Joe Brotherton is a man of diverse talents. His career includes theater, fine arts, and opera. Born in the rough community of Bozeman, Montana in 1918, Joe was given the chance to experience life on the plains and in the mountains. In the wilderness outdoors, Joe fostered his imagination by riding his horse, Baldy, using a bridle that once belonged to Buffalo Bill. Other days were spent at the home of Charlie Russell's widow, Nancy, whom he met through his grass-cutting partner, a Blackfeet Indian called Joe Long Boy. Though Joe's childhood circumstances were quite difficult, he eventually moved to Seattle to attend college at the University of Washington. Here, he focused on his first passion, journalism; however, college allowed him to dabble in other interests such as theatre and performance. It was also in Seattle, and La Conner, Washington where he lived after service in WWII, that he added painting to his work as a writer, and met other painters such as Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey.

Moving to San Francisco in 1948, he immediately pursued an active career in theatre, opera, and fine arts. Known principally as an actor and painter, Brotherton was a leading player with the Actor’s Workshop until its move to New York’s Beaumont Theatre. As Ben Hubbard in the Playhouse Reperatory production to ‘The Little Foxes’ at the North Point Theatre, he acted a principal role in one of the City’s longest running theatre engagements at the time. On Bay Area TV, Brotherton acted as emcee for two programs sponsored by the S. F. Museum of Modern Art, ‘Discovery’ and ‘Art in Your Life’ and performed as actor or narrator for many productions on Public Radio station, KQED. Adding yet another serious artistic endeavor to his repertoire, Joe also sang bass in the chorus of the San Francisco Opera, and was an understudy for certain roles. And he continued to paint.

It was another burgeoning interest, the world of Asian Art, that accompanied Joe from the Northwest, which would cause the serendipitous event of utmost influence on his painting, and it is best described in his own words, excerpted from his online interview with Paul Karlstrom for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art:

“…when I came to San Francisco I kept on working at painting. But what really transformed my work happened this way: One evening I was walking home from some place -- and here was a plaque on the side of a building on Bush Street, “American Academy of Asian Studies.” So, I walked upstairs and met this sort of slender gent who was very affable and forthcoming. His name was Alan Watts and at that time he was sort of headmaster or curator of this organization, The American Academy of Asian Studies. I got quite well acquainted with Alan Watts and gave some very sparsely attended lectures on Asian art at his Academy.

One night he called up and said, “Joe, I’m terribly sorry to do this to you but I have this Zen Abbott in my office here in full canonical fig and he insists that he wants to teach calligraphy at the Academy here. Starting here. Tonight. So what am I going to do? Could you come over?” So I bustled over to the Academy and here was this rather brusque, bald-headed, bullet-headed Japanese man in the robes of a Buddhist abbott. His name was Hodo Tobase, apparently in Japan a famous calligrapher because the seal that he used proclaimed him to be Kobo Daishi number 54 or 56. Daishi was the ninth century father of Japanese calligraphy and any calligrapher entitled to use this name on the seal that he puts on his paintings has to be a very formidable calligrapher indeed. So we started.

Alan had dragooned several other people to attend, including interestingly enough Gordon Onslow-Ford to come to class every Monday night at the Academy and study Japanese calligraphy with Reverend Tobase. And he was fantastic. He was a superb teacher. He would work very hard composing these sort of Zen homilies, that would be the week’s study. He would write a profound statement in four or five Japanese characters which would translate into something like “Daily Life is Important”, or another one that I remember affectionately was, “Toss Out the Short, Keep the Long”. Then we would write these statements with a big broad brush.

He would give us each a sheet of good “rice” paper for our practice writing. Then and he would come around and if you weren’t holding the brush right he’d jerk it out of your hand. Take the thing away from you entirely. He’d use a fat red brush to correct everything you’d written and I loved it. To me, it was so liberating because I wasn’t using a pencil between my thumb and forefinger anymore, I was using the lively brush, held six or eight inches above the paper, held in sort of like the way you’d grip a chopstick, and using full-arm, the complete apparatus of the body to make the stroke.

In other words, the stroke started in the shoulder and not in the wrist -- there wasn’t any question of a supported wrist. The only reason I mention this, in the two years I studied with Tobase I think my work as a painter was transformed. This not only gave you a feeling of freedom in drawing but the calligraphy itself had an organizing effect, because the school of calligraphy that he taught – I’m not sure this is typical of all schools of calligraphy – composed every character in a nine section square. No matter how many strokes there were in the character you were writing, it had to lie comfortably within that nine cube format . . .”

Thus by the 1960’s, the title line of an Alfred Frankenstein review of Joe’s work in the San Francisco Chronicle was, “A Western Oriental Artist.” The grounding in calligraphy and the Japanese manner of brush painting, along with a serious study of Asian Art, were a source for thematic development and experimentation with form and style from simple spare ink sketches of North Beach coffee house bohemia, to elaborately mounted scrolls and screens translating northwest locals such as the Olympic Rain Forrest, to architecturally detailed descriptions in color of Venice, Florence, Rome, San Francisco, Kyoto and other cities. Further demonstrating his sense of freedom and receptivity to the possibilities inherent in these forms, was the example of a series of 16 paintings exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum. Noticing the patterns on a wet porch of drift planks at Hartstene Island, Washington, Joe devised a method using tempera and Chinese ink on special papers laid down on the wood and was thus able to achieve interesting textural effects over which he could paint, i.e., the goose in his sublime, “Canada Honker.” Many of these were then mounted as panels and folding screens.

Brotherton’s study of Asian Art continued among a relatively small group in San Francisco at the time, of fellow collectors and enthusiasts that met informally for discussion, sharing recently acquired pieces, and participating in lectures. Eventually they formed The Society for Asian Art, which, realizing that there was no major Asian Art collection in San Francisco, soon set their sites on obtaining one. Arduous task, but the result in short: The Avery Brundage Collection came to San Francisco, forming the foundation of the City’s Asian Art Museum, a coup in which Brotherton played no small part. Activity in this circle led to another chance encounter with far reaching consequences for Joe. He received a call from Carlton Heymann, a member of the Society who was also a customs appraiser for the Port of San Francisco. There was a technical problem of some sort regarding a gentleman in his office who had arrived with some astounding Japanese paintings. Joe met them at the office, matters were straightened out, and a lasting friendship began with one Harry Packard, who was the leading dealer of Japanese Art at the time, and one of its foremost collectors. Years later the irascible Packard would allow Brotherton, to negotiate the sale of the Packard Collection to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art for $5.1 million. They built two homes in the Ohara district of rural Kyoto, lived there from 1983 with their wives, lecturing, collecting, Joe painting, including many local scenes, for over ten years until a few years after Packard’s death in 1991. Thereafter, Joe and his wife, Nam Kyon Hye, resided for a brief time in her hometown of Seoul, Korea, returning to San Francisco in 1999, where he continues to work, and write his memoirs.

Surveying such a long and productive life in the arts, one notices that its longevity coupled with an absence of almost 17 years while living overseas has to some extent eclipsed knowledge of his work as a painter. In fact, all but two of the shows in the list below were prior to his life in Japan.

Collections:

• Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts
• Standard Oil Company
• Bank of America
• Crown Zellerbach Corporation
• Wells Fargo Bank
• Seattle Art Museum
• Pacific National Bank
• Cambridge University
• Sunset Magazine
• Maxine Hong Kingston
• Various Private Collections

Television Programs

• "City Planning, Architecture and the Arts" (Six programs) – sponsored by San Francisco Museum of Art. (KRON-4)
• "Art in your Life" (13 programs) – Script adviser and moderator on all programs. Interviewed artists, critics, and resource persons. (KRON-4)
• "Discover" (13 programs) – Script adviser and moderator on all programs. (KRON-4)
• "Mask of Terror" – (Half-hour taped for NET) Wrote and narrated survey and description of archaic Chinese bronzes in Brundage Foundation. (KQED-9)
• "The Homeless Treasure" – (Half-hour film) Described ad-lib on camera, 10 objects from Brundage Foundation; interviewed Mr. Brundage. (KPIX-5)

The Smithsonian Archives of American Art web site includes the text of an Interview with Joe Brotherton

Return to Joe Brotherton: Western Art