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John Brassefort
I was just wandering through James Lileks’ website when I came across his retrospective of a forgotten American painter. I’m not a big fan of abstract painting, but @jameslileks‘ discussion of the artist and his work gives me some appreciation of the genre. Enjoy!
http://lileks.com/institute/brassefort/index.html
Published in Culture
Brassefort won recognition in the offices of linoleum manufacturers across the nation.
“That guy is in my office again. Get him out of here!”
EDIT: I hadn’t gotten to the last panel when I wrote the above. Linoleum is what I was thinking about 4/5ths of the way through.
Hilarious!
Lileks.com is like Barnum’s American Museum — so many crazy corridors, and at the end of every one, a room full of things you never knew existed but now find inexplicably fascinating.
My father studied art. He had paintings all over the house. Some were abstract, and looking back, I suspect may have been influenced by Brassefort.
James Lileks never fails to astonish and entertain. He could very well become the art critic for The New Yorker, he certainly has the language down pat.
I like his stuff, but he really is forgotten. I could find little to nothing on him on the ‘net. Where is his work other than on James’ website?
Look at the Bleat on 7/1/20.
Lol. I still like his “work.” The Ashcan to Ashtray thing should have been a tipoff.
I’m still annoyed that I got the joke without … you know … actually getting the joke.
Imagine me with the Ashcan School thing. I like a guy named John French Sloan, who is considered one of its founders, and I’m going “Brassefort, Brassefort . . ?”
John French Sloan, Spring in Gramercy Park:
Annoyed? You should be proud!
I’m more an Edward Hopper guy.
Nah. I always thought Mondrian was trying to land a linoleum gig and got distracted by all those art twerps.
I love Hopper as well. There are similarities to Sloan (although I’m no expert). Sloan’s McSorely’s Bar:
Easier to get it immediately if one is a regular reader of the Bleat. OGH made a reference to a previous day’s entry in introducing Brassefort.
He resides solely in James’ head, is my understanding. There are a lot of unusual things rattling around in there.
I’ve been to McSorley’s.
It looked a lot like that. But crowded.
Hah! I did a double-take when I saw that headline on the post – what, did someone else discover his work as well?
Thanks for the link. I had fun with that one. Found that old Armstrong (in French, roughly, Brassefort) linoleum catalog, and thought “this would be an interesting site on design for the 30s,” then realized it would be more fun to put the pictures in frames, and hence elevate them to Art. This required a backstory and a narrative, so let’s do that. It’s what I do with my morning coffee – by nine, I usually have five pages of something done. Right now finishing up a 150-page site on a popular newspaper cartoonist of the first half of the 20th century; it’s slated for 2022, God willing and the Covid don’t rise.
The same idea – recontextualizing the banal and finding meaning – can be found at the Permanent Collection of Impermanent Art, which presumes a view of a future art historian / sociologist attempting to decode the meanings of advertising art.
This is what I mean when I say James Lileks tells us stories so that we don’t cry in our beer.
Touring a historic (because it was authentic, not because it was expensive) house in an important city in Dixie, I was admiring the vintage linoleum floor. The hostess informed me that it was actually painted on the hardwood floor because there was an era in which everyone wanted linoleum even if they couldn’t afford it.