Vivian Browne’s Lessons in Flipping the Script

Vivian Browne navigated the intersection of identity, politics and paint in deft, surprising and tender ways. In lieu of overt symbols of Black liberation, her ‘Little Men’ (1966–69) paintings, made during the Black Arts Movement in the US, depict large, self-important white guys in moaning, defensive postures. Later in her career, she rarely worked in an explicitly figurative mode. When she did portray people, as in this early series, she tended to craft sketchy works that juxtaposed negative space with oozing rainbows. There’s a curious ambivalence to these watery portraits, which seem to teeter between rage and sympathy.

The ‘Little Men’ feature prominently in Browne’s first major museum retrospective, ‘My Kind of Protest’ at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. The artist, who died in 1993 at the age of 64, was a committed activist and organizer. She was a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in 1969 and the ‘Where We At’ Black Women Artists collective in 1971, and in 1979–80 became a member of the women’s cooperative SOHO20. ‘I was painting my kind of protest, but it didn’t look like Black art,’ she told fellow artist Emma Amos in 1986. Her work depicts mundane violences: the ugliness of patriarchy, the indifference of nature. The blossoming, somehow, of survival.

Browne’s large-scale oil paintings and gouaches draw on aesthetic lessons from her predecessor Paul Cézanne and her mentor Romare Bearden. At The Phillips Collection, her works are grouped in distinct eras, unfurling in room after room. ‘New Yorkers’ (1965–67), another early series, foreshadows the scratchy brushwork and quotidian men to come. Pastel hues battle with charcoal greys for dominance; figures sit, walk and screech, their mouths agape, their eyes sometimes represented by thin slits of blue or magenta. (The bodies of the subsequent ‘Little Men’ are often flush with lush colours: periwinkle, emerald, plum.) Browne’s portraits offer a fascinating counterpoint to the more overtly political work of some of her peers at the time. Artists of colour have historically encountered pressures to create positive or otherwise politically ‘useful’ representations of Black life amid struggles for civil rights, inclusion and equity. There are lessons to be gleaned from Browne’s oblique approach here, her flipping of the script.

In the early 1970s, the artist visited West Africa for the first time and her work turned towards the lyrical. Her ‘Africa’ series (1971–74), depictions of people, plants and places that often verge on abstraction, is characterized by palettes that are uniquely vibrant in her wider oeuvre. In For You (1974), for example, sumptuous clouds of oil paint – blue gradients abutting soft fields of yellow – are peppered with clearly delineated leaflike forms. In the artworks that followed, Browne continued to poetically render the landscapes that so affected her, abstracting the patterns and dynamics of the natural world; a particularly striking example is Clear Particles Floating Free (1982), a massive triptych rendered on silk and paper panels, in which foamy whites streak over a deep indigo seascape.

There is something ecstatic – effervescent, even – about her late paintings of trees, such as Oaks (1984), which consists of bramble-like, vigorous marks in acrylic on three sheets of loose canvas. Perhaps her mature turn to nature was a further extension of her aversion to straightforward narrative. As an artist, Browne prioritized curiosity over dogma and exploration over certainty; her work, wide-ranging as it is, is consistently imbued with a deep current of mystery. Such ambitious opacity is its own political project; it’s worth considering what pearls of wisdom such paintings can offer us today.

Vivian Browne’s  ‘My Kind of Protest’ is on view at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, until 28 September. It was co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

^{Main image: Vivian Browne, Seven Deadly Sins (detail), c.1968,  oil on canvas, 1.6 × 2.8 m. Courtesy:  © Vivian Browne, courtesy of Adobe Krow Archives, Los Angeles, and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York}