Byron Browne’s received his formal artistic training at the National Academy of Design from 1924-1928. In 1927 he and his friend Arshile Gorky visited Albert E. Gallatin’s Gallery of Living Art, where they saw works by Picasso, Braque, and Miró. Stimulated from what he saw there, Browne began to study Cahiers d’Art, the French magazine devoted to progressive European art. As he experimented with Cubism, Browne’s conviction that abstraction represented the future of art grew. His complete break from traditional art is perhaps best expressed in his decision to destroy his early representational work.

By 1930, the direction of Browne’s work was clearly established. By the mid-1930s, he found work and support within the Works Progress Administration Mural Division, as Burgoyne Diller, the Division’s head, began to advocate and organize on behalf of abstract artists. Browne became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists.

According to Byron Browne, the roots of abstraction could be found in the natural world, and as such, abstraction could not be separated from life itself. He saw abstraction as an extension of the physical world rather than generated by spiritualism. The distinction was an important one to Browne, who had little tolerance for the mysticism that Hilla Rebay and others believed to be at the foundation of abstraction…

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Leonard Edmondson was born in Sacramento in 1916 and became widely respected as a prominent figure in the abstract expressionist movement in the United States. Edmondson spent his career in California, where he eventually served as President of the California Watercolor Society and the Los Angeles Printmaking Society. During the Watercolor Society’s annual exhibits at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the artist was acclaimed one of the “radically modern” painters as he made an abrupt change from figuration to abstraction, cited by him as a journey of discovery, inspiration, and meaning in his work.

Edmondson’s abstract works present biomorphic shapes (his signature motifs) floating through an atmosphere of soft color. Often, his palette consisted of limpid hues of translucent rose, terra-cotta, pink, gray-blue, and yellow. Following the 1950s, Leonard learned advanced intaglio techniques from Ernest Freed at the University of Southern California…

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Inspired by Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Ward Jackson and his hard-edge geometric compositions held a presence in the New York art scene for more than 50 years. His works are in permanent collections of world-class museums and have been included in significant exhibitions. In the early ‘60s, Jackson was generating a forceful series of black and white compositions that very much played off a consistent lozenge format – and very boldly relied on the symmetric disposition of forms while going back and forth between rectilinearity and eccentricity. Jackson, who had begun as a landscape painter, returned to color at the end of the decade, generating a series of vibrant, deeply hued paintings throughout the ‘70s that play with flat, often-veil like forms, offbeat arrangements, and, often, a sense of lateral or even forward movement, as if projecting off the canvas…

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Fritz Rauh was born in Wuppertal, Germany. He began his art studies at the Braunschweig Art School in 1938. His artistic career was interrupted by World War II when he was drafted and served on the Russian front. He was eventually captured and spent six years in a Russian prison camp. After his release, he immediately resumed his formal studies and attended Braunscgweig Art School and Academy (1952), Germany, for four years. He became associated with Richard Bowman, Lee Mullican, and Fred Riechman, who were abstractionists that painted based on sources both in nature and Oriental art. During this time, he also met his future wife Alix, who emigrated to the United States, with Fritz following in 1954 and settled in Marin County.

Rauh had his first U.S. exhibition at the De Young Museum in 1956 and exhibited at many other U.S institutions and galleries, mainly in San Francisco as a prominent Bay Area abstractionist. In May 1968, San Francisco Chronicle writer Alfred Frankenstein cited Rauh as one of the most original painters in the Bay region: “[Painting] hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small, writhing connecting shapes on his canvas imitating nature and leading to a certain mysticism, the effect is ‘Magnificent.’”

Findlay Galleries has been the exclusive representative of the Fritz Rauh estate since 2017.

John Ferren was born in Pendleton, Oregon, in 1905. At the age of twenty, he apprenticed with an Italian stonecutter in San Francisco. Ferren’s early experiences with stonecutting influenced his style, particularly evident in the sculptural quality of his paintings, achieved through flat backgrounds and curving planes. Though Ferren was known later in his career as an intellectual among his peers, he avoided academe and formal art institutions, preferring to develop his own artistic style and theories nourished by his adventurous lifestyle and curious mind. Going to Europe in 1929, he attended the Sorbonne in Paris and also studied briefly at the Universita Degli Studi in Florence and the Universidad de Salamanca. His travels in Europe exposed him to the modern art movements of the early 20th century, such as cubism, surrealism, and expressionism. In 1930 Ferren returned to San Francisco for his debut solo exhibition at the Art Center; however, the lack of energy and artistic stimulation on the west coast at that time led Ferren to return to Paris in 1931

In Paris, Ferren was introduced to William Stanley Hayter’s Parisian Atelier 17, where some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, such as Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp, participated in experimental workshops. Like them, Ferren explored Hayter’s revolutionary theories on “the nature of space in a linear world,” inquiries that transformed Ferren’s style….

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Robert Richenburg was an abstract expressionist artist based in New York City, whose paintings were widely acclaimed in the 1950s and 1960s. While a student of Hans Hofmann, Richenburg exhibited at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim) in 1950. The following year, he participated in the historic Ninth Street Art Exhibition, and subsequently taught at Pratt Institute along with Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Jack Tworkov, Philip Guston, Milton Resnick and Tony Smith. By 1961, critic Irving Sandler declared that “Richenburg emerges as one of the most forceful painters on the New York Art Scene.” The Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others, purchased his work… Click below to read more.

British-born American painter Gordon Onslow Ford was associated with the Paris Surrealists. He also became interested in spontaneous creation and such metaphysical concerns as psychologist Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. The grandson of a sculptor, Onslow Ford served in the Royal Navy (1927–37) but, determined to pursue his interest in painting, resigned and went to Paris, where he worked briefly with André Lhote and Fernand Léger. He also met the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, who introduced him to André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and other Surrealists. Onslow Ford abandoned the pictorial images of his early work and embraced techniques such as psychic automatism.

In 1941 Onslow Ford lectured on Surrealism in New York City to an audience that included Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and other young American painters who felt his influence and created some of the most vital Abstract Expressionist work of the 20th century. (Indeed, years before Pollock became famous for the technique, Onslow Ford practiced what he called coulage, a method of pouring paint directly onto a canvas…

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Born in 1947, Ronnie Landfield knew from an early age that painting was his passion. Before his formal education, he would spend his free time in the avant-garde galleries viewing works by Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Willem de Kooning. By 20 years old, Landfield was invited to exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art, from then on his works were included in the museum’s biennial exhibitions.

Since the mid-1960s, Ronnie Landfield has been at the heart of American abstract painting and his name belongs amongst the pioneers of Lyrical Abstraction. Respected by his colleagues, influential among his peers, and inspiring to younger painters, Landfield continues to achieve success as his abstract works have become icons of the modernist Colorfield movement. He was among the group of artists who saved “post-painterly” abstraction from itself by giving it back its painterliness. Beyond that, he carved out a niche for himself where for decades, he has rung infinite changes onto a beautiful and straightforward vision, one as volatile and yet as fixed as the sky.

Today, Landfields works can be found in prominent museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and more.