October 27, 2022 • 33 mins
Maia found a painting in the garbage and took it home. But as it turned out, it wasn’t just any painting.
Credits
This episode was hosted and produced by senior producer Kalila Holt, along with Jonathan Goldstein.
The supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Production help from Damiano Marchetti.
Special thanks to Sam Reisman, Emily Condon, Alex Blumberg, Lydia Polgreen, Marcy Flynn, Karl McCool, Caitlin Kenney, and Kayla Lattimore.
The show was mixed by Bobby Lord.
Music by Christine Fellows, John K Samson, Blue Dot Sessions, Michael Hearst, Sun Shapes, and Bobby Lord. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hello, Jonathan.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Yeah, is everything okay?
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Huh?
Speaker 4 (00:12):
To what do I owe this?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
This pleasure? I'm reporting this week's episode.
Speaker 4 (00:19):
Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
I don't know why I said it was such trepidation
in my voice. I am yeah you are. Every episode needs.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
What you got to have the theme music?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Yeah, even before that.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Oh, I know what you're getting at the cold open where.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
You call someone trying to live their life, like your
friend Jackie Cohen, and ask them a bunch of stuff
that they don't have the time or interest in answering.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
I see what's going on.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
The tables have turned. See how you like being called
out of the blue, asked a bunch of questions?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Do you like it?
Speaker 5 (00:50):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (00:50):
You like it? Do you like it? If I start
saying like what do you like better? Lollipops or gum?
Speaker 4 (00:56):
Why too?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I've alreat had a small hat on with that endear
you to it?
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Oh? Definitely.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
If you were a dog, what do you think your
name would be?
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Probably the same name, Jonathan Goldstein.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Do you remember that time that you referred to George
Clooney as the gray haired doctor from er I did.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
No idea?
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yeah you did, Yes, you did. You were like who's
that gray haired doctor from R And I was like
George Clooney and you were.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Like, yeah, I guess the thing that we're learning from
this is I like being Jackie Cohen.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
From Gimlet Media. I'm Khalila Holt and this is Heavyweight
Today's episode Frederick J. Brown right after the break. Every
(02:03):
Friday night during the pandemic, I'd get on a Google
hangout with a group of my boyfriend's friends and we'd
all play Mario kartlind you, how did you see spread?
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Again? There's no PAM six races.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
These Mario Kart sessions started back in the days when
we could barely leave the house due to COVID restrictions,
so it felt like an escape to log on to
carelessly karine in a small car or kart if you will,
through a gold mine or off a waterfall. In those
dark days, a few minutes on Mount Warrio was the
closest thing I could get to a vacation, right, let's
(02:40):
be bad. That being said, I also found these Mario
Kart hangouts deeply intimidating because I'm not good at Mario Kart.
My gameplay mostly sounds like this no or this along
with the Mario karting, there was also non Mario chatting.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Oh I'm happy sat on Instagram, Happy Believe Birthday.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
And chatting of any kind is another thing I'm not
good at. Every so often I'd weigh in with something
like pretty crazy. This was essentially the extent of my
engagement until the night Maya told us about the painting.
Maya found the painting sitting in a pile of trash
on the sidewalk, and it grabbed her instantly. It was
(03:28):
only later, when she took it home that she saw
the artist's signature, Frederick J. Brown. Although Maya works in art,
the name was unfamiliar to her, so she googled him,
and what popped up was a lengthy New York Times
obituary from twenty twelve, praising Brown's work and citing Williem
Dakooning as an early mentor. Brown, it turned out, was
(03:51):
an acclaimed black artist known for his portraits of jazz
and blues musicians. He had work in the Smithsonian. As
Maya made her way his biography, she slowly realized that
the painting she'd been so instinctively drawn to was actually
the work of an important artist, and so Maya was
left wondering, how did Brown's painting end up in the trash? Oh,
(04:21):
very regal building on a cold Friday afternoon. I pay
Maya visit her Brooklyn apartment building to follow up and
learn more. And who knows, maybe my boyfriend's friend can
simply become a friend.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Oh, very like regal building.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
I feel like.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
My irl chatting is truly no better than my Mario
Kart chatting saying here else it is.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
What I couldn't see on the small square of our
Mario Kart calls was that every surface of Maya's apartment
is covered in art. Not only has Maya worked in
the art world for many years at galleries art publishers,
her husband, Wes, is also an artist himself. He even
proposed to Maya on the steps of the met There's
really only one spot in their apartment that's empty, a
(05:16):
blank wall above the couch. They'd been waiting year after
year for the perfect work of art to hang there,
and now with the discovery of the Frederick J. Brown painting,
they knew they'd found it. Maya says she spotted the
painting while heading home from a COVID test. It was gigantic,
and she still had a mile to walk. She knew
(05:36):
it didn't really make sense to take it with her,
but she couldn't walk away from it either.
Speaker 5 (05:41):
I just kept going back to it. It just was
different from all of the other paintings I've seen. It
just really kind of grabbed me, and I started trying
to get it out of the trash.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Clutching the huge painting to her body. Mayawardly waddled the
mile home.
Speaker 5 (06:02):
There's like a little garbage juice at the bottom and
a little dust at the top, and I was walking.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I wouldn't let it sit on the ground.
Speaker 5 (06:12):
I know I had probably been on the street all day,
but I didn't want it to be on the street anymore.
It is nearly as long as I am tall, and
I'm five four, lots of color and patterns.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Despite my fondness for the audio medium, it fails to
translate the force of Brown's painting. It's not as easily
encapsulated as say the Mona Lisa Smiling Woman or American
Gothic unsmiling woman and man. It's mostly abstract, but then
there are these tiny spots with recognizable figures.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
You can see faces and there's these horizontal bands that
sort of organize the composition.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Admiring the painting with makes me feel like I'm at
a fancy party, enjoying or jerves, but also panicked that
I have nothing intelligent to say that kind OFT's like
a seven. The painting feels like a stained glass cabinet
full of curios. It feels like a quilt if a
quilt weren't made of fabric, but a fields and buildings
(07:19):
and people rushing to work. It feels like a packed
room where everybody's dancing. I asked Maya to show me
where she first found the painting, and so we hit
the streets to return to the scene of the trash.
So we walk, Yeah, let's walk. We take a walk,
as friends often do. Maya tells me the painting was
(07:44):
in the trash with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff,
a TJ Max planter, a stained toy chest. Whoever disposed
of it was probably moving. Maybe a neighbor can tell
us who might have moved in the last couple months.
But whereas I was picturing a small building with just
a few buzzers, it turns out the trash heap was
actually in front of a public housing complex fourteen stories high,
(08:07):
taking up a whole block. We loiter by the building's
entrance and I try to catch people as they're going
in or out. Can I ask you something weird and
ask you a weird question? Anyone who moved out? Like
in it's just about a painting that was left outside
of painting. Some my friend found a painting and she's
(08:28):
trying to figure out, like what the deal is. Nobody
knows anything. No, all right, thank you, no, thank you? No,
all right, thank you. There's a lot I don't understand
about art, like why are frames so expensive? But I
(08:49):
can tell you this. Paintings. They have two sides. There's
a side with all the paint on it that people
are always tripping over each other to talk about. But
then there's the other side, the second or backside. If
you will, do you want a water tear or anything?
Water would be great. And back in Maya's apartment, she
explains that on this backside, or dari are side, there's
(09:13):
another clue. She and West were cleaning the painting off,
getting it ready to hang on the wall when they
saw it. Lightly scrawled on the back of the canvas
was an inscription.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Painted nineteen seventy nine December title Genesis two Love Happy
Birthday from Frederick to Lowry Simms, and then he signed
it and dated it in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Maya may not have known the name Frederick Brown, but
she knew the name Lowry Simms quite well. Larry was
the president of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and before
that she'd been the first black curator at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. She's now in her seventies and has
had dec it's of impact on the art world. She's
reached living legend status.
Speaker 5 (10:04):
You can't help but be like, oh, okay, yeah, should
I have not used a paper towel to clean this?
Speaker 1 (10:13):
The way Maya sees it, if you find something with
someone else's name on it, whether that's a wallet, a cat,
or a painting, you try to give it back to them.
And so she wants to return the painting to its
rightful owner, Lowry Simms. And once we find her, maybe
Lowry can help piece together how the painting ended up
in the garbage. I would like love to help try
(10:37):
and get in touch with this person.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yes, please, okay?
Speaker 1 (10:41):
My garbage hunting an abject failure but my people hunting
that's going to be an abject success. I can't find
an email address for Lowry. So I do what we
all do when we want to pester someone more important
than we are. I send a message on LinkedIn. I
(11:03):
explain that I have a painting I think belongs to her,
but perhaps fearing I'm running some sort of con where
I trade paintings for Social Security numbers, Lowry doesn't respond, HI,
how are you I need some sort of inroad? So
I contact an artist named Chloe Bass, who's worked with Lowry.
Speaker 5 (11:24):
I don't know why she would even need LinkedIn, how
it's like her career is very well stablished.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Chloe is also confused by how the painting ended up
in the trash. She says Lowry can't have been the
one to throw it away because Lowry doesn't live in
Brooklyn and never has. Chloe agrees to reach out to
her on my behalf and now that the request isn't
coming from Rando on LinkedIn, but Randa, who knows Chloe Bass,
Lowry responds, we have a few back and forths of
(11:53):
her email. I'm hoping to schedule a time for us
to talk on the phone, but Lowry is reluctant. She
tells me she's doesn't want to talk unless she can
see a photo of the painting first. So I send
her a photo, saying I'd be curious if she recognizes
Genesis Too, and equally curious if she doesn't. Who knows.
Maybe Brown's gift of the painting never even reached her.
(12:14):
The next morning, Lowry writes back quote intriguing period. That
is the extent of her email, and after that our
correspondence comes to a halt. Intriguing period. What did Lowry
(12:52):
Simms's email mean. It's not the response you'd expect of
someone recognizing a beloved, long lost painting. I start to
wonder if maybe the painting is a fake. Genesis Too
doesn't look like any of the other Frederick Brown paintings
I've seen online. Maybe Lowry's intriguing means an intriguing forgery.
So I contact Frederick Brown's trust. I figure they'll know
(13:15):
best if the painting's really his, and five days later
I get confirmation that the painting is legit. I receive
a call from a man named Bentley, who teaches at
Fordham and is a PhD candidate at the NYU Institute
of Fine Arts. Bentley is also it turns out, Frederick J.
Brown's son.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
So here's the backstory. Yeah, the painting is part of
a larger painting called Genesis. Okay, that's in the collection
of the MET.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Oh, whoa, I didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
So my dad became the youngest artist to be in
the collection of the MET at that time. I get
thirty three. Geez, let's say that. Actually thirty four okay,
and like on top of that, right as a black artist,
right this deal? So Part one is at the MET.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Part one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Part two
in a trash heap on a Brooklyn sidewalk. Bentley can't
wait to see his father's painting in person, so he
makes the drive from the Bronx to Maya's apartment in Brooklyn.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Hi.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
And I'm hoping maybe Bentley will have insight into how
his dad's painting ended up in the trash. Should we
look at this painting and then maybe we can talk.
We all file into the living room, where Maya and
her husband West have propped the painting up against a
(14:47):
wall for Bentley to look at. Bentley takes it in.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
This is amazing it's just like, this makes me so happy.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
He's it's your first time.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, I've never seen this.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Bentley's dedicated years of his life to his father's work,
but he can't tell me how the painting ended up
in the trash. Before I reached out, he hadn't even
known Genesis Too existed. He bends down to get a
closer look.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
He didn't just stumble upon any piece within his catalog.
He stumbled upon a extremely important piece.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
It turns out the Genesis two was painted at the
moment when Brown was making a transition. That's why it
looks so different than anything else I'd seen online. Brown
was moving away from abstraction and towards more figurative work.
So among the shapes and lines, you see faces, an
airplane and the fox figure, and it's like a self portrait.
Speaker 5 (15:48):
Do you know why your dad chose fox as a
symbol of representation.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
That's a good question. You have to be a fox
to survive in the art world as a black man,
have to be. Everybody looks at the fox as like
like a nefarious sort of character, right, But my dad
kind of looked at it as like, nah, that's just
like that's just a cad that has to do whatever
it has to do to survive.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Bentley tells us about his dad's life, about Frederick Brown's
childhood on the South Side of Chicago, how Brown's dad
managed to juke joint, hanging around blues musicians like Muddy Waters.
Early on, color made a strong impression on Brown. He
grew up mixing paint for the luxury cars his uncle
worked on. Later, Brown found work in the steel mills,
(16:37):
the colors of the hot metal burning their way into
his mind.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Because he'd always talked about how like bright orange the
ingots were. You can see the bright orange in there.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Brown attended college in Illinois and eventually moved to New York,
where he set up shop in a huge loft on
Worcester Street and soho other artists and musicians were always
stopping by, for Mayor Bearden, BB King, John Lennon, and
Yoko Ono. The Western Street loft is where Brown painted Genesis.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
So then after that he signed with Marlboro Gallery, and
so that was a big deal because Marlboro Gallery was
the hottest gallery at that time. We talk about like
Basqueiacht being the first black artist to sort of make
that break. It was really my dad, like, I'm not
even gonna hold you like I'm I'm not going to
I'm not going to.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Sugarcoat it, you know. But while Bosquia went on to
become a household name, selling paintings for millions of dollars,
Frederick J. Brown did not. So what happened. It turns
out that even after signing with Marlborough, Brown wasn't being
shown in the way he thought he should be.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
My dad kept trying to get like a retrospective, and
he couldn't get a retrospective anywhere.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
So Brown took matters into his own hands when a
Taiwanese artist named C. J. Yao invited him to come
to China. It was nineteen eighty eight and communist China
was just starting to culturally open up. Only one other
American artist, Robert Rauschenberg, had shown work in the country.
But together Brown and Yao decided, let's do a Frederick J.
(18:09):
Brown retrospective in China.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
And they decided to do it in the National Museum
of China, which like is on Tienamen Square and it's
like an insanely huge building.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
The museum had been filled with relative chairman Mao and
the Communist revolution. But all that was cleared out to
make room for one hundred Frederick J. Brown paintings, and.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
He had a lot. I mean he had sixty thousand
people a day for like thirty days.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
He had to go to China to have a red.
He had to go to China to be seen as
an American.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Artist because in America, Brown was seen as a black artist.
And despite what he accomplished in China, when he returned
to the States, he hadn't earned any additional prestige.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Instead, Marlborough was pissed that he did the show because
they did it without his without their consent. He took
out a loan to do it himself of half a
million dollars. He had no way of paying it back.
So that was like the beginning of I don't want
to say the end, but it was the beginning of
like a real hardship.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Marlborough dropped him. The bank was trying to take all
his work, which he'd put up as collateral. He was
only able to save some paintings by erasing his name
entirely so the bank would think they weren't his. Other
paintings he hid in the walls of his Worcester Street loft.
(19:44):
Brown continued to paint for the rest of his life,
but he never regained that blue trip cachet from his
early career. He didn't become a name that a non
art person like me, or even an art person like
Maya would immediately recognize. Brown died of cancer in twenty twelve,
and ten years later, Bentley's frustrated that his father still
(20:04):
doesn't have his rightful place in the cannon.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
You go up to these people that are gatekeepers and
you plead your case. Most people are just like, whatever,
there's not a market for it right now, right, and
it's like it's like, man, fuck you.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
It's the same story for a lot of black artists. Sure,
these gatekeepers want black art, Bentley says, but they want
a particular kind of black art. They want art they
can look at and go, ah, yes, I get it.
This is about the politics of being black in America.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
When we think about black art or black artists, right,
we are very quick to add like a political tag
to the thing. I mean, I guess you could argue
that blackness in and of itself is a political thing.
But my dad was kind of much more of the
camp of like just like make art for art's.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Sake, but purely aesthetic work by a black artist. That's
what ends up in the garbage.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
It's such a painful feeling. It's such a yeah, painful
is the word, And such a painful feeling when you
know that, like you have such a special world and
people don't give a shit.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
What is I mean?
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Like if you have to describe, like what what that
special world was?
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Like?
Speaker 1 (21:22):
What how would you explain it? Bentley points of the
painting still leaning against the wall?
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Is that right there? So much color, so much emotion,
so much beauty. You two recognized it.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
The beanting definitely called to me.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Yeah, I mean you rescued it right like, and it's
like a piece of my dad. It's like his energy,
his spirit is him. You know that was my dad
calling out to you. That's what that was. You're like, yeah,
let me go in the trash. My son lives not
too far away. Don't let me go in the trash.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Well, Bentley was able to trace the path that led
Frederick Brown's work to the metaphorical trash heap. I'm still
wondering about the literal trash heap, the one on a
Brooklyn sidewalk, and so, of course I'm still wondering about
Larry Simms. It turns out Bentley knows Lowry well. The
two are even writing a book together. When I ask
(22:34):
Bentley about Lowry's aversion to speaking with me, he alludes
to some bad experiences she's had with journalists, but he
reassures me that he'll put in a good word. And
the next morning, Bentley calls to tell me that Lowry
is willing to talk. There's just one caveat. She doesn't
want to discuss how the painting wound up in the garbage.
(22:56):
It's hard for me to figure out why. And I
don't really know how to do an interview about a
painting that ended up in the trash without asking how
the painting ended up in the trash. So I crossed
my fingers that something might shift. Once we're on the phone,
Larry takes my call from her condo in Baltimore. She
(23:17):
tells me that she met Frederick Brown when she was
around thirty, a newly minted curator at the Met. As
a curator, Lowry's mission was to champion the work of
overlooked artists. Lowry herself knew what it was like to
be overlooked.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
I mean, I was in, you know, as this black
girl from Queens. I had a career nobody would have
expected at that time. I was in places where nobody
expected at the time. I mean I used to tell people.
One of the most amusing things for me was to
go to a collector on Park Avenue in the seventies
(23:52):
and get to the front door, and the doorman would
try to sort of scoop me around to the service
entrance because they assumed I was a housekeeper or something,
you know, and new I'm, you know, from the Metropolitan Museum.
You sort to see that the face change, you know,
they go, oh.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
You know.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
It was a struggle to get past the ignorance about
black artists.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Like once in the seventies Lowry organized an exhibit of
black art from the METS collection.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
And when we got the exhibition up, I was approached
by a journalist and said, I didn't even know they.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Were black artists.
Speaker 4 (24:36):
Now this is like nineteen seventy nine. Come on, jeez,
yeah yeah, yeah, so I said, where we've been around
since the late eighteen hundred.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Hearing this story, it starts to make sense why Lowry
might have been reluctant to speak with me, a white
looking journalist she's never met. In fact, when I spoke
with Bentley, he said Lowry had wanted him to suss
me out, to make sure that I was okay, before
she agreed to talk to me. Like his dad, Bentley said,
Lowry too has had to be a fox. Larry and
(25:16):
Brown's friendship endured for decades, starting in that Worcester Street
loft and lasting until Brown's death, and even after he died,
Larry continued to engage with Brown's work. Just last summer,
she helped put together a big posthumous show of his
art at the Barry Campbell Gallery in Manhattan. Like Bentley,
she wants Brown to finally get his due.
Speaker 4 (25:37):
It's a regional work, you know, it's strong work. I'm
just hopeful that, you know, Frederick gets written into the
you know, the art lexicon in the way that he
needs to be.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
When I ask Lowry why this hasn't happened yet, like Bentley,
she cites the aftermath at the China trip, but she
also offers this, he.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
Sort of left New York at a crucial period in
his career, and he put the concerns of his family first.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
And it's true. In the nineties, Brown left New York
for a town called Carefree, Arizona. A big factor in
that decision was his daughter's asthma. Brown knew the dry
desert heat would be good for her, and although money
was still tight, the family was happy out in Arizona.
Bentley recalls his dad attending his flag football games in
his signature White Brooks Brothers suit, sweating in the Arizona
(26:31):
Son and dabbing his forehead with napkins. Well, some children
of famous artists remember locked studio doors. Bentley remembers his
dad's welcoming studio couch, where he'd flopped down after school
and talk about his day while his father painted. All
of which is to say Bentley remembers Brown as a
good dad. As Lowry and I talk, I do my
(27:00):
best to avoid the whole painting and the trash thing.
So we discussed her time at the met Brown's jazz portraits,
the similarities between Genesis one and two. But then, without prompting,
Lowry volunteers this.
Speaker 4 (27:14):
I mean, I sort of, like, you know, kind of
figured out that I probably gazed the painting to someone
who admired it.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
You know.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
I can't remember who because it you know, because it
was certainly too big for my low apartment.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
As it turns out, Brown had painted Lowry Genesis two
as a thank you gift because she had been the
curator who bought Genesis one for the Mets collection. But
the painting was huge, and Lowry ran into the problem
that so many New Yorkers do. Living in a cramped
apartment on the Upper east Side, she just hadn't had
space for it. For Lowry, there was no blank wall
(27:50):
above the couch, just waiting for something to be hung.
So instead she found Genesis two a good home with
a friend who loved it.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
And I think I told Fred, you know, like about
six Yeah, how it ended up with, amya find it?
I don't know. I just can't remember who I might
have given it to.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
I suspect that Lowry might be trying to protect a friend.
Maybe that's why she'd been reluctant to talk about the
painting's loss. Maybe Larry gave the painting to someone who
moved to a smaller apartment themselves, or maybe they died
or fell on hard times and decided to sell it.
Maybe it was regifted to someone else, or sold in
a state sale, or just lost in the general shuffle
(28:31):
of life. No matter what, the end result is the same. Ultimately,
someone looked at it thought this isn't worth keeping and
threw it away. All of that, it seems, was wrapped
up and Lowry's intriguing. Does it make you sad at
all to think of art just in the trash like that?
Speaker 4 (28:52):
Well, you know, there's a saying that ninety eight percent
of all the art created in the world since the
beginning is gone.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Do you think like the best stuff somehow makes it through?
Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 4 (29:09):
I think it's totally random. Yeah, I mean, I guess
that's why we have museums, you know, because they can
be seen as places where these things can be safe.
But I mean, just look, it was happening now in
the Ukraine, you know, the Palming museums and cultural sites.
So I think a lot of times it's just the
luck of the draw.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Time is the most capricious of curators. A few weeks earlier,
when Bentley came by Maya's apartment, we all sat around
and talked for hours about art and family, and finally,
when it was time to go, Maya turned to Bentley
(29:52):
and said, I don't think the painting belongs with me.
I think it belongs somewhere else. Bentley's taller than my
and had no problem lifting up the canvas. He thanked
Maya warmly and carried Genesis Too out the door to
his car. He'd serve as the paintings caretaker until Lowry
decided what she wanted to do. Can you tell me
(30:14):
sort of like, what's happening to it now? Do you
know where it's going?
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Yeah, it's been accepted by the Studio Museum as a donation. Oh,
that's great, and the donation will be from me, from
the estate of the artists, and from Maya.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
On a warm Friday afternoon, I pay Maya visit her
regal apartment building.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Hello.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
She and Wes are signing the paperwork to officially donate
the painting to the Studio Museum, and I'm here to
serve as a witness. Lowry and Bentley have both already signed.
Knowing how much Maya loves the painting, I thought giving
it up would be bittersweet, but she's in high spirits.
(31:03):
She likes the idea of Genesis Too hanging in a
museum that way, thousands of people will get to enjoy it.
We'll lean towards the plaque and read the name Frederick J. Brown.
Who knows what that name might mean to people in
the future, if time will strengthen Brown's legacy or wash
it away. But for now, we finish up the paperwork
(31:24):
and all cheers a shot at tequila to celebrate, as
friends often do.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
On my way out, I noticed that the big wall
above Maya's couch is still blank.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Now that the furnitures returning to its goodwill.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Home, Now that the last month's rent is scheming with.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
The damage to pos take this moment to do so.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
If we mint it, if we travel felt around for
far too from things good accidentally. This episode of Heavyweight
was produced by me Khalila Holt along with Jonathan Goldstein.
(32:43):
Our supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Production help from Domiano Marquetti,
special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg, Lydia Polgreen, Mercy Flynn,
Carl McCool, Caitlin Kenny, and Kayla Lattimore, with extra special
thanks to Sam Riceman. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with
original music by Christine Fellows. John K. Sampson, Michael Hurst,
(33:04):
and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found on
our website, gimlipmedia dot com slash Heavyweight. Our theme song
is by The Weaker Dance courtesy of Epitaph Records. Follow
us on Twitter at Heavyweight or email us at Heavyweight
at gimlipmedia dot com. We'll be back next week.
Hello, Jonathan.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Yeah, is everything okay?
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Huh?
Speaker 4 (00:12):
To what do I owe this?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
This pleasure? I'm reporting this week's episode.
Speaker 4 (00:19):
Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
I don't know why I said it was such trepidation
in my voice. I am yeah you are. Every episode needs.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
What you got to have the theme music?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Yeah, even before that.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Oh, I know what you're getting at the cold open where.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
You call someone trying to live their life, like your
friend Jackie Cohen, and ask them a bunch of stuff
that they don't have the time or interest in answering.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
I see what's going on.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
The tables have turned. See how you like being called
out of the blue, asked a bunch of questions?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Do you like it?
Speaker 5 (00:50):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (00:50):
You like it? Do you like it? If I start
saying like what do you like better? Lollipops or gum?
Speaker 4 (00:56):
Why too?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I've alreat had a small hat on with that endear
you to it?
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Oh? Definitely.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
If you were a dog, what do you think your
name would be?
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Probably the same name, Jonathan Goldstein.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Do you remember that time that you referred to George
Clooney as the gray haired doctor from er I did.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
No idea?
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yeah you did, Yes, you did. You were like who's
that gray haired doctor from R And I was like
George Clooney and you were.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Like, yeah, I guess the thing that we're learning from
this is I like being Jackie Cohen.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
From Gimlet Media. I'm Khalila Holt and this is Heavyweight
Today's episode Frederick J. Brown right after the break. Every
(02:03):
Friday night during the pandemic, I'd get on a Google
hangout with a group of my boyfriend's friends and we'd
all play Mario kartlind you, how did you see spread?
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Again? There's no PAM six races.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
These Mario Kart sessions started back in the days when
we could barely leave the house due to COVID restrictions,
so it felt like an escape to log on to
carelessly karine in a small car or kart if you will,
through a gold mine or off a waterfall. In those
dark days, a few minutes on Mount Warrio was the
closest thing I could get to a vacation, right, let's
(02:40):
be bad. That being said, I also found these Mario
Kart hangouts deeply intimidating because I'm not good at Mario Kart.
My gameplay mostly sounds like this no or this along
with the Mario karting, there was also non Mario chatting.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Oh I'm happy sat on Instagram, Happy Believe Birthday.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
And chatting of any kind is another thing I'm not
good at. Every so often I'd weigh in with something
like pretty crazy. This was essentially the extent of my
engagement until the night Maya told us about the painting.
Maya found the painting sitting in a pile of trash
on the sidewalk, and it grabbed her instantly. It was
(03:28):
only later, when she took it home that she saw
the artist's signature, Frederick J. Brown. Although Maya works in art,
the name was unfamiliar to her, so she googled him,
and what popped up was a lengthy New York Times
obituary from twenty twelve, praising Brown's work and citing Williem
Dakooning as an early mentor. Brown, it turned out, was
(03:51):
an acclaimed black artist known for his portraits of jazz
and blues musicians. He had work in the Smithsonian. As
Maya made her way his biography, she slowly realized that
the painting she'd been so instinctively drawn to was actually
the work of an important artist, and so Maya was
left wondering, how did Brown's painting end up in the trash? Oh,
(04:21):
very regal building on a cold Friday afternoon. I pay
Maya visit her Brooklyn apartment building to follow up and
learn more. And who knows, maybe my boyfriend's friend can
simply become a friend.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Oh, very like regal building.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
I feel like.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
My irl chatting is truly no better than my Mario
Kart chatting saying here else it is.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
What I couldn't see on the small square of our
Mario Kart calls was that every surface of Maya's apartment
is covered in art. Not only has Maya worked in
the art world for many years at galleries art publishers,
her husband, Wes, is also an artist himself. He even
proposed to Maya on the steps of the met There's
really only one spot in their apartment that's empty, a
(05:16):
blank wall above the couch. They'd been waiting year after
year for the perfect work of art to hang there,
and now with the discovery of the Frederick J. Brown painting,
they knew they'd found it. Maya says she spotted the
painting while heading home from a COVID test. It was gigantic,
and she still had a mile to walk. She knew
(05:36):
it didn't really make sense to take it with her,
but she couldn't walk away from it either.
Speaker 5 (05:41):
I just kept going back to it. It just was
different from all of the other paintings I've seen. It
just really kind of grabbed me, and I started trying
to get it out of the trash.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Clutching the huge painting to her body. Mayawardly waddled the
mile home.
Speaker 5 (06:02):
There's like a little garbage juice at the bottom and
a little dust at the top, and I was walking.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I wouldn't let it sit on the ground.
Speaker 5 (06:12):
I know I had probably been on the street all day,
but I didn't want it to be on the street anymore.
It is nearly as long as I am tall, and
I'm five four, lots of color and patterns.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Despite my fondness for the audio medium, it fails to
translate the force of Brown's painting. It's not as easily
encapsulated as say the Mona Lisa Smiling Woman or American
Gothic unsmiling woman and man. It's mostly abstract, but then
there are these tiny spots with recognizable figures.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
You can see faces and there's these horizontal bands that
sort of organize the composition.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Admiring the painting with makes me feel like I'm at
a fancy party, enjoying or jerves, but also panicked that
I have nothing intelligent to say that kind OFT's like
a seven. The painting feels like a stained glass cabinet
full of curios. It feels like a quilt if a
quilt weren't made of fabric, but a fields and buildings
(07:19):
and people rushing to work. It feels like a packed
room where everybody's dancing. I asked Maya to show me
where she first found the painting, and so we hit
the streets to return to the scene of the trash.
So we walk, Yeah, let's walk. We take a walk,
as friends often do. Maya tells me the painting was
(07:44):
in the trash with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff,
a TJ Max planter, a stained toy chest. Whoever disposed
of it was probably moving. Maybe a neighbor can tell
us who might have moved in the last couple months.
But whereas I was picturing a small building with just
a few buzzers, it turns out the trash heap was
actually in front of a public housing complex fourteen stories high,
(08:07):
taking up a whole block. We loiter by the building's
entrance and I try to catch people as they're going
in or out. Can I ask you something weird and
ask you a weird question? Anyone who moved out? Like
in it's just about a painting that was left outside
of painting. Some my friend found a painting and she's
(08:28):
trying to figure out, like what the deal is. Nobody
knows anything. No, all right, thank you, no, thank you? No,
all right, thank you. There's a lot I don't understand
about art, like why are frames so expensive? But I
(08:49):
can tell you this. Paintings. They have two sides. There's
a side with all the paint on it that people
are always tripping over each other to talk about. But
then there's the other side, the second or backside. If
you will, do you want a water tear or anything?
Water would be great. And back in Maya's apartment, she
explains that on this backside, or dari are side, there's
(09:13):
another clue. She and West were cleaning the painting off,
getting it ready to hang on the wall when they
saw it. Lightly scrawled on the back of the canvas
was an inscription.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Painted nineteen seventy nine December title Genesis two Love Happy
Birthday from Frederick to Lowry Simms, and then he signed
it and dated it in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Maya may not have known the name Frederick Brown, but
she knew the name Lowry Simms quite well. Larry was
the president of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and before
that she'd been the first black curator at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. She's now in her seventies and has
had dec it's of impact on the art world. She's
reached living legend status.
Speaker 5 (10:04):
You can't help but be like, oh, okay, yeah, should
I have not used a paper towel to clean this?
Speaker 1 (10:13):
The way Maya sees it, if you find something with
someone else's name on it, whether that's a wallet, a cat,
or a painting, you try to give it back to them.
And so she wants to return the painting to its
rightful owner, Lowry Simms. And once we find her, maybe
Lowry can help piece together how the painting ended up
in the garbage. I would like love to help try
(10:37):
and get in touch with this person.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yes, please, okay?
Speaker 1 (10:41):
My garbage hunting an abject failure but my people hunting
that's going to be an abject success. I can't find
an email address for Lowry. So I do what we
all do when we want to pester someone more important
than we are. I send a message on LinkedIn. I
(11:03):
explain that I have a painting I think belongs to her,
but perhaps fearing I'm running some sort of con where
I trade paintings for Social Security numbers, Lowry doesn't respond, HI,
how are you I need some sort of inroad? So
I contact an artist named Chloe Bass, who's worked with Lowry.
Speaker 5 (11:24):
I don't know why she would even need LinkedIn, how
it's like her career is very well stablished.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Chloe is also confused by how the painting ended up
in the trash. She says Lowry can't have been the
one to throw it away because Lowry doesn't live in
Brooklyn and never has. Chloe agrees to reach out to
her on my behalf and now that the request isn't
coming from Rando on LinkedIn, but Randa, who knows Chloe Bass,
Lowry responds, we have a few back and forths of
(11:53):
her email. I'm hoping to schedule a time for us
to talk on the phone, but Lowry is reluctant. She
tells me she's doesn't want to talk unless she can
see a photo of the painting first. So I send
her a photo, saying I'd be curious if she recognizes
Genesis Too, and equally curious if she doesn't. Who knows.
Maybe Brown's gift of the painting never even reached her.
(12:14):
The next morning, Lowry writes back quote intriguing period. That
is the extent of her email, and after that our
correspondence comes to a halt. Intriguing period. What did Lowry
(12:52):
Simms's email mean. It's not the response you'd expect of
someone recognizing a beloved, long lost painting. I start to
wonder if maybe the painting is a fake. Genesis Too
doesn't look like any of the other Frederick Brown paintings
I've seen online. Maybe Lowry's intriguing means an intriguing forgery.
So I contact Frederick Brown's trust. I figure they'll know
(13:15):
best if the painting's really his, and five days later
I get confirmation that the painting is legit. I receive
a call from a man named Bentley, who teaches at
Fordham and is a PhD candidate at the NYU Institute
of Fine Arts. Bentley is also it turns out, Frederick J.
Brown's son.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
So here's the backstory. Yeah, the painting is part of
a larger painting called Genesis. Okay, that's in the collection
of the MET.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Oh, whoa, I didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
So my dad became the youngest artist to be in
the collection of the MET at that time. I get
thirty three. Geez, let's say that. Actually thirty four okay,
and like on top of that, right as a black artist,
right this deal? So Part one is at the MET.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Part one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Part two
in a trash heap on a Brooklyn sidewalk. Bentley can't
wait to see his father's painting in person, so he
makes the drive from the Bronx to Maya's apartment in Brooklyn.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Hi.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
And I'm hoping maybe Bentley will have insight into how
his dad's painting ended up in the trash. Should we
look at this painting and then maybe we can talk.
We all file into the living room, where Maya and
her husband West have propped the painting up against a
(14:47):
wall for Bentley to look at. Bentley takes it in.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
This is amazing it's just like, this makes me so happy.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
He's it's your first time.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, I've never seen this.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Bentley's dedicated years of his life to his father's work,
but he can't tell me how the painting ended up
in the trash. Before I reached out, he hadn't even
known Genesis Too existed. He bends down to get a
closer look.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
He didn't just stumble upon any piece within his catalog.
He stumbled upon a extremely important piece.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
It turns out the Genesis two was painted at the
moment when Brown was making a transition. That's why it
looks so different than anything else I'd seen online. Brown
was moving away from abstraction and towards more figurative work.
So among the shapes and lines, you see faces, an
airplane and the fox figure, and it's like a self portrait.
Speaker 5 (15:48):
Do you know why your dad chose fox as a
symbol of representation.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
That's a good question. You have to be a fox
to survive in the art world as a black man,
have to be. Everybody looks at the fox as like
like a nefarious sort of character, right, But my dad
kind of looked at it as like, nah, that's just
like that's just a cad that has to do whatever
it has to do to survive.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Bentley tells us about his dad's life, about Frederick Brown's
childhood on the South Side of Chicago, how Brown's dad
managed to juke joint, hanging around blues musicians like Muddy Waters.
Early on, color made a strong impression on Brown. He
grew up mixing paint for the luxury cars his uncle
worked on. Later, Brown found work in the steel mills,
(16:37):
the colors of the hot metal burning their way into
his mind.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Because he'd always talked about how like bright orange the
ingots were. You can see the bright orange in there.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Brown attended college in Illinois and eventually moved to New York,
where he set up shop in a huge loft on
Worcester Street and soho other artists and musicians were always
stopping by, for Mayor Bearden, BB King, John Lennon, and
Yoko Ono. The Western Street loft is where Brown painted Genesis.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
So then after that he signed with Marlboro Gallery, and
so that was a big deal because Marlboro Gallery was
the hottest gallery at that time. We talk about like
Basqueiacht being the first black artist to sort of make
that break. It was really my dad, like, I'm not
even gonna hold you like I'm I'm not going to
I'm not going to.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Sugarcoat it, you know. But while Bosquia went on to
become a household name, selling paintings for millions of dollars,
Frederick J. Brown did not. So what happened. It turns
out that even after signing with Marlborough, Brown wasn't being
shown in the way he thought he should be.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
My dad kept trying to get like a retrospective, and
he couldn't get a retrospective anywhere.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
So Brown took matters into his own hands when a
Taiwanese artist named C. J. Yao invited him to come
to China. It was nineteen eighty eight and communist China
was just starting to culturally open up. Only one other
American artist, Robert Rauschenberg, had shown work in the country.
But together Brown and Yao decided, let's do a Frederick J.
(18:09):
Brown retrospective in China.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
And they decided to do it in the National Museum
of China, which like is on Tienamen Square and it's
like an insanely huge building.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
The museum had been filled with relative chairman Mao and
the Communist revolution. But all that was cleared out to
make room for one hundred Frederick J. Brown paintings, and.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
He had a lot. I mean he had sixty thousand
people a day for like thirty days.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
He had to go to China to have a red.
He had to go to China to be seen as
an American.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Artist because in America, Brown was seen as a black artist.
And despite what he accomplished in China, when he returned
to the States, he hadn't earned any additional prestige.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Instead, Marlborough was pissed that he did the show because
they did it without his without their consent. He took
out a loan to do it himself of half a
million dollars. He had no way of paying it back.
So that was like the beginning of I don't want
to say the end, but it was the beginning of
like a real hardship.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Marlborough dropped him. The bank was trying to take all
his work, which he'd put up as collateral. He was
only able to save some paintings by erasing his name
entirely so the bank would think they weren't his. Other
paintings he hid in the walls of his Worcester Street loft.
(19:44):
Brown continued to paint for the rest of his life,
but he never regained that blue trip cachet from his
early career. He didn't become a name that a non
art person like me, or even an art person like
Maya would immediately recognize. Brown died of cancer in twenty twelve,
and ten years later, Bentley's frustrated that his father still
(20:04):
doesn't have his rightful place in the cannon.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
You go up to these people that are gatekeepers and
you plead your case. Most people are just like, whatever,
there's not a market for it right now, right, and
it's like it's like, man, fuck you.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
It's the same story for a lot of black artists. Sure,
these gatekeepers want black art, Bentley says, but they want
a particular kind of black art. They want art they
can look at and go, ah, yes, I get it.
This is about the politics of being black in America.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
When we think about black art or black artists, right,
we are very quick to add like a political tag
to the thing. I mean, I guess you could argue
that blackness in and of itself is a political thing.
But my dad was kind of much more of the
camp of like just like make art for art's.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Sake, but purely aesthetic work by a black artist. That's
what ends up in the garbage.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
It's such a painful feeling. It's such a yeah, painful
is the word, And such a painful feeling when you
know that, like you have such a special world and
people don't give a shit.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
What is I mean?
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Like if you have to describe, like what what that
special world was?
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Like?
Speaker 1 (21:22):
What how would you explain it? Bentley points of the
painting still leaning against the wall?
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Is that right there? So much color, so much emotion,
so much beauty. You two recognized it.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
The beanting definitely called to me.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Yeah, I mean you rescued it right like, and it's
like a piece of my dad. It's like his energy,
his spirit is him. You know that was my dad
calling out to you. That's what that was. You're like, yeah,
let me go in the trash. My son lives not
too far away. Don't let me go in the trash.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Well, Bentley was able to trace the path that led
Frederick Brown's work to the metaphorical trash heap. I'm still
wondering about the literal trash heap, the one on a
Brooklyn sidewalk, and so, of course I'm still wondering about
Larry Simms. It turns out Bentley knows Lowry well. The
two are even writing a book together. When I ask
(22:34):
Bentley about Lowry's aversion to speaking with me, he alludes
to some bad experiences she's had with journalists, but he
reassures me that he'll put in a good word. And
the next morning, Bentley calls to tell me that Lowry
is willing to talk. There's just one caveat. She doesn't
want to discuss how the painting wound up in the garbage.
(22:56):
It's hard for me to figure out why. And I
don't really know how to do an interview about a
painting that ended up in the trash without asking how
the painting ended up in the trash. So I crossed
my fingers that something might shift. Once we're on the phone,
Larry takes my call from her condo in Baltimore. She
(23:17):
tells me that she met Frederick Brown when she was
around thirty, a newly minted curator at the Met. As
a curator, Lowry's mission was to champion the work of
overlooked artists. Lowry herself knew what it was like to
be overlooked.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
I mean, I was in, you know, as this black
girl from Queens. I had a career nobody would have
expected at that time. I was in places where nobody
expected at the time. I mean I used to tell people.
One of the most amusing things for me was to
go to a collector on Park Avenue in the seventies
(23:52):
and get to the front door, and the doorman would
try to sort of scoop me around to the service
entrance because they assumed I was a housekeeper or something,
you know, and new I'm, you know, from the Metropolitan Museum.
You sort to see that the face change, you know,
they go, oh.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
You know.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
It was a struggle to get past the ignorance about
black artists.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Like once in the seventies Lowry organized an exhibit of
black art from the METS collection.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
And when we got the exhibition up, I was approached
by a journalist and said, I didn't even know they.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Were black artists.
Speaker 4 (24:36):
Now this is like nineteen seventy nine. Come on, jeez,
yeah yeah, yeah, so I said, where we've been around
since the late eighteen hundred.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Hearing this story, it starts to make sense why Lowry
might have been reluctant to speak with me, a white
looking journalist she's never met. In fact, when I spoke
with Bentley, he said Lowry had wanted him to suss
me out, to make sure that I was okay, before
she agreed to talk to me. Like his dad, Bentley said,
Lowry too has had to be a fox. Larry and
(25:16):
Brown's friendship endured for decades, starting in that Worcester Street
loft and lasting until Brown's death, and even after he died,
Larry continued to engage with Brown's work. Just last summer,
she helped put together a big posthumous show of his
art at the Barry Campbell Gallery in Manhattan. Like Bentley,
she wants Brown to finally get his due.
Speaker 4 (25:37):
It's a regional work, you know, it's strong work. I'm
just hopeful that, you know, Frederick gets written into the
you know, the art lexicon in the way that he
needs to be.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
When I ask Lowry why this hasn't happened yet, like Bentley,
she cites the aftermath at the China trip, but she
also offers this, he.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
Sort of left New York at a crucial period in
his career, and he put the concerns of his family first.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
And it's true. In the nineties, Brown left New York
for a town called Carefree, Arizona. A big factor in
that decision was his daughter's asthma. Brown knew the dry
desert heat would be good for her, and although money
was still tight, the family was happy out in Arizona.
Bentley recalls his dad attending his flag football games in
his signature White Brooks Brothers suit, sweating in the Arizona
(26:31):
Son and dabbing his forehead with napkins. Well, some children
of famous artists remember locked studio doors. Bentley remembers his
dad's welcoming studio couch, where he'd flopped down after school
and talk about his day while his father painted. All
of which is to say Bentley remembers Brown as a
good dad. As Lowry and I talk, I do my
(27:00):
best to avoid the whole painting and the trash thing.
So we discussed her time at the met Brown's jazz portraits,
the similarities between Genesis one and two. But then, without prompting,
Lowry volunteers this.
Speaker 4 (27:14):
I mean, I sort of, like, you know, kind of
figured out that I probably gazed the painting to someone
who admired it.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
You know.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
I can't remember who because it you know, because it
was certainly too big for my low apartment.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
As it turns out, Brown had painted Lowry Genesis two
as a thank you gift because she had been the
curator who bought Genesis one for the Mets collection. But
the painting was huge, and Lowry ran into the problem
that so many New Yorkers do. Living in a cramped
apartment on the Upper east Side, she just hadn't had
space for it. For Lowry, there was no blank wall
(27:50):
above the couch, just waiting for something to be hung.
So instead she found Genesis two a good home with
a friend who loved it.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
And I think I told Fred, you know, like about
six Yeah, how it ended up with, amya find it?
I don't know. I just can't remember who I might
have given it to.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
I suspect that Lowry might be trying to protect a friend.
Maybe that's why she'd been reluctant to talk about the
painting's loss. Maybe Larry gave the painting to someone who
moved to a smaller apartment themselves, or maybe they died
or fell on hard times and decided to sell it.
Maybe it was regifted to someone else, or sold in
a state sale, or just lost in the general shuffle
(28:31):
of life. No matter what, the end result is the same. Ultimately,
someone looked at it thought this isn't worth keeping and
threw it away. All of that, it seems, was wrapped
up and Lowry's intriguing. Does it make you sad at
all to think of art just in the trash like that?
Speaker 4 (28:52):
Well, you know, there's a saying that ninety eight percent
of all the art created in the world since the
beginning is gone.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Do you think like the best stuff somehow makes it through?
Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 4 (29:09):
I think it's totally random. Yeah, I mean, I guess
that's why we have museums, you know, because they can
be seen as places where these things can be safe.
But I mean, just look, it was happening now in
the Ukraine, you know, the Palming museums and cultural sites.
So I think a lot of times it's just the
luck of the draw.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Time is the most capricious of curators. A few weeks earlier,
when Bentley came by Maya's apartment, we all sat around
and talked for hours about art and family, and finally,
when it was time to go, Maya turned to Bentley
(29:52):
and said, I don't think the painting belongs with me.
I think it belongs somewhere else. Bentley's taller than my
and had no problem lifting up the canvas. He thanked
Maya warmly and carried Genesis Too out the door to
his car. He'd serve as the paintings caretaker until Lowry
decided what she wanted to do. Can you tell me
(30:14):
sort of like, what's happening to it now? Do you
know where it's going?
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Yeah, it's been accepted by the Studio Museum as a donation. Oh,
that's great, and the donation will be from me, from
the estate of the artists, and from Maya.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
On a warm Friday afternoon, I pay Maya visit her
regal apartment building.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Hello.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
She and Wes are signing the paperwork to officially donate
the painting to the Studio Museum, and I'm here to
serve as a witness. Lowry and Bentley have both already signed.
Knowing how much Maya loves the painting, I thought giving
it up would be bittersweet, but she's in high spirits.
(31:03):
She likes the idea of Genesis Too hanging in a
museum that way, thousands of people will get to enjoy it.
We'll lean towards the plaque and read the name Frederick J. Brown.
Who knows what that name might mean to people in
the future, if time will strengthen Brown's legacy or wash
it away. But for now, we finish up the paperwork
(31:24):
and all cheers a shot at tequila to celebrate, as
friends often do.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
On my way out, I noticed that the big wall
above Maya's couch is still blank.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Now that the furnitures returning to its goodwill.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Home, Now that the last month's rent is scheming with.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
The damage to pos take this moment to do so.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
If we mint it, if we travel felt around for
far too from things good accidentally. This episode of Heavyweight
was produced by me Khalila Holt along with Jonathan Goldstein.
(32:43):
Our supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Production help from Domiano Marquetti,
special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg, Lydia Polgreen, Mercy Flynn,
Carl McCool, Caitlin Kenny, and Kayla Lattimore, with extra special
thanks to Sam Riceman. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with
original music by Christine Fellows. John K. Sampson, Michael Hurst,
(33:04):
and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found on
our website, gimlipmedia dot com slash Heavyweight. Our theme song
is by The Weaker Dance courtesy of Epitaph Records. Follow
us on Twitter at Heavyweight or email us at Heavyweight
at gimlipmedia dot com. We'll be back next week.
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