Byron Browne: The measure of a polemical legacy.
Item
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Title
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Byron Browne: The measure of a polemical legacy.
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Identifier
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AAI3063869
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identifier
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3063869
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Creator
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Paul (nee Lapland), April Joyce.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Diane M. Kelder
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Fine Arts | Biography
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Abstract
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The author examines the life of an American painter whose remarkable creative gifts promised a brilliant career. Indeed, by the time he graduated from the National Academy of Design, Byron Browne (1907--1961) had won nearly every prize and medal offered during his three years at the School. Then, within a short time, Browne shook off the yoke of his conservative training to accept modernism in all its ramifications. He fell headlong into the arms of Picasso and Cubism, an embrace from which he never extricated himself.;The time was 1929, the year the stock market crashed, ushering in the longest financial depression in the history of this nation. This study documents Browne's struggle for artistic survival during that terrible period, occurring at a time when abstract art by an American was an unacceptable commodity. Stubborn, dedicated and persevering against all odds, Browne gained national prominence at the end of World War II, when, finally, American abstraction began to achieve acceptance. Browne, with the patronage of his dealer, Samuel M. Kootz, became one of the most celebrated modernist painters in the country.;Yet other currents were operating simultaneously, as the brash Abstract Expressionist painters, armed with the Surrealist teachings of Andre Breton, began to undermine Cubism and everything that harked back to European tradition and our slavish worship of "their" art as the leading edge. Suddenly, Browne found his kind of painting eclipsed by the revolutionary concepts of the New York School. Aesthetically and psychologically, he could not accept the iconoclastic premises of painters like Jackson Pollock, Franz Mine, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb. By summer's end 1948, Browne learned that his dealer had eliminated him from the gallery's roster, as Samuel Kootz wholeheartedly embraced surrealism and gestural painting that left no room for his decorative Cubist fantasies.;Then, without warning, one Sunday morning in 1951 Browne awakened to learn through a full-page advertisement in The New York Times that dozens of his paintings, held by his former dealer, had been advertised for sale at discount prices on the selling floor of Gimbles Department Store. This unprecedented incident, so publicly announced, devastated the artist, ruining his reputation and driving his prices downward; it shattered an already fragile ego as well. Shortly thereafter, Browne suffered a heart attack from which he never fully recovered.;Browne's paintings from the late 1940s and the 1950s are contrasted with those of the Abstract Expressionists, in a effort to learn what happened to an artist who by all rights could have been among those now-revered members of the New York School. His is at once a marvelous and a chilling story, unfolding during some of the most breathtaking moments in American art history.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
