Red 02 (Davis (A Mysterious Picture))

Adolph Brownstein, born to Olga Brownstein as the result of the young Jewish woman's rape by Nazi soldiers was named, in an act of hope and defiance, after the assailants' cruel leader and became one of the most important, if not widely known, artists of the late twentieth century. His mother, who remained incredibly stalwart throughout her ordeal, fled to stay with family in America before she or her unborn son could be taken to the concentration camps. In February of 1939, Adolph Brownstein was born in St. Vincent Charity Hospital of Cleveland, Ohio and raised in the nearby home of his mother's aunt Zelda. Olga Brownstein refused to acknowledge any power or connotation in Hitler's first name and was steadfast in her belief that her son would become a heroic counter example, a persona that would outshine the villainous fascist. And though her son didn't live up to her lofty expectations, he did create one of the most confounding and exquisite pieces of art in recent history. Adolph Brownstein's most famous painting, "Davis" has become and object of fascination, confusion and spirited debate.
Although his works were generally admired by critics during his lifetime, Brownstein's style, a fusion of surrealist influences and more populist psychedelic art in step with the culture of the day, never really caught on with the public. "Davis," with its grotesque triad of figures set against a swirling sea of colorful and enigmatic words is undoubtedly Brownstein's best known work, not merely because of the content of the painting, but also because of the story the piece is haplessly attached to. It is impossible to view "Davis" objectively as, tragically, the artist committed suicide mere hours after he'd completed the work. That fact is irreversibly tied up with the painting, though it would have been a haunting image even without being intertwined with its maker's death.
The painting, of course, focuses on three personages arranged in a triangle. Two of the characters, a starkly and classically rendered hooded skeletal presence on the left and a bloody, bludgeoned Fifties funny page father on the right, occupy the lower two corners of the canvas. The third figure, a massive, multi-headed creature, each face illustrated in a conscientiously different style, seems to represent a sort of supremely evil being, and it looms ominously over the entire upper portion of the work. Behind them, in LSD inspired brilliant colors and giant fisheye bloated letters are the words, "Davis, Davis, Davis... why do you haunt me? Why do your dead eyes taunt me, and hold their gaze right on me?" Disturbingly, hidden in the swirls and curlicues of the words are very tiny, very intricate drawings of bodies in various states of decay. And scripted around the border of the work, in fancy gold leaf, are the words "my hell is..." repeated ad nauseum.
Brownstein's own tribulations, missteps and feelings of failure as a father are well documented, and many critics have found obvious parallels between the artist and the man in the lower right hand corner of the painting. In 1968, two months before "Davis" was completed and Brownstein hanged himself, Adolph's wife, Gretchen, called the Cleveland police when her husband somewhat viciously beat their seven year old son, Otto. By Adolph Brownstein's own teary admission, he lost control when his young son inadvertently ruined two of the painter's unfinished works. Charges against Brownstein were ultimately greatly reduced via plea bargain, but while being interrogated for the crime, Brownstein was severely beaten by Detective Martin Randall, one of the officers assigned to the Brownstein case. The injuries the artist received were severe and, as told by Gretchen days after Adolph's death, administered with the promise of more beatings to follow. In addition to the fear brought down upon him by that incensed officer of the law, Brownstein's name was dragged through the mud as newspaper articles furiously appeared, all portraying him as a merciless child abuser coddled by a legal system too enamored of Brownstein's wealth and fairly prominent community standing to truly act with justice. Brownstein was, by nearly all accounts, crushed and humiliated by the press and without exception, Brownstein's backers and patrons abandoned him. Two large galleries in Ohio refused to showcase his art. So while there was little in the way of legal ramifications, Brownstein did not avoid consequence entirely. And while the guilt over his beating of his only child may have played a role, the fear of continued physical reprisal from Detective Randall and the bad press garnered in the face of the plea bargain are still generally considered the prime motivations for Brownstein's suicide. The father figure's gorily painted injuries are often assumed to mimic those that Brownstein received in retaliation for the ones he'd given to his son... while the decision to cast that character in the guise of a comic strip protagonist was seemingly born from the role newspapers played in the artist's death.
Brownstein's first dedicated biographer (coincidentally named Harland Davis) wasn't the first to suggest that "Davis" was an elaborate suicide note, but he probably drafted the longest exposition on the topic. And by Davis' account, Brownstein is represented not just in the battered father figure, but in all three of the paintings' characters.
The evil, many-headed menace above the blatant Brownstein surrogate, according to the biographer, was not a representation of outward malice or the imposing evils of society (as inferred by noted art historian Grant Weiss), but was, in Davis' mind, Brownstein's own self-loathing and perceived character flaws given a sacrilegious and utterly terrifying form. Davis goes on to say that the reasons for the artist's suicide can be read, like a list, in the faces of the overarching monster. The Renaissance style head of Satan is supposedly there as evidence of Brownstein's failure as a pious Jew, an internal Adversary claiming him from the inside out. The woodcut printed dragon's head next to Satan's is perhaps an admission of the draconian wrath that Brownstein struggled to keep under control. The tortured expression of the classically inspired face of Prometheus is indicative of the artist's need to be punished for his actions, the way Prometheus was punished for giving fire to the nascent human race. The next of the creature's heads, a malevolently grinning and severely burnt jester painted with unsettlingly photorealistic features, is there to lament what a fool was made of Brownstein by the newsmen, and how quickly his beloved society was there to burn him in effigy. And finally, in a loving recreation of a Universal movie poster pose, is the Wolfman's head, now snarling and stained with blood and holding, in its fangs, the grisly severed arm of a baby. The meaning behind that, in Davis' opinion, is quite clear: Brownstein obviously felt like a monster for the suffering he'd inflicted upon his son.
The reason for the inclusion of the final figure, the robed skeleton, is even less open to interpretation. This is certainly Death, Brownstein's own suicidal impulse come to take him while overseen by the monstrous thing created by the artist's fears and flaws. It points menacingly at the newsprint father, and if you look very closely you can see the red glint of metallic paint gleaming in the hollow sockets of the cruel Reaper's skull.
Not everyone believes in Harland Davis' pat explanations behind the painting's imagery, though. Many of Brownstein's detractors claim that, in crafting a mythology around the artist as a tragic figure, Davis handily exonerates him from his crimes, not just of harming of his child, but also of a suicide they claim was an act of cowardice, not some sort of honorable self-execution. In a passionate essay on the subject, Clarence Matine, an opponent of Davis' somewhat aggrandizing Brownstein biography, takes Davis to task for acquitting Brownstein of his crimes by giving the artist, in retrospect, such a firm command over his own flaws. Matine says that "in stating with such unwarranted authority the guilt that Brownstein felt in regards to his actions (represented especially in those demonized heads of the Devil, the Dragon, Prometheus and the Wolf), [Davis] allows Brownstein to atone for his misdeeds, where in reality, the man merely fled them as quickly as he could." Matine goes on to say that there's no real evidence that the painting is anything more than another of Brownstein's typical surrealist-collage works, and that "meaning has been injected into the work because of a coincidence of timing." It's very true that "Davis" doesn't vary from Brownstein's other work considerably. He used newsprint and comic characters frequently in his other paintings, and monstrous or horrific figures were not uncommon. Harland Davis' biography also omits any reasoning behind the text included in "Davis." While some of the words convey a fairly tortured mindset, there is, frustratingly, no context to put it in. Worst of all, the subject of the background poetry is never once explained or justified by a single art critic. Harland Davis himself glosses over who or what the namesake of the painting is. Adolph Brownstein had a habit of including non sequiter text in his works, but that he would do so in a piece so otherwise intricately constructed seems unlikely. So is "Davis" really a suicide note, or just the last work of a man who happened to commit suicide upon its completion?
While there can never be any definitive answer on the subject (as the only authority has been dead for nearly forty years), new evidence has come out that might challenge both Harland Davis' and Clarence Matine's take on "Davis." While doing restoration on another Brownstein piece ("Cradle": a finely painted sparrow's skeleton laid over the words "Broken baby skull, you ain't got no friends at all, you just sit around the corner waiting, silent, for the alligator footsteps to walk by"), Bowling Green art collector Kerry Micha noticed what seemed to be an entirely different color palette jutting through a tiny damaged portion of paint near the center of the painting. Intrigued, Micha had the piece x-rayed. It was clear, then, that there was another work underneath the finished "Cradle." Using Bowling Green University imaging technology, art historians were able to discern a much smaller picture that had been created in the center of the canvas and wholly painted over. Disturbingly, the hidden picture is a sloppily rendered infant's head, crushed on the side, and captioned with the phrase (or epitaph), "Davis 1962-1962: Shame Shame Shame." This eerie combination suggested, to many (Kerry Micha included), that Davis was, indeed, a real person and, perhaps, had died as infant at Brownstein's hand.
Obviously, this discovery rekindled interest in "Davis" and what, if anything, the painting might mean. Micha suggested a scan to see whether or not "Davis" had any hidden pictures of its own. After struggling with clearances for months, Kerry Micha finally gained access to the work.
Underneath the dense layers of symbolism and text, Kerry Micha and the Bowling Green University team discovered two similar sloppy paintings. One was a near duplicate (even containing the same chilling epitaph) of the picture of Davis found under "Cradle." The second was a seeming portrait of his son, Otto, cradling a dead child and captioned with the words, "Otto, dear, if they ask: I did it all for you."
No birth or death certificate for a Davis Brownstein was ever located, but in a tucked off corner of Cleveland's Lakeview Cemetery, there is a small, nondescript headstone that only reads, "Shame Shame Shame."