Robert Brokl

Robert Brokl (born 1948) is an American visual artist and activist based in the Bay Area, known for expressive woodblock printmaking and painting that has focused on the figure, landscape and travel for subject matter. His visual language combines the influences of German Expressionism, Japanese woodblock printing and the Bay Area Figurative Movement with a loosely autobiographical, Romantic interest in representing authentic personal experience, inner states and nature. Critics and curators characterize his style by its graphic line, expressive gestural brushwork, tactile surfaces and sensitivity to color, mood and light.

Robert Brokl, Figures on a Bridge (after Hiroshige), woodblock print, 24" x 38”, 1987. Brokl's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), Tokyo Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, International Biennial of Woodcut and Wood-Engraving (Banská Bystrica), San Jose Museum of Art and Monterey Museum of Art. His art belongs to public collections including the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts (FAMSF), the Library of Congress, Oakland Museum and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, among others.

In addition to making art, Brokl has taught, curated shows, and been an activist in the Bay Area for several decades, focusing especially on gay rights and historic preservation in Oakland. He lives and works in North Oakland with his spouse, Alfred Crofts.

Early life and career Robert Brokl was born in 1948 in Marshfield, Wisconsin to Sylvester Brokl, a farmer and construction worker, and Ruth (Ware) Brokl, a factory worker and nurse's aide.

In 1974, Brokl returned to art, taking classes at Laney College in Oakland and exhibiting by 1976. From 1981–3, Brokl served as vice-president and president of the California Society of Printmakers (CSP) and helped organize exhibitions and catalogues, including "Contemporary California Prints" (1982) and "Cutting Edge" (1987), during a time of resurgent interest in printmaking. His first show in 1983 at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery run by Marian Parmenter began a longstanding exhibition history there that continued until the gallery's closing in 2021. In later decades, Brokl has appeared in group shows at the National Printmaking Symposium (Drake University), Kala Institute, Triton Museum of Art and Kyoto City Museum, and featured exhibitions at the Oakland Museum, Fresno Art Museum, de Young Museum, and Thoreau Center for Sustainability. of his figurative work and leisurely, off-guard nudes (e.g., Self-Portrait with Pink Sky and Al and Ludwig – Russian River, both 1980). which intertwines forms of landscape, foliage, water and sky).

Mary Davis MacNaughton and others describe Brokl's style as combining traditional Ukiyo-e subject matter and landscape views with the bold graphic line of German Expressionist woodcuts; Oakland Museum curator Harvey Jones writes that the resulting painterly prints (e.g., Willow Bridge, 1989, FAMSF Collection ) display "gestural effects and lively tactile surfaces more often associated with contemporary oil painting."

Brokl's later printmaking—like his painting—explores travel, animals and pets, and art itself and often combines woodblock printing, drawing, collage, painting and stencils (e.g., 9 Roosters, 2004; Weller Frog and Albers Painting, 2011; or David, 1992).

Robert Brokl, Al and Ludwig--Russian River, oil on canvas, 85.5" x 72", 1980. Painting and drawing Brokl's oil paintings and prints were featured in the five-person exhibition "Contemporary Romanticism" (California State University, Hayward, 1987), which sought to counter the era's "Bad Painting" movement with work that merged drama with skill and feeling with form. Other reviewers compare that work and others like Figures on a Bridge and Crow (1990) to the Romantic scenes of Friedrich and Ryder, the impressionistic style of Arts and Crafts painter Arthur Mathews, or pointillism. Artweek critic Mark Van Proyen noted Brokl's "interest in light as a transfiguring pictorial element" in moody, "unpopulated interiors and landscapes that … capture a nocturnal mood of moonlit quietude."

His 2022 show at the Piedmont Center for the Arts, "What I’ve Been up To," consisted of landscape-themed paintings, drawings, and prints that were described as a visual chronicle of an era of savage wildfires, severe drought, and rapid climate change in California. Brokl's exhibition at the Monterey Museum of Art in 2024 featured his "Nature Morte" (still life) paintings and prints. These works juxtapose well-known images, objects and ephemera in shallow spaces and highlight his artistic influences, such as of Bay Area Figurative movement. In the 1970s, he and Crofts worked as members of the Committee for a Berkeley Human Rights Law for Gay People for passage of Berkeley's gay rights ordinance (approved, 1978); its introduction spurred passage of similar legislation in San Francisco that year through efforts led by Harvey Milk and was considered the strongest such measure in the U.S. at the time. The group successfully placed the building on the National Register of Historic Places, over the City's objections, and sued the City in federal court for "demolition by neglect" in 1992. The nine-acre Merritt site was eventually rehabilitated for use as UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, the North Oakland Senior Center, and a public park and housing; NOVA also successfully placed four Carnegie Libraries in the city on the National Register, bolstering successful bond measures for their refurbishment. Among the landmarks rescued were the Art Deco Fox Oakland Theater, which reopened in 2009 after a $75 million restoration; the Floral Depot building; a Sears Roebuck building converted into lofts; and the Cox Cadillac Building, converted into a Whole Foods. He also joined efforts by The League for the Protection of Oakland’s Architectural and Historic Resources to save a 1923 Montgomery Ward & Company distribution center in the Fruitvale District, despite its listing on the National Register of Historic Places; the building was demolished in 2001.

Related to his activism, Brokl has been a longtime contributor to the Berkeley Daily Planet and Oakland Heritage Alliance News; his articles are available in the archives of both and at Muck Rack.com.

Arts writing and advocacy Brokl's arts writing has appeared in northern California publications including Square Cylinder and the Bay Area Reporter. His art reviews for the latter publication were honored by the California News Publishers Association. He has advocated through essays, lectures and curatorial efforts for the recognition of several under-appreciated artists and movements, including David Park and the Bay Area Figurative Movement, printer and painter Augusta Rathbone (1897–1990), As executors of Brewer's estate, Brokl and Crofts have donated his materials and many of his works to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, and the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries in Los Angeles, respectively.

Brokl has also taught art at University of California, Davis and San Francisco State University. GLBT Historical Society, Library of Congress,