Theophilus Brown: Paintings, Collages & Drawings

by John Arthur and Peter Plagens

Book Overview

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0915829754
• ISBN13: 9780915829750
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Chameleon Books
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 2.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 10.2" x 10.8"

Customer Reviews

It's About Time

Yes! A long overdue book on a wonderful artist. Fans of Brown's work or those who admire the Bay Area Figurative Painters will definitely want this book to add to their library. John Arthur"s commentary on the history of realism and how Brown fits in historically is insightful, funny, witty, and most importantly readable. This book is a great value. I was very surprised that a book with so many color reproductions would be this well priced. You will be very happy with this addition to your library.

the life and work of the San Francisco painter Theophilus Brown

With Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Wonner, and other area artists, Theophilus Brown was a member of the group that became known as the San Francisco Bay Area Figurative Movement. Formed in the 1950s, by the 1960s, the Movement had gained national prominence. Brown, like the others and more so than most of them, made a decided turn from the abstract expressionism and pop art dominant at the time. Brown, like the others, did landscapes as well as figures. His city and industrial landscapes have a geometric formality and sharp coloration like those of Diebenkorn; though Brown's retain closer representation. The persons in Brown's portraits are recognizable individuals; while he employs limited cubist techniques and imaginative, unconventional color. As William Inge perceptively described the artist's work in 1967, "[T]he human figure takes its place as a natural part of the landscape, unseparated from it, as in the Matisse interiors. Man is not portraitured against a physical world that serves him as a mere backdrop. He is an integral part of that world." The figures in Brown's paintings always seem a natural part of the overall scene despite their cubist accents and unnatural colors and occasional De Kooningesque electric striations of vivid color. Even while turning to figure painting and related kinds based on the physical, visible world, Brown's paintings nonetheless display influences from De Kooning, Rothko, and Leger; who taught him in the latter 1940s. The paintings also display influences from Picasso, Braque, and Guston; all of whom Brown knew in his movement from Europe to New York to California. The "turn to figurative art" denotes the long middle period of Brown's work. In the first stages of his career, the work shows Modernist art's characteristic disinterest of representation in favor of celebration of materials and raw imagination. In the last stages of Brown's career beginning at the opening of the 21st century, he again, in an unplanned and unexpected way, makes modernist art in a style of the day. In the early 2000's, Brown took "colorful little screeds" that were remnants clinging to his palette of acrylics he had been working with and "pinned them to the wall" for assembling into collages. "Like the Proustian sweet, the inherent beauty of these viscous snippets recalled the open-ended, improvisational traits of Willem de Kooning, the gestural physicality of Jackson Pollock" and also traits from Franz Kline and Mark Rothko. Closing with these most recent works of Brown's, the art historian and critic and curator John Arthur completes a comprehensive, multifaceted overview of Brown's career.