Last week, Roberta Fallon published an article, "Too Much Art," in Artblog about the dilemma we face when we've run out of room to house the artworks we've created and collected.

When I began searching for my father's work in 2008, I knew of fewer than 20 pieces. By 2011, I had found enough that I placed it in art storage--stabilized and safe, a concern because many of the pieces were donated in less-than-perfect condition. I’ve also located artwork that he owned by his friends, like Joe Amarotico, Helen Siegl, Jim McWilliams, Dan Miller, Elizabeth Osborne, and Louis Sloan. Since the collection in storage is a mix of other artists' work and the Brewton Foundation’s, I've always stayed on the safe side and paid the storage fees myself. It’s expensive, but it gives me peace of mind. I hope someday a museum will want to have stewardship of Jim Brewton’s artworks.

Conservation is also expensive for a tiny nonprofit, but rather than leave the work sitting in storage, we want to make progress in taking care of it. Our goal is to form an ongoing relationship with a conservator who will get to know Jim's work and methods. We're talking with Elizabeth (Beth) Nunan at Flux Art Conservation about applying for potential grants that would allow for an ongoing, collaborative educational project using the Brewton collection as a teaching tool for aspiring conservators.

Flux Art Conservation is already involved with educating and training pre-program, graduate, and post-graduate staff members, and we hope to develop a program together with an educational institution that will offer conservation students opportunities to perform hands-on assessment and treatment, and provide them with meaningful projects for growing their professional portfolios. In the meantime, Beth and her team are assessing six Brewton works with similar metallic paint/construction, including our top priority, the Kobenhavn painting Jim considered his masterpiece: The Bombardment of Kobenhavn by Vice Admiral Lord Nelson in 1801: The Mad Laughter of Courage (1966-67, mixed media on canvas, 49" x 86").

We look forward to sharing the project with you and, as ever, thank you for your interest and support.

In late March I visited my cousin Lisa, whose mother was Jim’s sister Joan. Lisa and her two brothers have a nice collection of Brewton works, and I had not seen any of the pictures in decades. While I was there, Lisa allowed me to measure and photograph the front and back of each work. 
 
As always, the combination of gravitas and wit, size, and presence of Jim’s work took me by surprise. Letter from the Past has a subtle exclamation point in the upper left quadrant that didn’t show in previous photographs; Til: Trine #3 sports potent mixed-media elements. Both Mother As A Little Girl and the untitled boat painting are larger than I’d expected.

This summer we're excited to be arranging the cleaning and restoration of Jim's masterpiece, The Bombardment of Kobenhavn by Vice Admiral Lord Nelson in 1801: The Mad Laughter of Courage (1966-67, mixed media on canvas, 49" x 86"). It's a work created with very mixed media, including a working lightbulb and a bra, as well as delicate penciled graffiti, so cleaning it will be a complicated task. We're looking forward to seeing the results.

Thank you for your interest and support! Below are more new photographs of artwork from Lisa's collection. 

     We're delighted to announce that Sarah Rosenthal has joined the Brewton Foundation's Board of Directors.

     Sarah expects to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business in June 2023. She received a Summit Academic Scholarship for all of her undergraduate academic years and plans to earn a Master of Science of Financial Analysis before building her career in financial management.

     While in high school, Sarah maintained a 4.0 GPA and was editor-in-chief of the school newspaper as a senior, freshman representative in Student Government, and president of the Drama Club for three years. As technical manager of the theatre department, she created and ran sound, lighting, and venue support for 25 events and three theater productions per academic year.

     Combining business sense and passion for the arts, Sarah researched a way to save her high school’s theater department when she was a sophomore. The school board announced that it would close the department and remove the position of drama teacher on April 30; by May 3 Sarah had gathered budget information and county property tax records in time to present a defense at the Board of Education’s public meeting. The theater program and teacher’s position were reinstated.
​
     In addition to her academic achievements, Sarah made ongoing sacrifices to help others during the first two years of the pandemic. She is an enthusiastic reader and enjoys cooking, hiking, and camping. Sarah’s character, work ethic, and sense of humor make her an ideal member of our board of directors, and we thank her for joining us.

     We're thrilled that 'Pataphysics Unrolled will be released in April 2022, thanks to editors Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor. The book's cover art is a detail from Jim Brewton's The Pataphysics Times (1964). 

     Among the illustrious and pataphysically-minded authors whose work is in the collection are two Brewton Foundation board members: Taylor and John Heon.

     Taylor's enthusiasm means the world to us; he first inspired our quest for Jim's artwork in 2008. A guiding light for the James E. Brewton Foundation, Taylor offers a lively essay, "Pataphysics in Philadelphia: The Strange Case of James E. Brewton," in 'Pataphysics Unrolled. (Color plates! Thanks to photographers Elena M. Bouvier and Vera Carbo.)

     Heon's guidance is always spot-on; his advice is essential to the Brewton Foundation. He mentions Jim in one of the footnotes to his essay, "Twisted Witz: Experiments in Psychopathology and Humor by Dr. Faustroll and His Pataphysical Progeny." It is the funniest footnote ever written. 
   
     Katie L. Price, a major force among those organizing the three-day conference, "Philadelphia à la Pataphysique" in 2014, worked tirelessly to bring 'Pataphysics Unrolled to fruition. We're grateful to her and Taylor for championing the manuscript over the course of several years.

     A number of the Brewton Foundation's projects have been interrupted by the pandemic, but we continue the work of researching, looking for artwork, and cataloguing. The April release of 'Pataphysics Unrolled is a wonderful chance to celebrate, and today is an opportunity to express our constant gratitude to our board members, collectors, relatives and supporters of the Brewton Foundation. And we're grateful to the founders, directors, and steering committee members of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium (PASC), whose support of the James E. Brewton Foundation has helped us in many ways. 

     So that's us: thrilled, thankful, honored, and looking forward to the April release of 'Pataphysics Unrolled!

     'Pataphysics Unrolled is published in Penn State University Press's "Refiguring Modernism" series, edited by Jonathan P. Eburne. 

We are delighted to share these images of Brewton works, professionally photographed by Vera Carbo. Many thanks to the owner of these works, and to Vera, for making them available.

Top row, from left:
Portrait of Asger Jorn. 1964, oils on canvas, 51.5" x 37.25" (including frame).
Solitary Penitent. n.d., oils on canvas.
Untitled self-portrait. n.d., oils on canvas.
The Key to Birmingham. 1964, metal construction with souvenir key, 12" x 12" (not including key).

Middle row, from left:
Untitled. n.d., oils on canvas.
Portrait of Barry. 1966, oils.
Untitled. n.d., oils on canvas.
Untitled. n.d., oils on canvas.

Bottom row, from left:
Untitled. n.d., oils on canvas.
Portrait of Marianne. 1965, oils.
Conie. n.d., oils on canvas.

In 2008, when I first began looking for Jim's artwork, I heard a great story from Dan Miller, his classmate at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Dan went on to teach at the Academy for (I think) more than 50 years, and is the subject of a documentary by John Thornton. Dan said "Jim's death diminished us all," and told me a story: One day Jim came in to school and said he'd heard he'd get more money under the G.I. Bill if he were married. "So he walked down the hall, asking every girl he saw to marry him. One of them said yes. So they were married." And, said Dan, "I assume he got more money." When I told the story to other friends of Jim's, one of the women said, "Jim asked me to marry him, too."--Emily ​

     We're thrilled to announce that John Heon has joined the Brewton Foundation's Board of Directors. 
     John holds a doctorate in English with a concentration in psychology and the history of science from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, the Dean’s Scholar Award, a Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, and the Penn Student Course Review’s “Hall of Fame Professor” designation. He has also taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Marquette University and has worked in the education department of the Phillips Collection.  
     His areas of scholarly interest include modern and postmodern literature and art, avant-garde comic aesthetics, Alfred Jarry and ’Pataphysics, the relationship between psychopathology and creativity, and the effects of science and technology on culture. He is a founding co-director of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium (www.pasc-arts.org), serves on the Advisory Board of the Penn pre-medical journal, “Synapse,” and has an educational and career consulting practice specializing in the psychological factors that affect academic and professional performance.
     John has been a champion of Jim Brewton's work since we began planning the ’Pataphysics conference in 2014, and we thank him for joining us.     

I've been updating the catalog of Jim's works since it was a list of only 14 known paintings and prints. That was in February 2008. Happily, today the works we've located--and the 44 documented paintings we still seek--take up a lot of pages. 

Just finished updating v.13, and creating a key to the works.