatic Park. Brown swam these bay waters many times, familiar with the frigid temperature and strong currents. However, during the race, a freighter unexpectedly passed by, creating treacherous currents that made the already difficult waters unnavigable. Consumed by the overwhelming sense of isolation, after losing sight of her fellow swimmers, Brown became disoriented and hypothermic. Swept off course, she swam in circles for over an hour, hallucinating about Hawaiian islands and palm trees floating in the bay, before she and several other swimmers were rescued. Brown recalls, “There were ten or fifteen foot waves, choppy and full of swells where you could see no one and nothing. It was so awful and the city looked so far away. The water had never really spooked me before, but this time I was absolutely terrified” (quoted in K. Tsujimoto and J. Baas, The Art of Joan Brown, exh. cat., University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, 1998, p. 122).
Swimming held deep importance for Brown—not just as a form of physical activity and hobby, but as a source of reflection and spiritual insight that shaped much of her artistic vision. After her harrowing brush with death doing the sport she loved so dearly, Brown turned to painting a series of self-portraits, including the present work, as a way of processing the emotional aftermath and confronting the event through her art. For Brown, she immediately knew that in order to “…get this damn thing out of my system…” she had to paint about it (ibid., p. 122). This experience became a pivotal moment for Brown, leading her to explore themes of spirituality and self-reflection with renewed depth. After the Alcatraz Swim #2 serves as a powerful visual testimony—not only to the physical consequences of the ordeal, but also to its emotional and psychological weight. Brown revisited this event multiple times in her practice. The Night Before the Alcatraz Swim captures the contemplative, quiet moments on the eve of the fateful swim, with the artist resting by the window overlooking the looming silhouette of Alcatraz Island and the route she would soon attempt. In addition to the present work, Brown produced two other paintings: After the Alcatraz Swim #1 (promised gift to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and After the Alcatraz Swim #3 (Palm Springs Art Museum), both capturing the artist’s introspective and sobering reflections of the traumatic event. Together, these paintings form a deeply personal series chronicling her brush with death and its lasting impact: “It really shook [me up], not just my physical being but my psyche, my soul, my emotional being, and my spirit” (ibid, p. 122).
In After the Alcatraz Swim #2, Brown depicts herself standing within a quiet, domestic interior, her hands folded gently before her. A dog sits attentively to her right, watching with intent, as Brown looks off and away, as if avoiding its concerned gaze. Flat, static, and donning crisp, clean clothes, and high heels, Brown appears oddly calm and composed, contradicting the underlying physical and emotional trauma that lie beneath the surface—the bright colors, strong and bold outlining, repetitive patterns, and cozy floral motifs present an ironic and uncanny sense of order and stability. Brown’s use of bold planes of color and flat perspective presents an illusion of depth reminiscent of Eastern art, particularly Indian miniature paintings. On the wall, a framed painting depicts turbulent waters, bordered by the San Francisco skyline enveloped in a fiery and ominous red sky. A figure in a small yellow boat holds onto a swimmer. As with the other two paintings depicting the psychological aftermath of the attempted swim, Brown illustrates her experiences within the compositions as actual paintings, memorializing the memory like a dramatic shipwreck reminiscent of J.M.W. Turner. The turbulent sea evokes not only the literal event of the Alcatraz swim, but the metaphorical storms of life and the potential of transformation through adversity, contrasting with the safety and stability of the surrounding domestic home.
“If there is a San Francisco style, a San Francisco attitude, that style, and that attitude can be found epitomized in [Brown’s] paintings.” Philip Leider
Born and raised in San Francisco, Brown attended the California School of Fine Arts (later known as the San Francisco Art Institute) and was introduced to the Bay Area Figurative Movement through her mentor and teacher Elmer Bischoff. In her early works of this period, greatly inspired by Bischoff’s peers, including Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, Brown’s style emerged with expressive, thick-impastoed surfaces, treading between abstraction and figuration. Bischoff encouraged Brown to look beyond small details and academic rules in painting, to accept and learn from mistakes—his teaching style influenced Brown to pull directly from her own life events for her paintings. Her career quickly catapulted, garnering immediate institutional and critical recognition for her highly textured, tactile canvases. In 1957-1958, she was included in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1960, at just twenty-two years old, her painting, Thanksgiving Turkey, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; her first solo exhibition in New York City opened; and she was the youngest artist included in the Whitney Museum’s Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six exhibition. In 1963, following the birth of her son with her second husband, fellow Bay Area artist Manuel Neri, Brown’s work was featured on the front cover of Artforum, lauding her as the face of the San Francisco art scene: “If there is a San Francisco style, a San Francisco attitude, that style, and that attitude can be found epitomized in [Brown’s] paintings” (P. Leider, “Joan Brown: Her Work Illustrates the Progress of a San Francisco Mood,” Artforum, vol. I, no. 12, June 1963, p. 28).
By the mid-1960s, Brown’s career was on a high—her decadent paintings, with figurative motifs emerging from swaths of thick paint that riffed on the Abstract Expressionist artists on the opposite coast, attracted frenzied collectors, institutional recognition, and commercial and academic success. Brown began feeling disenchanted, resenting how her work had become commodified and feeling as though her output was reduced to products to be churned out and sold. Weighing the benefits of comfortability afforded by commercial success with the integrity of being an “artist’s artist,” Brown was presented with an existential rift—in response, she shifted her artistic aesthetic to a more minimal approach, fracturing her relationship with her New York dealer over this change. A new wave of inspiration captured her attention a few years later; unable to find oil paint at her neighborhood art supply store, Brown bought enamel paint, often used for house painting, and quickly became enamored by its vibrancy and its ability to quickly dry. With newfound inspiration from the alternative materials she purchased on a whim, Brown approached painting again with newfound vigor, developing a graphic figurative style that marked a complete contrast from the impastoed, semi-abstracted works that catapulted her to early fame. With a flattened, illustrative approach, using bold black outlines and simplified forms that echo folk art, comic illustration, and non-Western art, After the Alcatraz Swim #2 embodies a stylized, almost surreal, quality, enhancing the psychological distance between Brown’s past trauma and present reflection.
In Brown’s paintings of her traumatic swim, a powerful tension emerges to the surface—beneath the bold colors, whimsical patterns, and playful forms lies a deeper narrative of struggle, resilience, and inner turmoil. Like a swimmer, whose smooth strokes on the surface hide the frenetic effort in the water below, After the Alcatraz Swim #2 conceals the emotional and physical struggle it represents.
At the heart of After the Alcatraz Swim #2 lies Brown’s own near-death experience. An avid swimmer, Brown trained with Olympic swim coach Charlie Sava and participated in open-water swims in the San Francisco Bay, often without a wetsuit or goggles and fully immersed in the elements of the extreme environment. Along with five other women, Brown successfully sued the various swim clubs in the Bay Area to admit women. In 1975, Brown competed for the first time in the all-women’s Alcatraz Swim, a one-and-a-half mile race from Alcatraz Island to Aquatic Park. Brown swam these bay waters many times, familiar with the frigid temperature and strong currents. However, during the race, a freighter unexpectedly passed by, creating treacherous currents that made the already difficult waters unnavigable. Consumed by the overwhelming sense of isolation, after losing sight of her fellow swimmers, Brown became disoriented and hypothermic. Swept off course, she swam in circles for over an hour, hallucinating about Hawaiian islands and palm trees floating in the bay, before she and several other swimmers were rescued. Brown recalls, “There were ten or fifteen foot waves, choppy and full of swells where you could see no one and nothing. It was so awful and the city looked so far away. The water had never really spooked me before, but this time I was absolutely terrified” (quoted in K. Tsujimoto and J. Baas, The Art of Joan Brown, exh. cat., University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, 1998, p. 122).
Swimming held deep importance for Brown—not just as a form of physical activity and hobby, but as a source of reflection and spiritual insight that shaped much of her artistic vision. After her harrowing brush with death doing the sport she loved so dearly, Brown turned to painting a series of self-portraits, including the present work, as a way of processing the emotional aftermath and confronting the event through her art. For Brown, she immediately knew that in order to “…get this damn thing out of my system…” she had to paint about it (ibid., p. 122). This experience became a pivotal moment for Brown, leading her to explore themes of spirituality and self-reflection with renewed depth. After the Alcatraz Swim #2 serves as a powerful visual testimony—not only to the physical consequences of the ordeal, but also to its emotional and psychological weight. Brown revisited this event multiple times in her practice. The Night Before the Alcatraz Swim captures the contemplative, quiet moments on the eve of the fateful swim, with the artist resting by the window overlooking the looming silhouette of Alcatraz Island and the route she would soon attempt. In addition to the present work, Brown produced two other paintings: After the Alcatraz Swim #1 (promised gift to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and After the Alcatraz Swim #3 (Palm Springs Art Museum), both capturing the artist’s introspective and sobering reflections of the traumatic event. Together, these paintings form a deeply personal series chronicling her brush with death and its lasting impact: “It really shook [me up], not just my physical being but my psyche, my soul, my emotional being, and my spirit” (ibid, p. 122).
In After the Alcatraz Swim #2, Brown depicts herself standing within a quiet, domestic interior, her hands folded gently before her. A dog sits attentively to her right, watching with intent, as Brown looks off and away, as if avoiding its concerned gaze. Flat, static, and donning crisp, clean clothes, and high heels, Brown appears oddly calm and composed, contradicting the underlying physical and emotional trauma that lie beneath the surface—the bright colors, strong and bold outlining, repetitive patterns, and cozy floral motifs present an ironic and uncanny sense of order and stability. Brown’s use of bold planes of color and flat perspective presents an illusion of depth reminiscent of Eastern art, particularly Indian miniature paintings. On the wall, a framed painting depicts turbulent waters, bordered by the San Francisco skyline enveloped in a fiery and ominous red sky. A figure in a small yellow boat holds onto a swimmer. As with the other two paintings depicting the psychological aftermath of the attempted swim, Brown illustrates her experiences within the compositions as actual paintings, memorializing the memory like a dramatic shipwreck reminiscent of J.M.W. Turner. The turbulent sea evokes not only the literal event of the Alcatraz swim, but the metaphorical storms of life and the potential of transformation through adversity, contrasting with the safety and stability of the surrounding domestic home.
“If there is a San Francisco style, a San Francisco attitude, that style, and that attitude can be found epitomized in [Brown’s] paintings.” Philip Leider
Born and raised in San Francisco, Brown attended the California School of Fine Arts (later known as the San Francisco Art Institute) and was introduced to the Bay Area Figurative Movement through her mentor and teacher Elmer Bischoff. In her early works of this period, greatly inspired by Bischoff’s peers, including Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, Brown’s style emerged with expressive, thick-impastoed surfaces, treading between abstraction and figuration. Bischoff encouraged Brown to look beyond small details and academic rules in painting, to accept and learn from mistakes—his teaching style influenced Brown to pull directly from her own life events for her paintings. Her career quickly catapulted, garnering immediate institutional and critical recognition for her highly textured, tactile canvases. In 1957-1958, she was included in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1960, at just twenty-two years old, her painting, Thanksgiving Turkey, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; her first solo exhibition in New York City opened; and she was the youngest artist included in the Whitney Museum’s Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six exhibition. In 1963, following the birth of her son with her second husband, fellow Bay Area artist Manuel Neri, Brown’s work was featured on the front cover of Artforum, lauding her as the face of the San Francisco art scene: “If there is a San Francisco style, a San Francisco attitude, that style, and that attitude can be found epitomized in [Brown’s] paintings” (P. Leider, “Joan Brown: Her Work Illustrates the Progress of a San Francisco Mood,” Artforum, vol. I, no. 12, June 1963, p. 28).
By the mid-1960s, Brown’s career was on a high—her decadent paintings, with figurative motifs emerging from swaths of thick paint that riffed on the Abstract Expressionist artists on the opposite coast, attracted frenzied collectors, institutional recognition, and commercial and academic success. Brown began feeling disenchanted, resenting how her work had become commodified and feeling as though her output was reduced to products to be churned out and sold. Weighing the benefits of comfortability afforded by commercial success with the integrity of being an “artist’s artist,” Brown was presented with an existential rift—in response, she shifted her artistic aesthetic to a more minimal approach, fracturing her relationship with her New York dealer over this change. A new wave of inspiration captured her attention a few years later; unable to find oil paint at her neighborhood art supply store, Brown bought enamel paint, often used for house painting, and quickly became enamored by its vibrancy and its ability to quickly dry. With newfound inspiration from the alternative materials she purchased on a whim, Brown approached painting again with newfound vigor, developing a graphic figurative style that marked a complete contrast from the impastoed, semi-abstracted works that catapulted her to early fame. With a flattened, illustrative approach, using bold black outlines and simplified forms that echo folk art, comic illustration, and non-Western art, After the Alcatraz Swim #2 embodies a stylized, almost surreal, quality, enhancing the psychological distance between Brown’s past trauma and present reflection.
In Brown’s paintings of her traumatic swim, a powerful tension emerges to the surface—beneath the bold colors, whimsical patterns, and playful forms lies a deeper narrative of struggle, resilience, and inner turmoil. Like a swimmer, whose smooth strokes on the surface hide the frenetic effort in the water below, After the Alcatraz Swim #2 conceals the emotional and physical struggle it represents.