“I took him 36 oysters Saturday night and we shared dinner,” Theophilus Brown’s friend Matt Gonzalez said. “He had a good appetite and was in good spirits. But he couldn’t leave the apartment, and he was clear that if he couldn’t go to his studio and make art anymore, he didn’t want to live. So it was time.”

EARLIER: “A friendship with Theophilus Brown“

William Theophilus Brown
April 7, 1919 – February 8, 2012

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

William Theophilus Brown, an elegant and irreverent American painter and member of the venerated figurative movement who met and befriended some of history’s great artists, from Pablo Picasso to Igor Stravinsky, died Wednesday [February 8, 2012] at his home in San Francisco. He was 92.

Mr. Brown, who lived in the opulent San Francisco Towers, which he christened the “Versailles of retirement communities,” was painting until the end, said his friend and gallerist Thomas Reynolds. He had a studio a few blocks from his home and continued to participate in drawing sessions.

“Theophilus Brown was one of those rare artists who was successful at every stage of his career,” Reynolds said. “And he was always at the center of the action — in France with Picasso, in New York with (Mark) Rothko and (Willem) de Kooning, in California with the Bay Area figurative painters.”

Reynolds added, “He was everybody’s favorite dinner companion — charming to the ladies and bawdy with the boys.”

Read more

According to artist Wally Hedrick, the Funk art movement got its definition from the peculiar practice of his eccentric former wife, artist Jay DeFeo — with whom he lived at 2322 Fillmore Street — of storing her dirty underwear in the refrigerator.

“When I first got to know Jay DeFeo,” Hedrick said, “I’d go over to her house and talk. One day when she’s gone to the john or someplace, I began looking for something to eat. I went to the refrigerator and opened it up — and all of her old underwear was in it. It was a couple years’ supply. The refrigerator was off, probably hadn’t run in 10 years, and she never washed her clothes. And so — instead of putting it somewhere else or throwing it away when she finally took off her underwear — she’d just stick it in the refrigerator. . . . Funky.”

— from Peter Selz: Sketches of a Life in Art © 2012 by Paul J. Karlstrom with Ann Heath Karlstrom, published by the University of California Press.

His reply, in its entirety:

What really matters: Family and friends.
What have I learned: Didn’t take enough risks.
What advice do I have: Take them.

By PETER STEINHART

Charles Campbell stands in his small Potrero Hill living room looking up at a painting. It has been in the house for years, one of dozens he believed in, bought or traded for, and held onto. The walls around him are clamorous with paintings, most of them by artists who became famous partly through Charlie’s efforts. There are Diebenkorns, Oliveiras, Wonners, Weekses and Thiebauds. Each one has deep personal associations. They’re all old friends, guests at his party.

This one he has just moved from another wall and installed over the fireplace, where he can have a long last conversation with it. For it is about to leave. He has just sold it to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur for close to $2 million dollars. Charlie stands before it like a father before a son he is about to send off into the world: appraisingly but proud.

A San Francisco art dealer for six decades, Charlie asks me not to divulge the name of the painting, its price or its buyer. Discretion is an essential condition of dealing with wealth. But right now Charlie is clearly bragging. He poses, birdlike, hawknosed, chin up, gray sweat pants all but falling off his rail-thin hips, and it is a posture of triumph as if to say: “I wasn’t given a lot of advantages, but how do you like me now, world?” And then, his gaze shuffles behind his thick eyeglasses, his chin lowers and something softens in him and you see he is sad at parting with an old friend.

Charlie doesn’t look much like a gallery man. He doesn’t seem to calculate your social standing or your net worth as you walk in his door. He hasn’t got a day of academic training, has never taken a college art history course. No ascot, no fancy suit, no monocle. If you entered his gallery, he would not stand over your shoulder lecturing about the artist or the painting or how the painting’s value is expected to grow. “I always felt, look, I’ll put up what I think is the best stuff and you come and look at it and make your own decision,” he told interviewer Joan Bossart. It’s up to the people who come into his gallery to decide what the paintings are about.

There is a common man quality to him. His close friend Wayne Thiebaud calls him “the accidental dealer.” Unlike most of his gallery competitors, he backed into the business, with no preconceived idea of the nobility of art or its patrons. And one gets the impression that he did it not for beauty or wealth or social standing, but because he has always taken pleasure in sharing the enjoyment he gets out of life.

— excerpted from The Accidental Dealer by Peter Steinhart, copyright 2011, available from blurb.com.

South Anchorage, Golden Gate Bridge | Michael Reardon

Master watercolorist Michael Reardon’s atmospheric painting of the Golden Gate Bridge has been juried into the 145th annual exhibition of the American Watercolor Society, opening April 3 at the historic Salmagundi Club in New York. The exhibition continues through April 22 at the club, which is located at 47 Fifth Avenue.

Read more: “A love for light” from Watercolor Artist magazine

Blackberries | Raphaelle Peale | de Young Museum, San Francisco

Many of the finest treasures in San Francisco’s de Young Museum, including this small still life, came from the Rockefeller Collection of American Art, donated by Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III. A passage on page 17 of the Rockefeller catalog describes the unusual grading system they used to buy works of art.

“The Rockefellers … used a gradually developed classification system to rank candidates for purchase — A, B, C, D, X and O. The last two categories were evolved to deal with surprises, the `X’ label was for rare works of extraordinary attractiveness by little-known artists, the `O’ rank was given to exquisite, small-scale works that, no matter what the artist’s fame, generated sufficient pleasure to prompt exclamation, `O, what a delightful little picture!’”

The catalog notes that works from the last two classifications are crucial in giving the Rockefeller collection its personal, idiosyncratic flavor — what one scholar called its “note of individual taste and connoisseurship, and a love of the arts for their own sake, independent of fame or price.”

Murals by William Keith hang in the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco.
Photograph by Jim Karageorge

ART HISTORY | CHARLES KEELER

A great personality was evident to all who came in contact with William Keith. A rather thick-set Scot of medium height, with a head of true nobility — a broad face, wide forehead, kindly gray eyes, ample, well-shaped nose, a moustache and small beard hiding his lips, and a mass of tousled grizzly gray hair surmounting his Jovian head — such was the impression one got of him at first meeting. He generally wore a suit of fine checked gray, more often with the careless abandon of an artist than with the neatly pressed creases of a business or professional man.

To his intimate friends he was always gracious, although they sometimes found him in an exuberant mood and again utterly dejected and despondent. It all depended on whether his work was progressing satisfactorily or not. When he had dashed off an inspired masterpiece he was jubilant and triumphant, but when he had laboriously slaved over something that just would not come out as he intended, he was in the black depths of despair.

Of all his friends, the Rev. Joseph Worcester probably exercised the greatest personal influence over his life and work. Mr. Keith came of good old Scotch Presbyterian stock, but the mystic doctrines of Immanuel Swedenborg, as preached by Mr. Worcester, had quite obliterated the older faith. Indeed, Mr. Keith had grown too liberal for any creed, although he used to jokingly observe that his only chance of getting into heaven was by holding on to Mr. Worcester’s coattails.

A quiet power that could move mountains

An extraordinary person was Joseph Worcester. Shy as an inexperienced girl, reserved and restrained to an almost morbid degree, he was yet a determined fighter for his principles. Tall and slender, with a florid complexion, his averted eyes looking downward as he faced you, nevertheless there was in the man a quiet power that could move mountains. In his repressed suit of black, he stood before one as a personality of no ordinary type. His deep, low voice was full of emotion. Above all else he was a man of taste, an aesthete whose word was law in the select group of connoisseurs of which he was the center. But his taste was always for the subdued, the grave, the repressed. I could not but feel that he exercised a dampening influence over Mr. Keith. The artist wished above all to win the approbation of this extraordinary friend. When Mr. Worcester came into the studio and caught Mr. Keith working away at a great sunset of glorious color, with the golden light suffusing sky and trees, and a riot of crimson clouds reflected in a patch of water in the foreground, Mr. Worcester would look at the canvas with an air of pained tolerance, and then, turning to a dark and gloomy nocturne on an easel nearby, would say quietly: “I like this one better.”

William Keith in the 1870s

Sometimes Keith would get considerably annoyed at the banter, but he had far too great an admiration for Muir to let it last. All would end happily when the three of us would repair to one of those characteristic French restaurants of old San Francisco and have a hearty luncheon with soup with grated cheese, fillet of sole with tartar sauce, braised oxtail and French fried cream, with Dago red wine and fizz water to wash it down. Such a meal in such company was an experience to live in memory through all the vicissitudes of an eventful life.

Nearsightedness helped his work

One of his favorite devices was painting over old pictures. Again and again I have seen him take a large canvas with a carefully finished landscape upon it, place it upon his easel and start in with a savage onslaught, mussing it up with great daubs and masses of paint until the original picture was utterly spoiled. Then, out of the confusion, under his deft strokes, a totally new conception would emerge, glowing, brilliant and bold. When it was blocked in, he would let the paint dry and then go at it again with broken pieces of glass or an old razor blade, scraping and scratching the thick outer layers of paint to let the undercolors shine through. By this means novel textures and color effects were obtained that gave a rich tapestry-like effect to the picture.

Other effects were obtained by taking frayed old brushes that spattered on intricate foliage effects or splashes of grass that seemed so careless but were always done with the most deft and clever craftsmanship. Wiping out with rags gave still different surfaces and textures. He always painted standing, and when in an excited mood would tiptoe back and forth, vigorously attacking the canvas and then moving back to note the effect. Much of his work was done with the brush lightly held at arm’s length. He explained to me that his nearsightedness helped his work because he saw it slightly blurred and thus attained broader effects.

His finest work was done in such an abstraction that he was scarcely conscious of what he was about. Often I have seen him, after an hour of intense absorption, come out of his trance dripping with perspiration and say: “Well, that’s come out pretty well, hasn’t it?”

Then someone introduced him to Chinese temple gongs. These great hand-wrought bronze cauldrons are so finely tempered that when struck with a big felted hammer the boom goes reverberating on for many minutes. Mr. Keith was fascinated with them. Although they are expensive, he bought several for his studio. He would play on them by the hour, listening to the liquid quavering waves of sound that followed each stroke of the hammer. It produced a psychic effect upon him and induced him to paint a series of his most gorgeous and most imaginative works. He called them his gong pictures, and they were vibrant with color and charged with imaginative feeling.

The magic portals of Keith’s Studio

William Keith in his studio

Still he was the same simple, unostentatious man. One day he said to me: “All I care about is the fun of painting. Nothing else counts. It’s just the satisfaction of the work.”

“I’m going to put you to the test,” I replied. “Suppose over the door of your studio were a sign: ‘No mortal save William Keith shall ever enter this studio, and at his death all that it contains shall be destroyed.’ Would you, under those conditions, go on painting?”

“No,” he answered, “you are right. I wouldn’t. You must paint to win the praise and understanding of others.”

Then came the 1906 earthquake and fire

Such was the life of William Keith before that memorable morning in April 1906 when a great earthquake roiled along the coast of central California, starting a conflagration that in less than four days burned out the business heart and much of the residential areas of San Francisco, devastating nearly 10 square miles of the seaport metropolis. The fires broke out almost immediately after the earthquake, and by the time Mr. Keith was able to cross the bay, he found the flames raging along the waterfront and approaching the business center from many directions. He made a futile attempt to reach the studio. Soldiers and police turned him back at every street. It was evident his studio was doomed, and the accumulation of a lifetime of indefatigable work would inevitably be shortly reduced to ashes. He had no inventory of his pictures, but estimated that there were fully 2,000 canvases in all. The larger ones at that time were selling at from $1,000 to $5,000, and in exceptional instances he was receiving $7,000 or $8,000 for his most important works.

While all Berkeley was in a tumult, with thousands of refugees pouring in from the stricken city, and the ominous boom of dynamite sounding day and night from the firefighters vainly trying to arrest the flames, Mr. Keith was working away at home on his pictures, resolved to recreate the dreams of splendor of his lifelong devotion to the beauties of nature. He had no qualification for organization of relief work and he was helpless as a child in coping with the emergency. But he was at the zenith of his power as a painter, and was resolved to carry on though the heavens were falling about his head.

Mr. Worcester, with a little group of San Francisco admirers, made their way to his studio before it burned, cut from their frames a few pictures which they especially admired, and took them home and buried them. At that time no one knew that any portion of the stricken city could be saved. These few were the only canvasses in his studio that escaped destruction. Furthermore, great numbers of his pictures owned by San Francisco residents were burned with the homes in which they hung.

Through the succeeding days of the conflagration and through the hectic weeks and months of emergency relief work that followed, Mr. Keith was at home painting. He worked as one inspired. Every intimate secret of nature’s moods in landscape effects was photographed in his mind from a life of study and communion. All the tricks of technique were at his fingertips. His incalculable loss had stimulated his creative faculty to new heights. Like some great composer, pouring forth his emotion in mighty outbursts of inspired improvisation, he painted new and glorious landscapes. To me it seemed like a miracle as I saw the new collection grow and accumulate about him.

In an old stable, a new art gallery

No sooner was the work of destruction ended in San Francisco, the refugees fed in bread lines and clothed from distributing stations, and the debris sufficiently cleared to make passageways through the ruins, than enterprising merchants went to work remodeling homes into stores along the broad Van Ness Avenue, where the firefighters in a last determined stand had halted the onsweeping flames. The art dealers Vickery, Atkins and Torrey moved a spacious old stable upon an empty lot on California Street just west of Van Ness Avenue, built an artistic temporary annex on the front, and opened up their new art store, while the great open spaces of the city below still lay in the confused disorder in which they had been left by the fire. And on the burlap walls of that transformed stable, Mr. Keith had the opening exhibit of the new art gallery. The walls were filled with his pictures painted since the disaster. They were paintings of great beauty, of great virtuosity, of great feeling for nature, and of deep insight. There was nothing indicating haste or crudity about them. The inimitable Keith touch, the sureness, the mastery were all there. It was an incredible feat of creative productivity.

In Mr. Keith’s friends, this tour de force excited the greatest wonder and admiration. How was it humanly possible to have accomplished all this in so short a time? But unfortunately there were others who envied this great achievement. “Keith was beginning to commercialize his work,” they said. “Pot boilers!” sniffed others with a superior air. “How his work has deteriorated,” complained the jealous ones who had done nothing since the disaster but feel sorry for themselves. Probably no one had made closer study of Mr. Keith’s work than I, and for the life of me I could see no marks of haste or deterioration in his style or handling. To me these post-fire productions seemed in his very finest manner. Mr. Keith was a keen and just critic of his own work, and he considered these pictures to be in his best style. They were not to be estimated by the time it took to paint them. Indeed every one of them had taken from 40 to 50 years to achieve.

The San Francisco fire did something to San Francisco besides the destruction of over $400 million worth of property. It seemed to burn out the old romantic and poetic spirit. With Mr. Keith it appeared the turning point in his life and fame. He could not be kept away from the city where his life work had been wrought. Soon after that notable exhibition, he moved into a new studio in a temporary building just off Van Ness Avenue. John Zeile, a wealthy art connoisseur and Keith enthusiast, had built it and occupied a part of the structure with an art furniture store and studios for the artists Arthur and Lucia Mathews. Upstairs Mr. Keith continued his work with the same undiminished zeal. But one day, making his way through the ruins to the ferry, he stumbled and struck his face close to the left eye on a stake. He was a heavy man, and the injury was a serious one. I was off camping in the Sierras at the time, but on returning found him much shaken by the experience. He worked with more of an effort after that, but so long as he was able to walk to the train, he went regularly to his San Francisco studio.

The intangible power of genius

It is now many years since Mr. Keith left us in 1911. His memory is still as fresh in the minds of those who loved him as if he had but just departed. There was a simplicity, a forthrightness and a loyalty in the man that had lasting qualities. But beyond that was an intangible power which only a genius possesses. Intense, reverent, loving, guileless of heart, a passionate adorer of beauty and a worker of such concentration of purpose that he never ceased his labors until his last illness laid him low.

Here was no ordinary man.

Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript by Charles Keeler, author of The Simple Home. Photographs by Scott McCue, courtesy of St. Mary’s College Museum of Art.

Coastin' | Terry Miura

A conversation with TERRY MIURA

The title of your new exhibition is “Urban Aria.” What is the significance of the title, and how did you arrive at it?

The word aria has a couple of definitions, one of which is Italian for air. This series of paintings has heavy emphasis on atmosphere and its effects, so I thought it was an appropriate title. The other reference for the word is musical — an aria is a melody, often a complex song in an opera. I often have musical references for titles of my paintings and shows (an earlier exhibition at Thomas Reynolds Gallery was entitled “Andante”) because I feel there’s a strong relationship between imagery and music, and I often think of my painting in terms of musical concepts. Harmony and rhythm are two of the more obvious examples.

Is this a new direction for you?

The genre isn’t new to me. I started out painting cityscapes a long time ago. There was a period of several years during which I focused on learning the craft of landscape painting en plein air, but the city never left me. What is new this time is that my work has become more abstract, both in terms of how I paint and what I paint.

What do you mean by that, and how did it come about?

Well, the brushwork is looser and freer than it has ever been. I don’t paint a lot of detail, so the shapes are simpler and less descriptive. Objects are merely suggested, not defined. I’ve been struggling to paint more abstractly for years and years, but being an extremely analytical person, I’ve always needed rigid structure. Rules of representational painting gave me that structure and I had a hard time leaving it. Consequently, abstraction eluded me for years. I mean, an abstract stroke made no sense to me, and I needed everything to make logical sense. Perhaps that’s why abstraction has always fascinated me; it was mysterious and out of reach.

It wasn’t until earlier this year that things began to change. I was painting on a street corner during the Sonoma Plein Air Festival. My subjects were cars and pedestrians, more or less familiar motifs. What was different for me this time was the fact that I was looking into the sun. The backlit cars and figures — in fact everything in view — became simplified because you really can’t see any detail when you’re staring into the sun. I was forced to simplify, working with a minimal amount of description. I have painted hundreds of backlit views before, but I believe this was the first time I tried it with moving targets. The simplicity forced upon my view by the back lighting, and the figures and cars in motion, made it impossible for me to render anything. The only way for me to paint the scene was if I just tried to capture the impressions of things, and not the things themselves. Many artists talk about this idea, and in fact I tell my students to do that too, but I hadn’t really grasped the full meaning of this way of seeing the world until I realized I was painting motion, not pedestrians.

Back in the studio, I pondered this concept of painting the intangible, and I started a bunch of new canvases. I wanted to see if I could come up with other concepts which were intangible, abstract notions and paint them — concepts such as airiness, noise, anonymity and mood. When I focused on these ideas and not cars and buildings, the cars and buildings looked more like cars and buildings. And to my delight, the painting became more and more abstract.

Atmosphere plays a part in this, right?

A huge part. I’ve always loved atmospheric perspective and its ability to create mood. My landscapes are typically very atmospheric. In back lighting, because the sunlight has to travel through all that stuff in the air — smog, dust, etc. — the atmospheric effects are very much accentuated. And it bathes everything in a single unifying color theme, which again is a great simplifier. The fact that you can tell a backlit car is a car tells me you don’t need any detail. A silhouette will do. Adding detail doesn’t make my statement any more eloquent, so what would be the point in making that car more defined? Less really is more.

You mentioned musical concepts. Can you elaborate?

Right. In many ways, ideas in music are very similar to those in picturemaking. Even the words are the same: composition, rhythm, harmony, key. Those are formal concepts. It’s easy to see color harmonies as being similar to chords on a piano, and pleasing placements of visual elements translating to tempo and cadence. I’ve always been a big fan of jazz, particularly Miles Davis’ music from the late 50s. Not only that the tunes are very moody and atmospheric, but I love that he says so much with so little. It’s pure poetry. I identify with jazz, I think, because of its improvisational nature. The music has to have structure, like representational painting, but with jazz, you’re allowed to abstract and express, sometimes sticking close to the score, and sometimes going way off. Coltrane sometimes played entire songs without ever hitting the note as written, and yet the tunes are identifiable. That to me is exactly what I try to do with my painting. I realize I have a long, long way to go, but I feel I’m making progress. When I get stuck on a painting, I often ask, “What would Miles do?” And I answer myself with a famous Miles quote, “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”

Can you talk about your process? Do you use photo references or paint on site?

About half of this series of paintings are done using photo references. The other half are imaginary, composed from scratch. None are done on location. To me, plein air sketches are more like studies. I often bring them to a satisfactory finish, but my intent is usually to study and explore something specific; light’s effects, or the construct of a car or a building or a tree, for example. In the studio, I often just start with random washes on a small canvas, looking for shapes to spark a composition. I think of these as doodles almost. I then tighten up some of the design and introduce some sort of structure, correct perspective and believable spatial relationships, all the while moving things around to try different placements. A great thing about painting cars is that I can move them around anywhere to suit the composition, as long as the perspective is consistent with the context. Once I have a design to sink my teeth into, I paint thicker and with more decisiveness. I do many of these small paintings and have them all around my studio to give me more ideas. Not all of them are good but many will have a potential to be made into larger, more thought-through paintings. I may combine elements from two or more smaller paintings, recompose and edit. In terms of actual application of paint on the larger canvases, it’s pretty much the same as small ones. The difference being with the larger one I know where I’m going, whereas with the smaller paintings I don’t. It’s hit or miss — and I have a lot of misses — but I like the spontaneity and improvisational nature of starting with doodley washes.

Is that the same thing as painting from memory?

I don’t have a photographic memory, so it’s not as if I can paint exactly what I visualize in my head. But I tap into my memory for a general feeling of being in a certain environment. I can remember whether it was busy or empty, tall buildings or a big open sky, many trees or few — that sort of thing. The rest is constructing the image on canvas with some attention to perspective. I always thought this was a good way to work because I can only actualize what I can remember, and I can only remember what I noticed. The composition is pre-edited, to an extent. By definition, what I remember must have been worth remembering. I don’t remember colors too well beyond simple hues, so perhaps that contributes my palette being muted.

You’re known as a tonalist. Why do you paint tonally?

You know, I don’t even know what that means, really. I have nothing against bright colors, if it’s done well. I’m just drawn to a more quiet, muted palettte. I think it’s an effective way to create mood — and besides, it’s a lot simpler. Colors of things are information, as with any other detail. If I can communicate what that thing is without local color information, why do I need it? It makes it more colorful, sure, but that has nothing to do with what I’m trying to express. Bringing a tuba into a sring quartet would make it more colorful, but it doesn’t make it better, does it? That’s not to say that I paint monochromatically. I do actually use a range of hues, just not very saturated. A strong single-color theme unifies the painting and if I throw in a few color accents in the foreground, I find that’s enough color for me. Any more would start to fragment the image.

A few of these paintings depict recognizeable buildings, but many are just ordinary, everyday type of views. Is that intentional?

Absolutely. It goes back to painting the intangiable. A recognizable building would have to be painted recognizably. That is to say, the visual information not only has to be there, but also more or less accurate. The painting becomes more about the building than about, say, city rhythms. I don’t really want to paint a portrait of a building or a car. I want to convey a mood. The more information I paint, the more specific the subject becomes. Keeping my views more ambiguous allows more room for the viewer to interpret and to complete the picture in their own mind in the context of their own experiences and memories. I think that is a far more powerful interaction than a realistic depiction of a recognizable street corner can offer.

Since your subject matter is ordinary streetscapes, do you find that you see potential paintings everywhere you go?

Sometimes, when my brain is in that mode, like right after a painting session. But most of the time it takes conscious effort for me to mentally translate what I see into a possible painting. It’s a lot of work, and since I have a habit of doing that while driving in the city, it can be dangerous! I prefer it if someone else is driving, but then I get car sick, so that’s not good either.

Your figures, too, are non-specific.

I’m painting motion, not pedestrians, remember? I try to keep my figures less defined for the same reason. I want to identify with the figures in my paintings, and if they’re specific individuals, it’s not so easy to find resonance. I wouldn’t necessarily care about that person, because I don’t know him. But I can relate to everyman, and keeping him anonymous by painting him abstractly, I can see myself being him. Not every viewer will identify with him the same way I do, but If I painted him with more detail and definition, I’m sure even fewer will be able to relate to him.

So this has been an important series of paintings for you?

Working on this series was a completely eye-opening journey for me, unlike any other stage in my development as an artist. I feel I discovered something very important. I feel like I finally understand how to break the rules of representational painting without violating my analytical self, and it’s absolutely liberating. I love how abstract my painting has become in such a short time, and I love that I feel right at home after all these years of struggling to find my voice. I’m not there yet, but I believe I’ve found a piece of the puzzle. A corner piece, even.

Preview the “Urban Aria” exhibition

Theophilus Brown | Photograph by Sarah Rice

By JULIAN GUTHRIE
San Francisco Chronicle

William Theophilus Brown walks through the opulent marble lobby of San Francisco Towers where he lives and remarks, “It’s the Versailles of retirement communities.”

Brown, who is 92, is accustomed to moving in luminous circles. From Yale to New York, Paris to Antibes, Brown studied, painted or partied with a cast of artistic giants: Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Samuel Barber, Georges Braque, Mark Rothko, Alberto Giacometti and Willem de Kooning. Once in California, he found his own place in painting and is known as one of the members of the venerated Bay Area Figurative Movement.

“It seems improbable, this life,” Brown said. “I was so lucky running across such creative and interesting people. The encounters and friendships inspired me to take chances and to try new mediums. It freed one up from a certain rigidity. I still look forward to going to the studio, even today.”

Brown’s paintings are featured in a new show at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery in San Francisco, and a documentary is being made on his improbable life. His works are held in major California museums, from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum to the Oakland Museum and the Cantor Center at Stanford. Nationally, his paintings are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum at the Smithsonian.

“Sure, he’s a key player in the Bay Area Figurative Movement, but he’s far more than that,” gallerist Thomas Reynolds said. “He’s a bridge to the whole New York scene of the ’40s and ’50s, and even to postwar Paris.

“This is someone whose life and art deserve to be celebrated. He’s got more going on at 92 than most artists half his age. He’s engaged. He’s creating. And he’s still everybody’s favorite dinner companion.”

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