SFMOMA: Bay Area icon Joan Brown gets the big, quirky exhibit she deserves

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s online promotion for its Joan Brown retrospective suggests we need an introduction to the Bay Area painter who flourished in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.

So she’s touted as an animal lover, swimming enthusiast and a deeply imaginative artist with an independent spirit who had a “charmingly personal and engaging career.” And she’s described as one of San Francisco’s most important local heroes.

That’s not marketing hype — it comes pretty close to the truth in the exhibit’s display of 80 of her paintings and sculptures. The works are colorful, fresh — more than 30 years after Brown’s death — and often humorous. They’re also thoughtful and seem timeless, because Brown (1938-1990) mostly ignored the art trends of her era.

Whether or not museum visitors already know her work, it’s hard to resist paintings of cats and dogs, a watermelon, a Thanksgiving turkey, her son Noel’s first Christmas, and an 8-foot-tall image with a brilliant red background titled “Self-Portrait With Fish and Cat.”

“Brown’s life and career were joyfully and productively entwined,” says Nancy Lim, the co-curator of the exhibit, in the show’s catalog.

Beginning in art school in San Francisco in the 1950s, Brown “committed to memorializing the majesty of the everyday,” Lim says. Brown’s works — including depictions of her shoes, her refrigerator, vegetables on the kitchen table — have been described as “visual diaries.”

The exhibit, co-curated by Janet Bishop, and the wide-ranging catalog are meant to reassess Brown’s career. Early on, critics were confounded by her transition from abstraction to a brighter, clearer figurative style — and by her quirky subject matter.

“Her vision was dismissed as unserious,” Lim says, “but was in fact rooted firmly in intellect and impassioned curiosity.”

That intellect and curiosity took Brown far beyond San Francisco’s Marina District where she grew up. She would eventually pursue a spiritual, metaphysical path. In the 1970s she used the proceeds of a Guggenheim fellowship to visit Egypt’s ancient archaeological sites.

She and her fourth husband, Michael S. Hebel, traveled to India’s holy sites on their honeymoon. Brown died in South India in 1990 when a turret collapsed while she was installing a tiled obelisk she created to honor her guru, Sathya Sai Baba.

The SFMOMA exhibit, simply titled “Joan Brown,” conveys an astonishing range of works in a 30-plus year career. The paintings date from 1957 to 1985, the subjects from “Cocker Spaniel With Cloud at Night” to ‘The Golden Age: The Tapir + the Jaguar.”

In an exhibit that overwhelms most of the museum’s seventh floor, Brown’s signature style kicks in by the third of nine galleries, with such paintings as “Joan, Gordon + Rufus, Front of S.F. Opera House” (1969). It’s a self-portrait based on a photograph of Brown and her third husband, Gordon Cook; she’s added, delightfully, their dog Rufus to the formal setting.

One full gallery is devoted to Brown’s 1975 swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco’s Aquatic Park, when the wake from a passing freighter created life-threatening waves. She nearly drowned. In one painting, she sits and reflects calmly on the near-disaster. The swim is depicted as a painting within the painting, and the freighter’s prow becomes a pattern in the dress she is wearing.

Both simplicity and mystery are a hallmark of many of Brown’s images, and the curators’ captions are enormously helpful in giving them depth. They explain occult theosophical symbols, the cat motif that stands in for the artist herself and the floating fish that’s a tribute to her home, for a couple of years, on the Sacramento River Delta.

The path through Brown’s art and life continues through galleries themed “A New Age” and “Spiritual Journey,” but it ends up with another self-portrait. It’s from 1984, depicting Brown in paint-splattered work clothes, a brush in one hand, and the wall behind her showing traces of blue, yellow and purple from previously completed works. Those earlier paintings, ‘Harmony” and “The Long Journey,” are also on view, to complete the process.

Don’t miss the 1982 painting — hung between the main galleries and the elevators– of “Joan + Donald,” depicting Brown holding a big, unruly looking cat. Donald had some stature of his own. The Internal Revenue Service audited Brown for claiming the cat as a tax deduction. But the case was dropped after she argued he was a live-in artist’s model that deserved food and veterinary care. To her artist friends, he became “Donald the Deductable.”

‘JOAN BROWN’

Through:  March 12

Where: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., San Francisco

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday-Tuesday; 1-8 p.m. Thursday

Admission: $19-$25, free for visitors 18 and younger (“Joan Brown” exhibit included with regular admission); 415-357-4000, sfmoma.org.