Nighttime

Nighttime reflects Roger Brown’s distinctive style, with its flattened and cartoonish composition, geometric shapes, and silhouetted characters. The presence of the blonde woman hanging out of the shattered window at the bottom left turns the two citizens at the end of the otherwise abandoned street into suspects silhouetted underneath too-bright streetlights. The hint of a blue-clad man along the right edge of the painting alludes to the absence of police officers and adds to Brown’s visual reflection on his dour view of humanity.

Roger Brown was a prominent member of the Chicago Imagists, an iconoclastic group of artists who were similarly educated—mostly at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)—and influenced by art beyond the canon of Western art history. Born and raised in Alabama, Brown moved to Chicago in 1962 and earned a BFA and MFA from SAIC in 1968 and 1970. His bold paintings are influenced by a wide variety of sources and explore America in the postwar era.