Download PDF scan of original article

Though he is only minimally active as an artist today, Robert Brown was one of the most inventive and refreshing artists working in photography in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Perhaps his critical career error was to allow himself to be identified as a photographer rather than as a Conceptual artist, for his work had an intellectual purity and complexity equal to much contemporaneous work of the early, now famous, conceptualists.

Much of the early work has been destroyed over the years, but documentation of a 1969 installation shows his interest in scale, repetition and transcription. A fifty-four foot strip printed with hand-colored photographs of daisies presented, at first glance, a minimal yellow line, at eye level, across a white field. Only on close examination did the line resolve into a vast “field” of a different sort.

In the early seventies Brown began a series of full-scale, illusionistic copies of walls and garage doors, which led to 1:1 color transcriptions of mundane building details—mail slots, ventilator covers, windows and the like. Cinder Block Wall was first shown as Cinder Block Room at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in 1974. Though it was produced after Brown moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, it is an extension of ideas developed earlier and is, according to the artist, among the only early works to survive a studio flood.