William Brun (born 1936)

William Brun was born and raised in San Diego but he has lived for most of his life in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, a surreal enclave of orthodox Jews and young people trying to make it in hollywood. In the mid 1950s, he is stationed in Germany as a soldier and draws cartoons, paints murals and designs posters for the officers in his regiment. 

In the late 1950s he studies at Chouinard Art Institute under Robert Irwin, Richards Ruben and Robert Graham. He develops a figurative style that appropriates heavily from early modernism but has an extra-terrestrial feel that is hard to pin down. In the 1960s he appears in exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Art Museum, Claremont Graduate University, Feigen Palmer Gallery, David Stuart Gallery and the Pasadena Art Museum, curated by Walter Hopps. He teaches neighborhood children at the newly-created Watts Towers Arts Center.

By the late 1960s offers from galleries to exhibit dry up but Brun keeps developing his style. His early paintings are surreal allegories that draw on the art of the  Viennese secession, Dada, Surrealism and german expressionism.  His mid-career paintings are portrait fantasies that lean heavily on Renaissance painting for inspiration. His most ambitious canvases from the 1990s deftly manage amounts of pictorial information—symbols, text, figures. These paintings are more cluttered than the ones that came before. Spiritual text comes to play an increasingly large role. Brun crams words into tiny spaces to the point of illegibility. His extreme dyslexia makes the meaning of the work even harder to penetrate. The combination of horror vaccui, neuro-difference and religious proseletyzing give the work an old-fashioned outsider art quality. 

To a certain extent this accounts for Brun’s marginalization. Only recently have traditional commercial galleries started to incorporate outsider art into their programs. Most of Brun’xs shows have taken place in frame shops, artist spaces, restaurants and cafes. His marginalization is also the likely result of exploring overt religious themes. Starting in the mid 1970s, his paintings veered away from psychology and symbolism to judaism and the news. While they avoid overt politcal debate, they emulate the gem-cutting, micography and ornate silver smithing of Judaica, a genre of art history that has yet to fare well as a source of appropriation in contemporary art.