Artists - Part 63

William Theophilus Brown

Previously I featured artist Paul Wonner, at left above.  Today's post is about William Theophilus Brown (1919-2012), at right.

Wonner and Brown were not only artistic partners, they were life partners, living openly as a gay couple beginning in the 1950s, when homosexuality was not only socially shunned but illegal.

Above: an untitled drawing by Brown, 1978.

Wonner and Brown met as grad students at Berkeley, working on Master of Fine Arts degrees, and they shared a studio above an automobile dealer in Berkeley.

In reaction to the Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s, several San Francisco Bay area artists, including Wonner and Brown, began to rediscover representational art.  Collectively their style was called the Bay Area Figurative movement.

Above, Seated Man, 1961 by Brown is still somewhat Expressionist but not abstract, depicting a recognizably male subject.

As time went on, Brown's work became more and more representational.  Above, Boy on Balcony, 1968.

Brown painted landscapes, clothed figures, and other subjects, but he loved to depict the male nude.  Above, Barry Nichols, 1977.

Brown's background was originally as a musician, not an artist.  He studied music at Yale University, graduating in 1941.  After serving in World War II, he began to study painting, moving between New York and Paris, where he met artists such as Picasso, Braque, Giacometti, Mark Rothko and de Kooning ...

Above: LL, 1986.

as well as composers John Cage, Samuel Barber and Stravinsky.

Above: Jamie, 1998.

He then enrolled in grad school at Berkeley, where he met Paul Wonner and got his MFA degree in 1954.

Above: Standing Bathers, 1993.

The male nude continued to be his lifelong favorite subject.  Above: Drawing Session at Mark Chester, 1992.

We end with Two Artists with Model, 2009.  Are the two artists Wonner and Brown?  Wonner had died the previous year, and Brown was 90 years old, but perhaps the painting is a recollection of happier days.

William Theophilus Brown died in 2012 at age 92, active and feisty to the end.  Four months before his death, he fact-checked his Wikipedia entry, which said he was an abstract expressionist, and called it horseshit.  (The Wikipedia entry has been corrected.)