In episode one of The Lowdown, Ethan Hawke sees a painting in a private supper club. He's enamored, both with the painting and maybe also the hostess who stands in front of it. He whispers to her: “That’s a Joe Brainard! It should be in a museum!”
Well, now it is.
“Untitled (Nude on Newsprint),” by Joe Brainard, went up today at Philbrook Museum of Art, along with two other works. The painting was made in 1961, when the artist was just 19 years old.
“The late, great Joe Brainard was and remains a vital player in the history of Tulsa arts,” says Philbrook’s Director of Communications Jeff Martin. “When Ethan Hawke’s character in The Lowdown implores the hostess to learn more about him and that his work belongs in a museum, we felt exactly the same way.”
Brainard was born in Arkansas in 1942, and was raised in Tulsa. Together with Tulsa poets like Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, and Ted Berrigan, he worked on The White Dove Review, a literary journal which the teens ran out of Central High School, collecting the work of greats like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Brainard went to the Dayton Art Institute, but dropped out to move to New York, where he ran in a crowd with Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and other influential artists and writers. He died in 1994 at the age of 52.
Lee Roy Chapman filmed a biographical sketch of the artist in 2012 for This Land Press:
The painting belongs to Maggie Fox and Dean Williams, a Tulsa couple who helped co-found WOMPA and who are the owners of Fox Cleaners.
“A day or two after the first episode aired, we connected with the generous owner and arranged for the work featured in the show, along with two smaller Brainard works from our collection, to be on display,” Martin says. ”As Lee [Roy Chapman] would say, if you don’t know Joe Brainard, you’re doing it wrong!”
