Smithsonian to launch International Frederick Brown Exhibition

But Beautiful ... Portraits of Jazz: Music by Masters, Paintings by Frederick Brown, a major international exhibition organized by the National Portrait Gallery will travel Europe and Asia beginning Summer 2007.

Frederick Brown with President
Clinton at the unveiling of Clinton's
portrait, by Brown, New York, 2002.

The Exhibition centers around seventy vivid expressionist portraits by Frederick Brown of legendary stars like Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Jimi Hendrix. Brown, an African American, is one of America's foremost artists; as his bold brush and tropical colors indicate, his mentors included Willem de Kooning and Romare Bearden. Brown's work forms part of the collections of major Museums: the Metropolitan Museum (NY), the National Portrait Gallery and African-American Museum of Art (DC), and the Kemper Museum (Kansas City). Among his private collectors are former President Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But Beautiful ... unfolds a triumphant romance of how marginalized people overcame adversity in their native land to invent daring new sounds that have enchanted the world. The portraits, whose piercing eyes seem to follow viewers as they pass, capture the dynamics of pride and pain, of artistic affirmation and social discrimination, which powered the individuals who created America's greatest art form, jazz and the blues. The Exhibition will celebrate their triumph by presenting Brown's paintings as the focus of an ongoing festival which is designed to be a multimedia blockbuster "experience".