
Art Hunt: Chasing a shadow
Emily Brewton Schilling's artist father, James, took his own life when she was 4, just as he was making a splash in Philly. Since 2008, she's been tracking down his work from far and wide. Much of it was right under her nose.

Mikala Jamison

Mikala Jamison
There was an artist who was ahead of his time, who was brilliant, sensitive and nonviolent, who loved his art and just wanted to paint. And he committed suicide. — Nessa Forman, The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 1971
Time plays such a profound role in the story of Emily Brewton Schilling and her late father, James E. Brewton. There is both so little and so much — so little time Emily had with James, who she calls Jim, since he shot himself in 1967, when she was 4. So little time in between James’ suicide and what was to be an exhibition of his work at a Philadelphia gallery — just four days. So much time in between his death and what Emily calls his “reentry into Philadelphia,” Graffiti Pataphysic: An Exhibition for All Mankind, which opened at the Slought Foundation March 22: It’s been more than 40 years that James’ work has been scattered in private collections, in places Emily had gone so much of her life without seeing.
Many pieces of her father’s work, all this time, were much closer than she thought.
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“Growing up, it was always a big cloud over my life,” Emily says of all that she didn’t know about James. We spoke last week at Slought, where she was putting the finishing touches on the exhibition. She calls Jim “a shadow” — following his tragic death, he was never discussed; Emily has no full siblings (but a half-sister and twin half-brothers) and her mother, after a bitter split from James, only spoke poorly of him in conversation. His other artist friends who stuck around when Emily was growing up, she said, wouldn’t talk to her about him for fear of upsetting her. She was, after all, “always hysterical” about the tragic circumstances.
There were only a few of James’ pieces in the house in which Emily grew up. He was an eccentric, she said, a strange but vibrant man who was always living for the moment. His art, too, was often wild and inexplicable.
“When people who loved him saw me, they’d go like this,” Emily says, pulling an aghast face. She looked too much like him. So, she said, her father “just sort of disappeared.”
When she did later research his life, though, she ended up being led on what she calls an “art treasure hunt” that connected her to her father in ways she couldn't have imagined.
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James was born in Ohio in 1930, in an environment Emily said was working class and lacking in creativity. Still, in her search through decades-old documents about her father’s life, she found that he took private drawing lessons, and art classes at the Toledo Museum of Art.
Later, he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he won prizes and recognition for his work. While at PAFA, he had a part-time job at The Print Club (now The Print Center). It was at that time that his work became heavily influenced by the Surrealists, the northern European CoBrA art group, and pataphysics (more on that in a moment).
After gaining a bit of recognition as an artist locally, James toward the end of his life was married to a woman named Nanie, for just 100 days. She helped take care of him, Emily said, as he was suffering several blows to his wellbeing.
Emily said his back was hurt from serving in the Marines in the Korean War, and he was no longer able to rely on physical labor jobs to bring in income as he created art. The V.A. would not grant him disability. His romantic life was a mess, she said, and he had issues with alcohol.
The tragedy of her father’s suicide is intense and mystifying to Emily.
“He left a note,” Emily said, “But Nanie destroyed it before the police got there.” Nanie also called Emily once, saying she was communicating with James through a Ouija board, and that he had a message for his daughter. Before Nanie could relay it, Emily’s mother snatched the phone away and hung up.
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Pataphysics is, as Emily puts it, is “an imaginary science invented by an eccentric French poet and playwright named Alfred Jarry.” Indeed, French modernist Jarry’s “science of imaginary solutions” has had an influence on 20th and 21st century art and culture across the board — from Duchamp to Joyce to the Beatles. The University of Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia à la Pataphysique will explore (via conference, events, exhibits like Brewton’s) pataphysics in all its forms.
The movement had an obvious imprint on James’ work, literally — one, "The Pataphysics Times," is an erratic, mixed media “blueprint” of pataphysical elements. He called his own work “Graffiti Pataphysic.”
Pataphysics’ influence on her father’s work helped Emily track down many clues in her search for his pieces.
While living in Florida, Emily was thumbing through an old magazine and saw an advertisement for a Thomas Chimes retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007. The ad mentioned pataphysics, and she said it rang a bell. So she wrote a letter to Michael Taylor, the then-curator of modern art at PMA.
“I have to do something,” Emily said she thought. “I can’t allow him to have been forgotten. He didn’t last long, but he was here. Ever since then, I was completely obsessed.”
Taylor wrote back, expressing interest in Emily’s findings. She didn’t have much of her father’s work, but started to track it down.
That’s when things became stranger.
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After James died, Nanie was in a relationship and lived with a man named Gerry Larrison. When they both had passed away, Gerry’s family came to clean out their house. Patty Wright, Gerry’s sister, then called Emily after Patty’s niece tracked her down online. Gerry’s family had found several boxes in the house labeled J.E.B.
Emily rushed to Ohio to meet Patty to see what she would find. Turns out, it “was like Christmas morning.”
“They had scads of things,” Emily said. “All the prints, his art making tools, stamps, his ashes, an American flag from the veteran’s funeral, a piece of masking tape that someone had written, ‘James Brewton is a beatnik,’ and on the other side, ‘James Brewton is a cultured beatnik.’ Nanie had saved it all for 43 years.”
Later, when Emily was back home, Patty found more. There was a box labeled “For Emily, when she’s 21.” Patty sent it right away.
During three days waiting for what was, perhaps, a message or gift from her father, Emily said “it was like being on steroids.”
Her connection with him, though he died when she was so young, was intense. She said she remembers painting with him when she was little, and him telling her to never leave her paintbrushes in turpentine, even though he didn’t take his own advice. She opened one box of his effects, and said she felt a overpowering connection, because it smelled like him.
“Something I had never related to with women and girls growing up was, people have personal self esteem, and I thought, ‘Well, how do you get that?’” she says, tearing up. “But [waiting for a potential souvenir from James], I had that feeling like, ‘somebody’s got my back.’”
It turned out Nanie had written on the box, which was only full of posters. Emily doesn’t know why Nanie would want Emily to wait until she was 21 for them.
Emily struck gold when her parents’ friends, Patricia and Ronald Weingrad, allowed Emily to look at some of James' work they had, in 2009. James had left all of his "paintings and things artified" to them in a note he typed two weeks before committing suicide. In 2011, the Weingrads showed her the rest of the artwork they'd kept in their basement for so many years after his death, and they gave the whole collection to Emily.
“The paintings were saved in the Weingrads’ basement, right here in Philadelphia,” she says with an air of disbelief. “I’ve known them all my life.”
No one had told her until she started digging, because whenever anyone brought James up to her, she’d get emotional.
“They didn’t want to upset me, but it’s okay to be crying through this,” she said. She’s hoping that the exhibit will help her answer more questions — there are still paintings in Philadelphia she hasn’t recovered.
In co-curating this show with Patricia Weingrad, she says she feels like she’s helping preserve her father’s idiosyncratic and inspired legacy, even if she doesn’t necessarily have all the answers about the work that came from his mind.
“My father’s work is beyond me,” she says as she explains the details of his paintings and prints at Slought. “All I have are clues.”
But from the way she excitedly moves from piece to piece in the gallery, the way she lights up when pointing to an effect on a canvas, and how with every detail of her quest to find James' work, she seems to be making up for lost time, perhaps clues are enough.
Graffiti Pataphysic: An Exhibition for All Mankind, through Thursday, May 1, on Thurs., Fri., and Sat., from 1-6 p.m., and by appointment. Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St., free. 215-701-4627, slought.org/resources/james_brewton.