Joan Brown

Joan Brown painted the human condition from a studio in San Francisco for three decades. The early work — thickly impastoed, gestural figures and ordinary objects — brought national attention in the late 1950s. MoMA acquired a painting in 1960; Artforum put her on the cover at twenty-five.

Then she changed course. In the late 1960s she debuted a radically different style: bold colors, graphic directness, and a willingness to paint heartbreak, house cats, spiritual beliefs, and the everyday with equal seriousness. She expanded that vocabulary for the rest of her career.

Brown was included in the Carnegie International and two Whitney Biennials, and was the subject of major exhibitions at SFMOMA and Berkeley Art Museum. She died in a construction accident in 1990 at fifty-two.