Douglas Brown

Douglas Edwin Brown (1899-1952) was a Harvard and MIT-educated engineer turned radical artist who enlisted in the U.S. army during World War I, studied art with Myron Lechay, lived in Greenwich Village during the 1930s, made friends with Lincoln Steffens and Max Bodenheim, painted for the WPA in New Orleans and New York City, and in 1937 became state chair of the Louisiana Workers Alliance.

His political radicalism and espousal of workers’ rights are reflected in the themes, subject matter, and style of many of his paintings, which seem to echo the Social Realist approach to painting. His scenes of shop fronts, railway stations, and tenement backyards speak of his sympathy for working class, underpaid American laborers.

His work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Washington Artists’ Guild, National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art.