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Directory: Fine Art: Paintings: Oil: Pre 1940: Item # 1441364

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L'Enfant Gallery
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1442 Wisconsin Ave, N.W.
Washington, DC 20007
202-625-2873

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“Bacchant” by Bryron Browne, 1941, signed lower left (partly obscured by frame) and signed and dated on reverse, oil on canvas, 19” x 16”, framed. Byron Browne (1907 - 1961) also known as George Byron Browne, was born in Yonkers, New York. He was a modernist painter and one of the founders of American Abstract Artists, a New York City organization devoted to exhibiting abstract art. Browne worked at a lumberyard to pay his tuition at the National Academy of Design, where he enrolled in 1925. He was inspired by European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró and in 1930 burned several of his realistic works as a gesture against conventional painting. He was a founder of the American Abstract Artists and in 1935 led a march protesting museums that did not collect modern work. Browne specialized in still life in the style of Synthetic Cubism, influenced by his friends John Graham, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning. After World War II, Browne exhibited frequently at the Kootz Gallery, which ardently supported avant-garde American artists. While abstract expressionism dominated New York’s art world, Browne’s paintings, which still showed recognizable figures and objects, failed to draw an audience. The gallery sold all of Browne’s work in a department store sale at “50% off,” dealing a heavy blow to the artist’s career. Bio from Smithsonian American Art Museum quoting Jim Rogers, Byron Browne, A Seminal American Modernist: Paintings and Drawings, 1929 to 1961, 2001