Byron Browne

Always recognized as a major American abstract painter, George Byron Browne (also known as Byron Browne) is also acknowledged as one of the founders of Abstract Expressionism, along with his contemporaries Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. Browne’s primary influences were Surrealism and Cubism, even though his work is fairly different from these styles through its unique use of line and bright palette.

Byron Browne was born in 1907 in New York City. He received traditional training in academic painting at the National Academy of Design, where he studied from 1924-28 with Charles Hinton, Charles Hawthorne, Charles Courtney Curran, Ivan Olinsky, Robert Aitken and Alice Murphy. Around 1928, Browne began a lifelong friendship with Arshile Gorky and started to introduce a more abstract style to his work. It was during this time that he destroyed the majority of his figurative paintings.

During the 1930s and '40s Byron Browne worked extensively, and developed a unique abstract aesthetic. Byron Browne was married to the artist Rosalind Bengelsdorf. He lived in New York City and in Lakewood, New Jersey. He taught at the Art Students League from 1948-1959, and at New York University from 1959 until his death in 1961.

COLLECTIONS & MUSEUMS

Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York

Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Texas

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York