Byron Browne

(Yonkers, New York, June 26, 1907 - December 25, 1961, New York)Byron Browne was a painter, designer and sculptor born in Yonkers, New York in 1907. He died in 1961 in New York City a celebrated modernist. He studied at the National Academy of Design, NYC (1924-1928) and with Karfunkle, Aiken and Zorach. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists Group of 1938;American Artists Congress; Allied American Artists and the Yonkers Art Association. He won his first prize at the National Academy in 1928 and many other prizes followed. From 1933-1970, he was given over 60 solo exhibitions and his reputation grew by leaps and bounds. In 1927 Browne began to experiment with abstraction and he later destroyed all of his earlier representational canvases because he thought it was too old hat and tainted. During the mid-thirties he was a Works Project Administration (WPA) painter and he became extremely active in the American Abstract Artists Group. During the 1930s, he was painting in the Cubist style and by the 1940s he was painting in a biomorphic style influenced by Arp and Miro. From 1952-1961 Browne was active in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he combined both painting styles in a gestural manner in murals and he carved stone memorials. He was instructor of painting at the Arts Student's League (NYC) from 1948-1959 and taught Advanced Painting at New York University from 1959 until his death in 1961. Note: His birth name is George Byron Browne and many of his early works are signed in that manner.References: Who Was Who in American Art, vol. I, p. 475; New York City WPA Art, 14 (with illustrations); American Abstract Art, p. 178; Who's Who in American Art, 1940, 1947, 1959.Sources: Pierce Galleries Inc. piercegalleries.com Askart.comBYRON BROWNE WAS A CENTRAL FIGURE IN MANY OF THE ARTISTIC and political groups that flourished during the 1930s. He was an early member of the Artists' Union, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, and participated in the Artists' Congress until 1940, when political infighting prompted Browne and others to form the breakaway Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Browne's artistic training followed traditional lines. From 1925 to 1928, he studied at the National Academy of Design, where in his last year he won the prestigious Third Hallgarten Prize for a still-life composition. Yet before finishing his studies, Browne discovered the newly established Gallery of Living Art. There and through his friends John Graham and Arshile Gorky, he became fascinated with Picasso, Braque, Miro, and other modern masters. The mid 1930s were difficult financially for Browne.[1] His work was exhibited in a number of shows, but sales were few. Relief came when Burgoyne Diller began championing abstraction within the WPA's mural division. Browne completed abstract works for Studio D at radio station WNYC, the U.S. Passport Office in Rockefeller Center, the Chronic Disease Hospital, the Williamsburg Housing Project, and the 1939 World's Fair.[2] Although Browne destroyed his early academic work shortly after leaving the National Academy, he remained steadfast in his commitment to the value of tradition, and especially to the work of Ingres.[3] Browne believed, with his friend Gorky, that "Every artist has to have tradition. Without tradition art is no good. Having a tradition enables you to tackle new problems with authority, with solid footing."[4] Browne's stylistic excursions took many paths during the 1930s. His WNYC mural reflects the hard-edged Neo-plastic ideas of Diller, although a rougher Expressionism better suited his fascination for the primitive, mythical, and organic. A signer, with Harari and others, of the 1937 Art Front letter, which insisted that abstract art forms "are not separated from life," Browne admitted nature to his art---whether as an abstracted still life, a fully nonobjective canvas built from colors seen in nature, or in portraits and figure drawings executed with immaculate, Ingres-like finesse.[5] He advocated nature as the foundation for all art and had little use for the spiritual and mystical arguments promoted by Hilla Rebay at the Guggenheim Collection: "When I hear the words non-objective, intra-subjective, avant-garde and such trivialities, I run. There is only visible nature, visible to the eye or, visible by mechanical means, the telescope, microscope, etc."[6] Increasingly in the 1940s, Browne adopted an energetic, gestural style. Painterly brushstrokes and roughly textured surfaces amplify the primordial undercurrents posed by his symbolic and mythical themes. In 1945 Browne showed with Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Carl Holty, Romare Bearden, and Robert Motherwell at the newly opened Samuel Kootz Gallery. When Kootz suspended business for a year in 1948, Browne began showing at Grand Central Galleries. In 1950, he joined the faculty of the Art Students League, and in 1959 he began teaching advanced painting at New York University. The three works in the Frost collection, Abstract Collage (1933), Head (1938), and Chinese Dancer (1949), represent distinct phases in Browne's artistic career. The collage, created at a time when he was fascinated with Cubism, is a lyrical, delicately balanced work in which calligraphic line, imposed or incised, moves freely across the surface of the paper. The boldly colored, unrefined shapes ofHead and the tactile surface of Chinese Dancer are premonitions of the Abstract Expressionism that would be the hallmark of Browne's later work. 1. When she met him in October 1934, Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne recalled that her future husband's daily diet consisted of a quart of milk, a box of cornmeal, a head of lettuce, and some raisins. 2. Browne was also involved with Léger's mural project for the French Line terminal building that was canceled after officials discovered Léger's communist sympathies. 3. The abstract quality of Ingres's work held special appeal not only for Browne, but for John Graham and Arshile Gorky. Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne remembered Gorky waving an Ingres reproduction around at the opening of the first American Abstract Artists annual exhibition and proclaiming that the French master was more "abstract" than all the work in the exhibition. 4. Gorky is quoted in Melvin P. Lader, "Graham, Gorky, de Kooning and the 'Ingres Revival' in America," Arts Magazine 52, no. 7 (March 1978): 99. 5. The classical drawings, a group of which were exhibited at Washburn Gallery in 1977, show heads (often of cross-eyed women) and classically garbed and garlanded seated figures. They have important stylistic parallels to John Graham's paintings and drawings of the period. 6. Quoted in Gail Levin, "Byron Browne in the Context of Abstract Expressionism," Arts Magazine 59, no. 10 (Summer 1985): 129. Browne's notebook is in the collection of his son, Stephen B. Browne. The idea of portraying matter visible through telescope or microscope parallels the fusion of scientific and artistic vision discussed by Rosalind Bengelsdorf. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. "The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction, 1930-1945" (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), pp. 44-47. Copyright 1989 Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------