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Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
FREDERICK J. BROWN (1945 - 2012) Father Forgive Them.
Watercolor and pencil on wove paper, 1988. 495x368 mm; 19 1/2x14 1/2 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right recto. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "For Howard thanks a million and God bless. Best of Luck !" in pencil, on the frame back.
Provenance: gift from the artist, private collection, New York.
Frederick J. Brown was a Chicago-born, New York-based artist who is known best for his expressive, figurative painting of the 1980s. He was raised near the steel mills on Chicago's Southside and was exposed to the blues through musicians in the neighborhood such as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Memphis Slim. In 1970, Brown moved to New York and began to collaborate on multi-media projects with other artists including jazz musicians. During the 1980s, he focused much of his work on creating portraits of jazz and blues musicians, including popular artists such as Ornette Coleman, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Lionel Hampton in addition to less well-known jazz and blues artists.
In 1988, Brown became the first artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of the Chinese Revolution at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. A touring retrospective of his work, Brown: Portraits in Jazz, Blues, and Other Icons, originated at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City in 2002. Today, his paintings are found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
