ROBERT DELFORD BROWN (1930–2009)

Robert Delford Brown, a painter, sculptor, performance artist, and avant-garde philosopher, was found dead on March 24, reports the New York Times’ Bruce Weber. Brown lived in Wilmington, where he had moved two or three years ago to prepare for a 2008 exhibition of his work at the Cameron Art Museum there. He was a central figure in the anarchic New York art scene of the early 1960s, where he instigated and participated in happenings. His raw materials included buildings, pornographic photos, and even meat carcasses. He often performed in the persona of a religious leader, but dressed in a clown suit with a red nose and antennas hung with ripe bananas.

Brown’s religion was one of his own creation: the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. The church was jokey, but not a joke. It had a deity, called Who, to answer the mysterious questions of the universe. It had a philosophy, known as Pharblongence, an Anglicized skewing of the Yiddish word farblonjet_, meaning “confused.” And in 1967, the church got a home, a former New York City branch library building at 251 West Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village, built in 1887 and designed by the Beaux-Arts architect Richard Morris Hunt. Brown hired the modernist architect Paul Rudolph to redesign the entrance and the interior, creating a purposeful clash between the old and the new that Brown called “the Great Building Crack-Up.” He lived in the building until 1997, staging art exhibitions and Happenings there.