The great Brainard.

A new retrospective highlights the wit and wildness of the late artist Joe Brainard

After being forgotten for more than a decade, gay artist Joe Brainard (1942-1994) is finally being restored to his rightful place in the art pantheon with the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum's "Joe Brainard: A Retrospective," running through May 27. The eclectic Brainard's sense of humor and lighthearted touch come across in his decorative, campy, sensual work, now enjoying a much-deserved revival.

During his long career, Brainard was widely exhibited and well reviewed. Art critic and Warhol biographer Carter Ratcliff admired Brainard's "noted variety" in 1972, and in 1997, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter commented on the "metaphor and sensuality" of Brainard's style. The variety is breathtaking. Brainard hopped from style to style--from comics to decorative Madonnas to tattooed torsos--blurring the boundaries between high art and kitsch in a way that seems strikingly contemporary today.

The museum's senior curator Constance Lewallen, who organized the exhibit and its planned tour to Colorado, New York, and Nevada, says it is this contemporary quality that makes Brainard so compelling: "I was struck by how timely and how flesh the work looks. So many of the issues he was dealing with then are on the minds of artists today, such as decoration and appropriation. Look at the way he reinterpreted the comic book style." Unlike many artists, Brainard had an extraordinary range that defies categorization. As Lewallen notes, "There is no signature Brainard."

Kansas native Brainard's career took off not long after he moved to New York in 1960. By 1965 he had his first one-man show and was ensconced in a literary and artistic community that included his lover, Kenward Elmslie. In a phone interview, poet and librettist Elmslie described the time they met: "First time I laid eyes on him, it was love at first sight, on the Staten Island Ferry. I wanted to end up with him as my partner, mainstay, mate, whatever, and that's what happened for 31 years."

According to Elmslie, Brainard did not consider himself a "gay artist" but notes that "his quantum leap as artist happens to coincide with his sexual guy-guy coming-out--just maybe the guy-guy coming-out released this primal aesthetic energy. I know he energized me." Brainard's partnership with Elmslie included creative collaborations, wherein Elmslie supplied the words and Brainard the art. These collaborations extended to poet friends such as John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman in works including the very funny C Comics series and countless cover designs and illustrations for their poetry books.

Like other pop artists of the time, Brainard reinterpreted a cartoon character, Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, who Lewallen describes as "Brainard's alter ego." In his gender-bending hands, Nancy goes from being a perky schoolgirl to an ashtray with a cigarette stub in her mouth, a boy (she lifts up her skirt to show her penis), an interior decorator, and so on.

While not working with explicitly gay themes per se, his work does seem to draw on the gay old tradition of camp. One of his first shows featured Brainard's decorative Madonnas, which he bought in neighborhood botanicas and adorned with commercial products such as Prell shampoo. In "Good 'n Fruity Madonna" he juxtaposed Madonnas with Good 'n Fruity candy cartons, and he also used the Madonna image in repeating collages, with paint thrown on a la Jackson Pollock. Seeing them, one is reminded how ubiquitous this Madonna-as-decoration style has become, stamped on everything from mouse pads to refrigerator magnets, not for reasons of religious faith but just for good fun.

And Brainard's sense of fun seemed to infect everything. His recently reprinted memoir, I Remember, captures that sense of random delight in a list of seemingly arbitrary, often comical memories that all,begin with the phrase "I remember." Surely Joe Brainard would be gratified to see that he is remembered today.

Find more on the art and life of the late Joe Brainard at www.advocate.com

Warren writes about lesbian and gay issues for SFGate.com.