Let’s Get Lost

William Brun (born 1936) is a Los Angeles painter who makes supernatural fantasies with freaky-looking figures and dense passages of spiritual text in a cartoon style. He facets his compositions with the intensity of a gemcutter and tattoos them with upbeat aphorisms like a Jewish motivational speaker. In his most beguiling works, crystaline arcades filled with mysterious creatures, ominous symbols and elaborate text crawls are offered up like ancient labyrinthes as pathways to the divine. And yet he is almost a completely forgotten man.

Brun was born and raised in San Diego. A sickly child often restricted to bed, he turned to art and won his first prize by third grade. Towards the end of high school, he moved with his parents to the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, a surreal enclave of orthodox Jews and Hollywood aspirants, where he has lived most of his life. In the mid 1950s, Brun joined the military to take advantage of the expiring GI Bill. He was stationed in Germany and drew cartoons, painted murals and designed posters for the officers in his regiment. Back in Los Angeles, he studied at Chouinard Art Institute under Robert Irwin, Richards Ruben and Robert Graham. Fellow students included Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell and Joe Goode, three artists who would become famous and help turn Los Angeles from a postwar aesthetic backwater into a global art capital.

Early Success

After leaving Chouinard in 1960, Brun’s career got off to a fast start. He appeared in shows at Los Angeles County Art Museum, Claremont Graduate University, Feigen Palmer Gallery, and David Stuart Gallery. When the legendary Walter Hopps took over as curator of the Pasadena Art Museum in 1964, he put Brun’s work in a group show called “Young Californians” and brought him in to teach. There, Brun met the artist and teacher Lucille Krasne. She got him a job as an instructor at the Watts Towers Arts Center. For five years he taught neighborhood children in the original house of the towers' creator, folk artist Simon Rodia.

Unlike many of Brun’s contemporaries at Chouinard, who charged forward into abstraction, pop art and minimalism, Brun retreated into portraiture, cartooning and art history. He worked obsessively, and developed a retro-futurist drawing style with an Art Deco DNA. Ancient-Egyptian-looking figures in towering hats and elaborate necklaces fill his notebooks like statues in an air of melodramatic isolation. They are joined by even weirder characters in space-helmets and other alien gear. The recurrence of large, mystical stones can be traced to Brun’s work as an illustrator for Laykin et Cie, the jewlery company owned by his wife’s family. But the allure of these drawings comes from not knowing when or where they take place. They look like they’re on a fantasy world or a far-away planet. Yet the caption to a 2013 drawing suggests the opposite. “Tell me the truth,” says one oddball character to another, “do you like Earth?” And with that we realize it might not be the figures who are on another planet but their author, who spent six decades developing his alternative universe.

While the theatrical staging of figures remains constant throughout Brun’s long career, the language used to describe them evolves. This is particularly true in the paintings. Works done right after school where Brun was exposed to art history are drenched in art history. These might feature sparse, melodramatic arrangements of bodies distorted in the style of Viennese Secessionist painter Egon Schiele; or they might consist of organic constructions of geometric and tubular forms that draw heavily on Dada and Surrealism. These give way in the late 1960s to elaborate sexual fantasies in which nudes cavort with weirdly abstracted genitalia in modernist groupings lifted from German Expressionism and the early paintings of Matisse. In the most extreme versions of these, naked figures sliced into cubist shards dance across a canvas bound in rhythmic unity. These might have seemed outlandish to locals given the nerdy figurative painting by academic artists like Rico LeBrun and Howard Warshaw, but they are soft core bits of magical realism when compared to S. Clay Wilson’s biker orgies and the rubbery sexual nightmares of Peter Saul being made 300 miles north in San Francisco.

Brun’s paintings function like his drawings but with color. He labors over design but is indifferent to surface. More like graphic illustrations on canvas than traditional painting, he obsessively filigrees and tattoos, filling the picture plane with elegant lines and forms. Almost every image has to do double duty and be the thing it is as well as the platform for another image. That is, a human leg or a table top must also be the surface for a face, a heart, a series of words or an abstract design. The images grow dense with complexity despite almost no build-up of paint. Brun fosters ornamentation for ornamentation’s sake.

As he gets older, current events and Judaism replace sex and nudity as subject matter. The painting field becomes more and more cluttered. Like a hoarder, Brun develops a compulsive need to fill every space. Text comes to play an increasingly large role, as if Brun gets nervous about violating the second commandment “to not make unto thee any graven image” and starts replacing pictures with words. These are used to laminate everything from dogs to ships to the Saturn-like rings around planets. There is a shared sensibility with the work of folk artists like Howard Finster, who also crams words into tiny spaces to the point of illegibility. This leads to a particular kind of frustration in Brun’s work due to his rampaging dyslexia. “Faloce” substitutes for false, “aplickabel” for applicable and “blemce” for blimps, which frequently hover in his skies. While some of these unconventional spellings crackle like accidental poetry—“Interfear” and “shear a common fate”—for the most part they make the work harder to penetrate. Add horror vacui, to neuro-difference and religious ranting and you have the ingredients for what used to be called, innocently, outsider art.

Marginalization

After his exhibitions in the 1960s, Brun was shunted to the margins of the Los Angeles art world, and it’s easy to see why. His work doesn’t fit into any of the narratives that prevailed at the time: hard-edge, finish fetish, beat art, pop art, video art, conceptual art, performance art, street art, queer art, Chicano art. Even outsider art is an awkward fit. Brun went to an influential art school; his work is art-historically fluent and technically sophisticated; and he lives 15 minutes from the Hollywood sign. While this doesn’t disqualify him, since the definition of outside corresponds to the always-changing location of inside, it makes one think that maybe a better description for the art Brun makes is Jewish art. Elaborate ornamentation and spiritual focus are typical, and the use of tiny words to render images is in the tradition of Hebrew micrography that goes back to the ninth century. This might explain why Brun had to settle for shows in artist-run spaces, restaurants and cafes while the Los Angeles gallery world was exploding in size and importance. Despite a history of prominent Jewish collectors in Los Angeles, or perhaps because of it, Jewish and Jewish-seeming art tends to get shunned. Crusty paintings of rabbis and stone tablets gather in the thrift stores on Fairfax Avenue with cast off judaica. Brun, who describes his art as “gilded and bejeweled” and his process as “a magic out of silver and gold,” is an annoying reminder of pre-gentrified jewish origin for Los Angeles collectors and museums competing with their peers in Basel, London and New York for global art supremacy. The only Los Angeles artist who foregrounded his judaism and avoided expulsion is Wallace Berman. And even though he is the prototypical underground bohemian, it was only when European galleries and museums began to recognize his importance in the fields of appropriation, semiotics, assemblage and the artist book that he gained blue-chip status in his home town.

Lacking Berman’s intellectual heft and cool jazz vibe, Brun’s art has to succeed on quality of voice and uniqueness of visual style if it is to gain any attention at all. In this sense the early paintings are mostly intriguing failures. A 1960 picture branded with the phrase “two people” shows a male and female composed of interlocking cubistic blocks. The male appears to be growing out of the female’s pelvic region like a child. Its head is the only thing separated from their single body. This is as strange a use of modernist abstraction to tell a story of interpersonal psychodrama as you’ll ever see. And while it feels ahead of its time as the idea for an illustration, it feels weird and forced as a painting.

Stylistic Development

By the late 1960s, Brun’s appropriations from other artists become more knowing and his approach to narrative less stilted. He draws on his Jewish roots to portray a young woman’s interest in her African roots in what he would call an early “portrait impression.” The women floats above L.A. naked in a dream scene inspired by Chagall. The city is a placid hillscape with a lake, orchard, rainbow and oil derricks, but it’s red, as though it has been burning. The floating woman carries in her uterus the continent of Africa. An area near South Sudan is highlighted in red. She contemplates the disembodied head of an older Black woman floating alongside her, face tattooed like a tribal mask, afro covered in dots. Reflecting the era of Black consciousness, the woman is wholly focused on her ancestral spirit and oblivious to the city below. Being himself a product of diaspora, and an outsider by virtue of his strangeness, the painting glows with empathy and the artist’s identification with his subject. We don’t know who the sitter is, but she engages us with a directness and a familiarity contrary to the otherness of black sitters subjected to the distancing techniques often used by white artists of the past. Rather than conspire with the separation of Black people and their oppression, this painting collapses difference. It feels connected to the alliance that held between Jews and Blacks in urban centers such as L.A. during the civil rights era.

By the 1970s we see a glimmer of Brun’s mature style. A colorful scene from 1978 presents a man and a woman in a garden with a snake and a mask. Banners with phrases such as “Man and Woman Hold the Key” and “Only Time Will Tell What New Directions Are In Store” flutter throughout. The man is pulling a star from the sky while the woman offers him a mask bearing the word “nowars.” From this smattering of text and image one discerns the character of Brun’s basic allegorical approach: simple universal truths with moral underpinnings. In this case the key to world peace is in the personal, and the language to convey it comes from the Bible.

Many of Brun’s paintings from this time onward are portraits of friends and acquaintances, and he leans heavily on the Renaissance for inspiration. His models are thrust into the foreground like monarchs of the 16th and 17th centuries. As in portraits by Raphael, the background landscape helps cue the sitter’s interior life. But where Raphael used naturalism to evoke secular aesthetics and humanist psychology, Brun clutters science-fiction landscapes with religious sayings to opposite effect. The sitters seem less modern, more alien, like the Jews in 19th-century garb walking around his neighborhood. The effect is to un-renaissance the world and make it strange and medieval again.

This is the case in Brun’s most ambitious canvases from the 1990s, which try to encapsulate life’s spiritual mysteries on the immense scale of those apocalyptic storytellers Hieronymous Bosch and Pietr Breugel. A hundred things go on at once in these busy jewel boxes. Brun takes the cubist fragmentation of his earlier work to new heights. The picture plane is a riot of skewed doorways and long religious text crawls. There are pictures in pictures, sudden cutaways and wormholes that take the viewer away from the action and into a separate space. Fields of text billow like banners curving the space into non-Euclidean geometries. The eye goes up and down and round and round like a game of shoots and ladders. Paintings such as “Art Dealer” and “Enchantress” look like Las Vegas shopping malls designed by MC Escher for students from Hogwarts on spring break.

What sets these paintings apart from Brun’s earlier work is their extreme complexity. Having shrunk his pictorial monads and wildly increased their number, the canvases look like parade grounds for colorful marching ants. The paintings plead to be seen as the creation of a wizard architect, to bear the stamp of a supernatural designer. They invite the viewer to shop them for what promises to be some kind of divine wisdom. Unfortunately for Brun, selling god as mastery of excess goes against the grain of art history. Since the criminilization of ornamentation by the avant garde over 100 years ago, viewers have been conditioned to read the absence you find in the work of Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt as a signifier of the divine. To the contemporary viewer, the excess of Brun’s complexity reads like the absurdly intricate workings of a machine in a Rube Goldberg cartoon. Brun is that goofy guy who wears colorful hippie clothes to the opera where everyone else is wearing Prada black. To an American sensibility built on Puritan restraint, his designs are a long-winded religious bureaucracy with no direct line to god. His Catholic contemporary, Sister Mary Corita, understood this all too well. The California nun, who made psychedelic screen-prints with spiritual sayings during the 1960s and 1970s, eschewed scholastic ornamentation for protestant austerity, and has recently become an art world icon. Again.

How to Read Brun

Brun is nearing the end of his life. He knows all too well that his work doesn’t fit into the cultural narrative. For a while in the 60s he tried to be on trend with a series of hard-edge minimalist abstractions. But they bored him and he went back to following his own voice. Occasionally, he’ll shout at the world like a soap box ranter his sense of his own importance: ”I am the Artist William Robert Brun, Age Seventy—Born March 25th, 1936. Now claim to be one of the most famous 'unknown' artists of the approaching Millenium.” But for the most part he is humble about his place in the art world and hopes his paintings offer simple diversions.

“I am a simple Artist, single-minded, committed to my task of making Works of Art. Drawing from my family, friends, acquaintances. Just add charcoal to canvas, apply water, brushes with acrylic paints, proceeding in a manner of time and thoughts, bringing words a voice - a single voice - clear to a point where the eye and the mind live.”

Perhaps in the end, if we want to profit from visiting the temple of William Brun, we have to learn to value time wasted. If we free his paintings from the responsibility of performing weighty spiritual tasks, which paintings by artists such as Agnes Martin are more than willing to take on, we can appreciate them for what they are: miracles of genetic complexity, like the intricate web on an tropical leaf. Pinballing around Brun’s illuminated spaces may not be a route back to the god head but a productive dawdle, a needed drift, a useful waste of time in the company of a charming oddball. If you are the kind of viewer who sees in weightless artistic gestures like these an act of political resistance to the pedagogy of dominant culture, then you can thank Brun for creating a little free zone. Perhaps there is a rabbinical term for this low-level resistance. If not, one could just cite the old Chet Baker song as a way of describing Brun’s offer to the viewer: “Let’s Get Lost.”

So maybe Brun is a bit of a mystic after all. His preaching unpreaches. His schooling unschools. Sometimes an overgrown garden is just an overgrown garden. What counts is the lovely time you have in it and the marvels that make you stare. And Brun can make you stare. When artists give up trying to say something significant they risk being marginalized. If there is an outside anymore, maybe that’s where it has moved to: triviality, superficiality, the decorative. Despite yearning to say something profound, and amassing the tools for it, it’s possible William Brun accidentally landed outside by doing the exact opposite: producing the decorative. In the world of contemporary art, that kind of irony couldn’t be more inside.