Joan Brown

Exhibited by Venus Over Manhattan

Material Oil enamel on canvas

Dimensions 96 x 72 in

Place of Creation San Francisco, California

Status Vetted

About the Work

The poised subject in Joan Brown’s Woman Waiting in a Restaurant prefigures the turn in the artist’s later works toward surrogate, rather than literal, self-portraits—personal foils through which the artist explores artistic influences. The figure here finds herself in a familiar scene suffused with allusions to the artistic sources informing Brown’s work. The motif of the checkered floor seen here served both a spiritual and technical function for the artist, providing a meditative sense of order within her practice and grounding perspectival formats she was inspired to paint after viewing Tintoretto’s works in Italy in the 1960s.

While pursuing a Renaissance-inspired perspective within the implied space of the restaurant, the work simultaneously exemplifies Brown’s interest in the flattened perspective of Egyptian art. In front of the vanishing point implied by the checkerboard is a wall with silhouetted couples dining and conversing, rendered not as an extension of the ‘restaurant’ but rather in the style of a hieroglyph. The presence of the dog in this work marks Brown’s interest in the relationship between human and non-human animals. By this point in Brown’s career, her interest in animals had evolved—from a diaristic focus on personal and passive animals in intimate scenes, to a newly symbolic focus on the special intensity of animal intelligence in comparison to humans’. In the work’s content and style we also see traces of Brown’s interest in Matisse, who like Brown engaged the flattened pictorial ground of non-Western arts—the potted plant adorning the scene and color scheme of the adjacent walls are reminiscent of a Matisse cut-out.

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