The Broad Art Foundation’s Black Painting 1, 2002 is part of a series of dark works that muses on the connection between sex and death and demonstrates the complexity of Brown’s sources and concerns. A viewer can detect the hint of many references, notably Goya’s famous etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, 1782 and William Blake’s Jerusalem, 1820. However, Brown’s work is not easily reducible to any one forerunner and can be seen as a critique of these historical works. Unlike the ravished and intruded females of Blake and Fuseli, the painting presents a solitary male tortured by ambiguous if not evil spirits of the night. Goya’s bats and Fluseli’s horrible incubus become a cloud of fading flashes of white strokes, but it is ultimately uncertain whether the flashes come from an outside source or are produced by the man’s prone, orgasmic body.
