are obscured, preventing recognizability.64 Nevertheless, the closeness of the men feels unguarded, as if they were captured spontaneously by a friend with a camera, and the intimacy of the scene is palpable, despite both men being fully clothed. A similar feeling of intimacy permeates a related work from this period, River Bathers, which also depicts two men in nature, both seated and nude. One, who could again be Brown, looks at the viewer directly, the other, a blond with his back turned, could be Wonner gazing into a blue and white serpentine river with blue hills and green trees beyond. As Kessler
noted, the scenes suggest a snapshot but were not truly casual: “Instead of concealing compositional subtlety within a seemingly chance perspective . . . , [the] artist embeds a camera-eye fragment in a frankly organized system of planes. . . . The fast brush has emulated the fast shutter.” For Wonner, this was, perhaps, a way of letting viewers see and not see, providing them a glimpse into his world but also keeping them at arm’s length. “They are persons,” wrote Kessler, but “persons unknown and unknowable.”65
Wonner sought out gay literature both for support and to better understand
Paul Wonner, A Peaceable Kingdom
1988.
on canvas, 72 × 72 in. Courtesy of the San José Museum of Art. Museum purchase in memory of Averill Mix with funds contributed by the Lipman Family Foundation, Deborah and Andy Rappaport and members of the SJMA Board of Trustees, in honor of the San José Museum of Art’s 35th anniversary, 2004.04
from the humans. On a few occasions, he captured Brown giving an impromptu concert on his beloved Steinway piano, which had moved with them from Noe Valley to the Towers.
When Wonner looked back, there was little he would have done differently. Though his relationship with Brown had not always been easy, it was committed, and they had become each other’s family. He had also come to understand what his sexual orientation had meant for him both personally and as an artist. “I think being gay was the greatest thing that ever happened to me in my life,”
he ruminated. “I think that it gave me a direction that I might not have had otherwise, and made me not afraid of being an outsider and being by myself. And [it] also gave me a lot of courage to just blunder ahead and do things . . . and often I was very fearful.”125
In early 2007, Wonner suffered a serious case of pneumonia. Though he never entirely recovered, he continued to paint every day. Friends noticed his declining health, but Brown, who saw him daily, was less aware. On April 17 of the following year, Wonner called Brown and said, “I can’t get out of bed.” Brown summoned the nurse
and rushed to his side, and Wonner was taken to the hospital by ambulance. A week later, on the morning of April 23, Wonner looked up at Brown and, with typical humor and understatement, said, “There’s been change for the worse.”126 He died a few hours later, on the eve of his eighty-eighth birthday.
No services were planned for Wonner, but that fall, the John Berggruen Gallery held a memorial exhibition of his work. All who knew the artist loved and missed him, but no one more than Brown. “He was the central person in my life, no doubt about it,” Brown extolled.
He was also my best critic and I think I was his best critic, too. Particularly when I did something that wasn’t very good and I wanted praise and reassurance, I didn’t get it from Paul. He was always honest and I was, too. I think that’s what I miss the most. He was a marvelous man and the loss is constant. It’s still not easy to live without him.127
“More than any contemporary American painter whose work I have seen, he deals with the physical and emotional relationships of human beings in a way that affirms our deep need for the society of one another by his easy assumption that we are inextricably related.”97 Other viewers read the work differently, including Brown’s friend Janet Frame, a well-known New Zealand writer, who described Brown’s Muscatine Diver of 1963, one of his best-known paintings from this period, as “full of agony and helplessness.”98
William Theophilus Brown, Untitled (Horse and Rider), 1961. Oil on Masonite, 11 3/4 × 15 in. Collection of Matt Gonzalez
William Theophilus Brown, Muscatine Diver, 1963. Oil on canvas, 60 1/8 × 40 1/4 in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Gift of the artist
Brown painted Muscatine Diver at about the same time that he and Wonner moved from Santa Monica to Malibu, where they lived in the hills but were still close enough to the ocean to take morning swims. Though swimming and diving should be joyful acts, there is in Muscatine Diver, as Frame sensed, a sense of melancholy. The landscape is dark and the sky ominous; one figure turns his back on the other. Decidedly dreamlike, it combines Brown’s memories and fantasies with elements of his contemporary reality, a commonality in much of his work, as
William Theophilus Brown, Bay Swimming, 1962. Oil on canvas, 22 × 24 in. Collection of John Modell
eight-week experience, he left after four or five, finding it “sort of boring.”138 At first, he drew and painted the landscape, but quickly tired of that and began to make self-portraits, many in the nude in a large broken mirror. For Brown, the best thing to come out of the MacDowell experience was meeting Frame and beginning a new and lasting friendship with the writer.
Portraiture was becoming increasingly important to Brown, and he had recently been working on a series of full-length portraits, most of friends or acquaintances. As in the paintings featured in his LandauAlan exhibition, these evidenced a greater precision and clarity than his previous work, though Brown was not aiming for an exact likeness but an evocation of the sitter’s personality, character, or even sensuality. Among many works was a 1969 portrait of a fully clothed and enigmatically thoughtful Peter Liashkov, who, per Brown, was “mad Russian and a pretty good painter.”139 There was also Jim Christiansen (Open Book) , a pensive, seated portrait and, at the same time, a formal study in blue with red accents (see p. 140). Portraits such as these in a similar
hard-edged style continued throughout the next decade, one of the most notable being Brown’s depiction of his friend Kevin Kearney, the work now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see p. 140).
Brown held a show of his new portraits and other works in early 1971 at the Felix Landau Gallery. In addition to the paintings, the exhibition included a few charcoal portraits and “vaguely Picassoid” pieces. Once again, it was Brown’s stylistic redirection that drew the most attention, prompting Henry J. Seldis of the Los Angeles Times to write:
“William Theo Brown has turned a significant corner in mid-career. His current exhibition, dominated by full length portraits, sees him move from an essentially expressionist figurative idiom to a position of far greater detachment and clarity. It is as if his sitters were caught showing the essential isolation of the human condition, each in his own placement and stance.” Other recent works in the exhibition included architectural elements or streets, such as the 1970 Woman, Man, Dog, Pool, which featured a pair of small nudes, a dog in the margins, and a swimming pool. Another from that year,
William
Brown, Male Figure with Outstretched Arms and Three Figures in a Wave, 1973. Gouache on paper, 15 1/8 × 18 in. Crocker Art Museum, gift of the John S. Knudsen Trust, 2016.73.2
and, perhaps, to the architectural portals in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Brown was compelled enough by his creation to paint more than one version. In the best known, he included a man’s face in profile at the far right of the canvas, the man’s body cropped out. In this version, as opposed to a slightly more menacing one without the man, the woman seems to run not out of fear but euphoria—a lover’s chase that she leads. Brown’s early 1971 show with Landau would be his last with the dealer, as the gallery closed that April. That June, Brown also suffered the loss of both his parents, who died just three weeks apart. He took solace in the fact that they had led long and happy lives—his mother was in her eighties and his father in his nineties—and in the fact that his father had outlived his mother as his father had hoped, wanting to care for his wife until the end. Though these things brought Brown comfort, it did not diminish his grief, as he had always remained close to his parents. His father expressed his warm feelings to his son in one of his final letters: “Mother and I are happy that you could choose your life’s work. One in which you are happy and successful. And to think that you did it all by your own efforts and ability. Mother and I are very proud of you dear Bill. All that we did was give a little assistance to get [you] started, you have done the rest and done it well.”143
The inheritance Brown received from his parents proved important in years to come, as he and Wonner were about to enter another financially difficult period. “The ’70s were a disaster for us personally,” Brown recalled. “Felix [Landau] closed in 1970 [sic, 1971], so the only gallery we were in was Charles Campbell, and he did rather poorly. We had a few shows. . . . So then Paul began teaching and I did some teaching, and I had . . . some money from a trust fund that my family had left me that kept us going.”144
It was, perhaps, the death of Brown’s parents that also caused a new restlessness within him, his mortality suddenly on his mind. He and Wonner began planning a trip as a diversion, and in the spring of 1972 went to Italy, visiting various cities, seeing the sights, and looking at art. While he was away, the Charles Campbell Gallery in San
Francisco held a show of his recent paintings and drawings. In October, after he and Wonner returned, he held another solo exhibition at the Medinaceli Galleries in Southampton, New York. Also that month, he and Wonner opened a two-person exhibition of “semisurrealistic” paintings at California State University, Fresno. Some pieces evidenced the inspiration of Italy’s Metaphysical painters, whose works Brown and Wonner had seen on their recent trip.
Before either of these shows opened, Brown and Wonner left Montecito for Peterborough, New Hampshire, where they bought a home called “Covered Bridge House.” The move was Brown’s idea, though in hindsight a bad one. The couple went, according to Brown, because he’d spent happy summers in the region and because of his friend Sarton, who sang New Hampshire’s praises from the nearby town of Nelson. For Brown and Wonner, the locale was not a good fit, and the property required an enormous amount of work, which occupied Wonner almost totally at the expense of his art-making. Wonner moved back to California first, in February 1973; Brown stayed behind to sell the house and followed in April. The couple settled in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, renting an apartment close to the beach. Brown had only been in California a month when he held a solo show at Adele Bednarz Galleries in Los Angeles.
Brown and Wonner stayed in Southern California for about eighteen months but then returned to Northern California due to the poor air quality in Los Angeles. They settled in Berkeley, renting a home from their old graduate school friend Jerrold Davis, who lived in an adjacent house. In early 1975, Wonner returned to Southern California to pursue a temporary teaching assignment at California State University, Long Beach. Brown, meanwhile, stayed in Berkeley and held a one-person exhibition of portraits and allegorical paintings at Charles Campbell Gallery. When Wonner finished the semester at Long Beach, the couple took another trip, this time to London and France.
That fall, both Brown and Wonner began an academic year of teaching at the University of California, Davis. Rather than