Joan Brown Seated in Studio 13 | Anderson Collection at Stanford University

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Joan Brown Seated in Studio 13

In 1958 Manuel Neri sketched this simple graphite and ink portrait. The nude figure, Joan Brown, casually sits on an undefined surface, looking off towards image right. Her left hand rests on her left thigh obscured by her right arm reaching across, elbow resting on her knee and right hand hanging loosely. She is rendered minimally, mostly through a dark smudgy background highlighting her silhouette. Joan’s face is in profile, facing right. Aside from a scratchy black mark like a comma that represents her eye, the rest of her face is only a simple outline with a bit of shading. Her nose is visible but there is nothing to imply her mouth, and her neck isn’t clearly defined.The image is offset to occupy mostly the top left of the twenty-five and a half by twenty-four inch beige paper.

Her hair is a mass of scratchy marks that fall behind her shoulders.

Her left arm and breast are visible as a grey contrast to a dark cloudy shadow behind her. There is space between her arm and chest beneath her armpit as she pushes out her shoulder, her left hand resting on her thigh behind her right arm.

Black lines define her right arm, which is the lightest part of her body. It is mostly the color of the paper with very little shading at the bicep. Her rib cage juts out below her shoulder. She rests her elbow on her right knee and a limp wrist lets her hand curl down with only three fingers visible.

Right below her thighs, the surface she is sitting on is only visible as light space below the edge of the dark background. Her right leg has some shading and a thin outline, but her feet and left leg are only a hint of shading and fade into the background.

The shadow right behind her is applied with frantic strokes, dense around her body but dissipating like a dark aura. Individual dabs of the graphite and ink scatter behind her on the left and to the right, forming a more continuous medium shade that curves outward like a bloom.

As the drawing is offset, the right and bottom thirds of the image are mostly blank except some errant smudges, one black dot near the bottom below her legs, and Manuel Neri’s signature near the bottom, right of center. The signature is three steep peaks of a cursive M followed by a horizontal scribble with a couple more peaks for the N.

Joan Brown

Neri met the painter Joan Brown at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1957, when both were taking a painting class with Elmer Bischoff, a central figure of the Bay Area Figurative movement. A romantic and artistic partnership ensued, and Brown became a frequent subject of Neri’s figure studies. His drawings and sculptures of Brown reveal an extraordinary sensitivity to the interconnected volumes of the body, and his intimacy with his model. We see this in the earliest drawing shown here: Brown is pictured sitting casually in a classroom, her right arm stretched fluidly across her body, her shoulders gently curved as she slumps forward.

By 1959 Neri and Brown were sharing a large studio on Mission Street near the Embarcadero in San Francisco, where Neri began making life-size sculptures like Joan Brown Seated. Neri shaped the original sculpture in plaster, an inexpensive material he liked for the speed and ease with which it could be worked and reworked. The surface of the figure is rich with the marks of the artist’s hand and tools. Here, coated in Neri’s signature white patina, this unique aluminum cast—Neri’s first metal casting—preserves the look and tactility of the plaster original in a medium meant to last.