James Brinsfield standing in front of “FBI Jesus” (2012) in his spring 2014 exhibition at Haw Contemporary. (courtesy of Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art)
A restlessly inventive painter, committed to abstraction through an illustrious career spanning more than four decades
James Brinsfield, one of Kansas City’s leading abstract painters, died Sept. 21, 2024, at the age of 77, with his partner Alice Thorson at his side. The cause of death was cancer.
Brinsfield’s illustrious career spanned more than four decades, beginning in Chicago in the early 1980s, continuing in Washington, D.C., where he lived from 1986 to 1991, and flourishing in Kansas City, where he settled in the latter year. He had approximately 20 solo shows in those cities as well as in Duluth, Minnesota, at the Joseph Nease Gallery, which through December is displaying 12 small paintings on paper he made this past spring. In 2011-12, the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in Saint Joseph, Missouri, presented a survey of Brinsfield’s paintings from 2007 to 2011. His work was featured in dozens of group exhibitions, both in commercial galleries, nonprofit art spaces, and museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Milwaukee Art Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.
Brinsfield’s art garnered reviews in Art in America, New Art Examiner, Art Papers, the Washington Post and the Kansas City Star, among other publications, and entered the permanent collections of the Rockford (Illinois) Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as numerous private and corporate collections. In 1997, he was the first Kansas City painter to receive a Charlotte Street Fund grant.
Brinsfield was also a writer, curator and teacher. He wrote music reviews for Downbeat, book reviews for New Art Examiner, and articles on music and art for the Kansas City Star and KC Studio. He curated exhibitions of Kansas City artists and taught as a lecturer at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1998 to 2016. “Through exhibits, writing, teaching, and his own studio practice, he was a major force and influence within our artist community,” said Bruce Hartman, founding executive director and chief curator, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (retired).
Born Feb. 4, 1947, in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, Brinsfield later represented himself as having been born in 1949 in Chicago, the city that launched his artistic career. After studying art at the University of Illinois Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid-1970s, he made brooding, gesturally executed Neo-Expressionist drawings and paintings featuring abstracted human, animal and plant motifs. In a 1989 review, critic Rex Weil described Brinsfield’s work as picking up “figurative abstraction where Pollock and De Kooning left it in the early 1950s.” Brinsfield abandoned figuration in the 1990s but Abstract Expressionist gestural painting remained his artistic touchstone.
During the first half of the 1990s, Brinsfield painted in oil, enamel and amber varnish on paper in a predominantly white, black and brown palette, rendering organic shapes in ambiguous melting spaces, overlain by elegantly drawn looping lines (e.g., “Transit,” 1993, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art). Brinsfield expressed his “love/hate relationship with Abstract Expressionism” and its “loaded male signifiers” in paintings such as “Your Average Bisexual” (1995), with its dangling phallic/breast shape suspended over a field of green enamel and covered by a tangle of curving wiry black lines. Below, two phallic white shapes thrust upward against a black ground, overlapping unruly white curvilinear patterns suggesting decorative metalwork.
Restless and versatile, Brinsfield frequently reinvented his art and experimented with new materials and techniques. He drew inspiration from past modernist art, the built environment, history and current events, and his personal passions such as jazz and blues, mid-20th-century modern design and stylish cars. He sometimes made autonomous abstract paintings — paintings about painting — but he routinely used abstraction to convey content through visual metaphors. He also sometimes adopted a postmodern approach that critiqued or reworked the history of modernist abstraction. This is seen, for example, in late 1990s paintings that riff on the abstract modernist grid of artists like Mondrian but reject its geometric tightness and flatness. Instead, in paintings like “Hubbub” (1998), Brinsfield presented off-kilter, rickety configurations of loosely painted horizontal and vertical black bands, seeking to “harness the idea of the grid and [the Abstract Expressionist] gesture.”
Between 1999 and 2005, Brinsfield abandoned paint and brushes for tape, cut paper and magic marker, seeking to “relay visual information” in a diagrammatic fashion that could be read like “the printed page, a graph, or a map.” However, he ultimately felt constrained by this mode and picked up the brush again, attaining a new level of confidence and expressive vigor in his large paintings of the late 2000s.
Combining spontaneous painterly gestures with carefully delineated shapes, many of these compositions feature white backgrounds surrounding a central dark zone — the abstracted representation of a cave, with all its metaphorical associations. Rimming the cave in “No Ticket, No Ride” (2007) are candy-colored lozenges that guide the eye across the composition. Painted in oil over enamel, they have cracked surfaces resulting from the paints’ different drying times — an effect Brinsfield discovered accidentally and then cultivated. He identified the black hook shapes entering from the lower center and upper right as the Nike Swoosh — a commercial symbol playfully standing in for the Abstract Expressionist gesture.
Brinsfield continued his critical engagement with Abstract Expressionism in the early 2010s using a new technique: Rather than painting directly, he methodically transferred his colors to the canvas from sheets of watercolor paper loosely covered with thick patches of oil paint. The resulting all-over abstractions (e.g., “FBI Jesus,” 2012) had a quality of “psychological distance” — a detachment from the emotional urgency of the original Abstract Expressionists. “I’m never really ‘in’ the painting the way Pollock and his generation were,” said Brinsfield; “rather [making the painting] feels more like a task… with a beginning, middle, and end. What may look like emotion is a break with emotion… a succession of facades.”
In the later 2010s, Brinsfield conveyed concerns over the social and political polarization in the United States through abstraction. In “Long Division” (2017), a tree-trunk-like band straddles two areas in the lower third of the canvas featuring different colors and paint application — thick, crusty blue, black and white at the left, thinly brushed black, red and gray at the right, suggesting a political allegory. In a subsequent group of paintings, shown in the Nerman’s “Anxious Abstraction” exhibition (2018), Brinsfield reprised his oil-over-enamel technique to create map-like terrains with black paint breaking through a white surface in a fissured pattern he called “a metaphor for social disintegration.”
Transcending such anxiety, the last large paintings that Brinsfield made in the early 2020s surge with pure creative energy disciplined by the artist’s mastery of technique, materials, form and design. “Beppo” (2021) and “UFO” (2022), with their luminous white grounds and bold architecture of black lines and bands traversing large irregular shapes of brilliant color and agitated impastos, reverberate with echoes of Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann and the late work of Joan Mitchell, yet are unmistakably personal expressions. Totally contemporary in sensibility, they extend the energies of and hold their own with the classic works of the Abstract Expressionists. They are James Brinsfield’s final inspired declaration of his love of painting for painting itself — and a joyous affirmation of life.
