Bill Brown and his famous friends

A catalog of the exhibition is available.

One of the pioneers of Bay Area Figurative painting, artist Theophilus “Bill” Brown, 90, certainly qualifies as a local treasure. Still painting and drawing today, his work is celebrated in “Theophilus Brown Nudes: Five Decades of Drawing and Painting the Figure,” showing at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery in San Francisco through March 13.

After stays in Paris, where he met Braque, Picasso and Giacometti and studied with Leger, and New York, where he befriended the de Koonings, Brown moved to the Bay Area in 1952 to study painting at UC Berkeley. On his third day in California, he met a fellow painter, Paul Wonner, who would become his life partner. Along with Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and David Park, Brown and Wonner embraced the then-radical return of the human figure to the modern painting, what would become known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement. In Brown’s case, that returning to painting’s roots included extensive studies of the male nude. Brown still lives and works in San Francisco today.

During his one-man show’s run this month, Brown visited the gallery with Don Bachardy, the late Christopher Isherwood’s partner, and painter and official portraitist of Gov. Jerry Brown. Bill Brown is an old friend of Bachardy and Isherwood, and Bachardy came up from LA to see the show. Brown reminisced about old times with them, including a memorable dinner at their house. Before dinner, Isherwood had excused himself and left, and after a little while he returned — with Marlene Dietrich in tow. Of course they also talked about Tom Ford’s new film, A Single Man, from Isherwood’s novel. Both gave thumbs up.

Living history was flowering on Pine Street that day.

— BAY AREA REPORTER