Uncovering one of Philadelphia's "great art secrets"
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
"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."
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, 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 of it.
Schilling, now 51, had so little time with her dad, who shot himself when she was only 4. And there was so little time — just four days — between his death and the opening of an exhibition of his work at a Philadelphia gallery.
Yet, there has been so much time between Brewton’s death in 1967 and what Schilling calls his “re-entry into Philadelphia” with an exhibition that opened March 21 at the Slought Foundation on the edge of Penn’s campus.
For more than 40 years, James Brewton’s work had been scattered in private collections and stored in the Philadelphia home of family friends — Schilling just had never seen it. In 2008, she embarked on what she called an “art hunt” to find more of her father’s art and learn more about him.
She came to find that much of her acclaimed father’s work — the swirling, chaotic canvases of paint, and the prints, many with inexplicable symbols and snippets of words that perhaps only he understood — was right under her nose all this time.
“Growing up, it was always a big cloud over my life,” Schilling says of all that she didn’t know about her father. She calls him “a shadow” and says that following his tragic death, he was rarely discussed. Schilling has no siblings (she has a half-sister and twin half-brothers), and her mother, after a bitter split from her father, spoke poorly of him, Schilling says.
His artist friends, who were around when Schilling was growing up, wouldn’t talk to her about him for fear of upsetting her. She was, after all, “always hysterical,” she says, about his suicide.
“When people who loved him saw me, they’d go like this,” Schilling says, making an aghast face. She looked so much like him.
Brewton was an eccentric, a vibrant and energetic man who existed very much in the moment. His art, too, was often wild and somewhat inexplicable. There were only a few of Brewton’s works in the house where Schilling grew up.
It’s obvious in speaking with her that there is a great part of Schilling that is like him. Vibrant and energetic herself, jovially emotive in her speech, she’s a painter as well. She makes a living as a freelance writer and editor in New York, and put her own art on hold to learn more about her father’s.
Schilling was born in Denmark where she says Brewton met many artists who influenced his work. Her parents returned to Philadelphia when she was only months old, but the family left the city when Schilling was 8. She came back to attend the University of the Arts and lived here for much of the 1980s. Her main connection to Philadelphia today, though, seems to be through her father. Brewton was very much part of the Philadelphia art scene in the ’60s. That’s where he knew Patricia and Ronald Weingrad. Schilling knew them when she was growing up, and Patricia has co-curated the Slought show with Schilling.
Schilling might not have known much about her father’s place in the art world decades ago, but Patricia Weingrad did.
“He was terrifically smart and funny,” Weingrad says of Brewton, adding that he had a great intellectual curiosity. “He could do it all. He had this period and that period. I used to call him Picasso. He was just a brilliant painter.”
To make ends meet as an artist, she says, he’d take odd jobs even if he had no experience or knowledge of the work. She remembers with amusement his stint as a bartender.
“I would get hysterical with laughter when somebody would say, ‘Can I have a this or that?’” she said of Brewton’s time tending bar. “He’d ask, ‘What’s a Bloody Mary?’”
Once, she says, a bar featured a sort of burlesque act with a dancer named Julie Gibson. Another bar wanted a painting of her, and they commissioned Brewton to do it. But that bar cheated him, paying only part of his fee, she says. After Brewton died, the Weingrads marched into the bar, got the painting and loaded it into a van. Patricia Weingrad calls it a triumph.
“I think it’s a sad thing that someone that talented and that recognized as being talented, how difficult it is for an artist to live,” she says.
Brewton was born in Ohio in 1930 to a working-class family. Nevertheless, Schilling discovered in her research that Brewton took private drawing lessons, as well as art classes at the Toledo Museum of Art. He later studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), 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 northern European CoBrA art group, an avant-garde movement in the late ’40s and early ’50s formed by Karel Appel and Asger Jorn, among others. Its members emphasized freedom of color and form, as well as spontaneity and experimentation. Brewton was also influenced by the “imaginary science” of pataphysics (more about that later).
After splitting from Schilling’s mother and gaining a bit of recognition as an artist locally, Brewton married Nanie Lafitte. They were only together 100 days before his death.
Schilling says her father hurt his back while serving in the Marines in the Korean War, and as the years went on, he was no longer able to rely on physical labor to pay the bills while he created art. The Veterans Administration would not grant him disability. His romantic life was a mess, she said, and he had issues with alcohol.
The tragedy of Brewton’s suicide remains intense and mystifying to her.
“He left a note,” Schilling says, “but Nanie destroyed it before the police got there.” Nanie also called Schilling once, saying she was communicating with Brewton through a Ouija board, and that he had a message for his daughter. But before Nanie could relay it, Schilling’s mother snatched the phone away and hung up.
Michael R. Taylor is the director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, but was the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2008 when Schilling first contacted him.
While living in Florida, she had been thumbing through an old magazine and saw an advertisement for a Thomas Chimes retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The ad mentioned pataphysics, and she said it rang a bell. Pataphysics had shown up in some of Brewton’s pieces she’d seen. So she wrote Taylor a letter.
“I have to do something,” Schilling says 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 called her, expressing interest in Schilling’s search for Brewton’s work.
“I thought it was like one of the great art secrets of Philadelphia, you know, that this artist that no one’s heard of could have made such outstanding work and not received recognition,” Taylor says.
Brewton’s work, he continued, was ahead of others’ because of his desire to transform Philadelphia into an avant-garde place artwise — the artists he met while living in Denmark, Taylor says, make Brewton a “bridge figure” between the Philly avant-garde and European movements.
“[His work is] very much of its time. It speaks to the 1960s and the radical nature of that decade,” Taylor said. “He was antiwar, of the sexual revolution. … It immediately clicked with me that he was someone who wanted to change the status quo. He really wanted to launch a sort of pataphysical movement in the city.”
Pataphysics, as Schilling puts it, is “an imaginary science invented by an eccentric French poet and playwright named Alfred Jarry.” Pataphysics encourages imagination, the pushing of boundaries, the breaking of rules, and emphasizes a kind of offbeat humor — exactly the type of thing that would have interested Brewton.
“It’s really taken ahold of artists and writers because it basically suggests the known world we live in, the world of physics, for example, could be extended, [that] the world we know is limited and that there could be a world beyond it,” Taylor explains.
The movement had a literal impact on Brewton’s work. His The Pataphysics Times is a collage of pataphysical elements reproduced as a blueprint. He called his method of making art “graffiti pataphysic,” Schilling says.
Brewton’s exhibit is connected to UPenn’s Philadelphia á la Pataphysique arts festival, which wrapped up Saturday. The festival’s film screenings, conference and other events explored pataphysics’ influence on art and culture throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
The moment in which Brewton lived, Taylor says, placed him in the middle of a situation that ultimately proved tremendously difficult.
“Being an artist in Philadelphia in the ’60s was like being a coal miner,” he says. “You couldn’t support yourself. There weren’t the places of support. Now there’s a lot more galleries, more collectors. … In Philadelphia in the ’60s, an artist had to make their reputation in New York. There was an assumption of failure if you were an artist in Philadelphia.”
After Brewton died, Nanie was in a relationship with a man named Gerry Larrison. After they both had died, Larrison’s family cleaned out their house. Patty Wright, Gerry Larrison’s sister, called Schilling to let her know that the family had found several boxes in the house labeled J.E.B.
Wright sent Schilling some of what she had, including a roll of papers labeled “For Emily, when she’s 21.”
During the three days she spent waiting for what was, perhaps, a message or gift from her father, Schilling says, “it was like being on steroids.”
Her connection with him, though he died when she was so young, was intense. She says 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 Brewton], I had that feeling like, ‘Somebody’s got my back.’”
It turned out it was Nanie who had written on the roll of papers, and they turned out to be posters advertising the show that took place a few days after Brewton died. Schilling doesn’t know why Nanie would want Schilling to wait until she was 21 to get them.
Later, Schilling traveled to meet Wright in Ohio, to see in person what else the family had. It “was like Christmas morning,” Schilling says.
“They had scads of things. All the prints, his art-making tools, stamps, his ashes, an American flag from the veteran’s funeral, a roll of masking tape [where] 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.”
Two weeks before committing suicide, Brewton had typed a note leaving all of his “paintings and all things artified,” to the Weingrads.
“I think he left [them] to us because he knew we loved him and that we had gone out of our way to help him whenever we could,” Patricia Weingrad says. “He knew we appreciated his work. He thought it was the safest place.”
Schilling says she grew up knowing in the back of her mind that the Weingrads might have a few paintings, but she had no idea how many. She hadn’t visited their house when she was growing up.
Weingrad called Schilling in 2000 to say she had some things belonging to Brewton, but Schilling got very emotional, so Weingrad said they’d talk again another time. It wasn’t until 2008, after Schilling had embarked on her hunt for Brewton’s work, that Schilling called Patricia and arranged a visit. That’s when Schilling first saw her father’s work on their walls. In 2011, the Weingrads turned over all the works — more than 50 pieces — they had rescued from his studio after he died.
“The paintings were saved in the Weingrads’ basement, right here in Philadelphia,” Schilling says with an air of disbelief. “I’ve known them all my life.”
Schilling said that in curating this show, she feels like she’s helping to preserve her father’s idiosyncratic and inspired legacy, even if she doesn’t have all the answers about the work that came from his mind. She’s still searching for some art pieces. There are images, from slides, of the missing artwork listed here.
“My father’s work is beyond me,” she says as she points out some of the more mysterious details of his paintings and prints at Slought. “All I have are clues.”
But from the way she excitedly walks from piece to piece in the gallery, the way she lights up when pointing to an effect on a canvas and how in her quest to find his work, she seems to be making up for lost time, perhaps clues are enough.
“James E. Brewton: 1930-1967,” runs through May 1, open 1-6 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and by appointment, free, Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St., 215-701-4627, slought.org/resources/james_brewton.
An earlier version of this story appeared on the Naked City blog.
