ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 8, 1996 TAG: 9604090031
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: INDEPENDENCE
SOURCE: MARTHA WAGGONER ASSOCIATED PRESS
HIS FAMILY is trying to preserve artist Robert Broderson's work and renown
Carol Broderson kneels on the floor of her late husband's studio, going through portfolio after portfolio of paintings.
These are the works on sketch pad paper, newspaper and wallpaper. Some, from the 1950s, are yellowed and cracked at the edges.
On the walls around her, floor to ceiling, are oils on canvases and framed works on paper. Scores of smaller paintings are propped against the walls, stacked away in corners.
``This one needs to be preserved,'' she says, pointing to one that's almost in pieces as she carefully goes through a folder. ``There's beautiful stuff in here.''
The paintings were Robert Broderson's life. They remain his legacy.
Now his family - which includes two sons with Carol, four adult children and his first wife - must decide what to do with them. They can try to save them all, or pick and choose from among the best, letting others slowly disintegrate, victims of time and elements.
``I would like to say that we could save all of it, but if we don't do that very, very soon, it may not be possible,'' says Leonard Day, an art conservationist from High Point, N.C., who has worked on some Broderson paintings. ``We may soon have to be very deliberate and specific in the pieces we save.''
Strange, brooding people inhabit Broderson's canvases, often accompanied by birds, swans or unidentified, canine-looking critters. Frequently, there are ominous people in the background.
Broderson once said his work expresses ``a little joy, a lot of pain and many unanswered questions. If there is a specific message, it is this - we are intimately bound and ultimately alone.''
In a profession where fame usually is associated with death, Broderson was a rare breed - an artist recognized and honored during his life. In 1962, the Ford Foundation purchased Broderson paintings for the Whitney Museum. That same year, he received a citation and grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Around the same time, his work was part of an important, traveling show by the Museum of Modern Art called ``New Images of Man.'' It was one of the first exhibits of figurative work after a decade that gave prominence to abstraction.
In 1964, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
But he was dissatisfied, says Carol Broderson, who met her husband after the fame, when he was 59 years old and she was 29.
He quit teaching at Duke University in Durham - he was the first full-time artist to join Duke's art faculty - and left his family for a woman. What followed was a vagabond's life that included two brief marriages before he settled down with Carol in 1980.
``He had a restless urge to travel,'' says Vernon Pratt, an associate art professor at Duke who studied under Broderson. ``And Broderson really, I think, couldn't help living the romantic life of the artist.''
He paid a dear price for it emotionally, says Robin Partington, 41, one of Broderson's daughters. ``As an artist, he put his work first. He put his work before his personal life.''
Partington and her sister, Penne Lewis, 42, of Durham, N.C., recall a father who played guitar and piano, read poetry and chased them through the tunnels of Duke's gothic buildings.
They were 12 and 13 years old when their father left, walking down the sidewalk with a suitcase in his hand. When they saw him about a year later, he was no longer the professor in a suit. Instead, he was ``a full-fledged hippie with long hair and sandals,'' Lewis says.
Looking back, Lewis says she believes her father never was the same man after World War II. ``He was changed by all the horror he saw, but he never talked about it,'' she says.
Instead, he picked up a paint brush and painted his fears and anxieties.
His paintings appeal to psychiatrists, probably because they often portray conflict, says Keith Brodie, a former president of Duke who is now a psychiatry professor at the school.
``I think he manages to portray in these paintings a bit of the unconscious,'' says Brodie, who pushed Duke - unsuccessfully - to exhibit Broderson's work. ``His backgrounds contain figures that act out what the individual is experiencing.''
His paintings appeal because ``he has something to say and so many painters don't,'' says art collector Isabele Eaton of Chapel Hill, N.C., who with her husband owns 17 Broderson paintings.
Guilford College's art gallery also has several Broderson paintings and plans a show in the fall, says Terry Hammond, the gallery's director and curator.
For now, however, the majority of his canvases and works on paper remain in a shed and a studio perched high on a hill overlooking the New River. Carol Broderson sells some pieces, using the money to preserve the most important and most fragile works.
Her husband didn't make preservation any easier. The south windows in his studio let in harsh, damaging light. He painted so much that he sometimes didn't take time to apply a protective coat of varnish.
And because he couldn't afford to frame everything, he would attach the works on paper to the wall with thumbtacks and tape.
``He was crazy,'' Carol Broderson says. ``He'd nail holes in paintings.''
She and the rest of the family are hoping to find a grant that will help pay to save the works. And then they hope to interest a major museum in a retrospective to regain the recognition he once had.
``I believe his day will come back,'' Eaton says. ``Look around you. You're not going to see many people who paint like he does.''
LENGTH: Long : 112 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Robert Broderson as he painted himself. 2. Robertby CNBBroderson's widow, Carol Broderson, is surrounded by the artist's
work in his studio in Independence in Grayson County. color. 3.
Carol Broderson pulls out one of the many portfolios left by her
late husband. Robert Broderson once said his work expresses ``a
little joy, a lot of pain and many unanswered questions. If there is
a specific message, it is this - we are intimately bound and
ultimately alone.''