Several short statements on a website dedicated to Robert Broderson, a figurative painter, belie his inclination to depict gloomy looking individuals. For example: “And what does my work express? A little joy, a lot of pain, and many unanswered questions.” And: “Anything I say about my own work to heighten your awareness will naturally be biased and perhaps blind, since I cannot stand outside either my paintings or myself.”
Robert Maurice Broderson was born in West Haven, Connecticut. While serving in the United States Air Force between 1942 and 1945 he went to Africa, Sicily, England, and France. Using the GI Bill, in 1947, at the age of twenty-seven, Broderson enrolled as a freshman at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The following year he took up painting. Following graduation, he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1952 at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He studied with Mauricio Lasanky, a noted educator and printmaker.
Returning to Durham, he began a teaching career at his alma mater from 1957 to 1964. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 for painting, the same year Peter Grippe received one to work in sculpture. During the summer of 1967 Broderson taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where in the 1950s both David Driskell and Sigmund Abeles had been students. The next academic year (1967/1968) Broderson was an instructor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, before giving up teaching to travel extensively and paint.
The subjects of Broderson paintings are typically pairs or small groups of figures placed against spare backgrounds and characterized by pale, moon-shaped faces. He admits that the reaction to them has been mixed: “My work has engendered both hostility and indifference, anger and fear. It has been described, variously, as grotesque, unhappy, depressing, prophesying doom, and impossible to live with. Seldom has it been seen as tender, compassionate, humorous or beautiful, and never, as I see it, understood.”