Byron Browne

Byron Browne (1907–1961) was an American painter and founding member of the American Abstract Artists.

Biography Browne was born on June 26, 1907, in Yonkers, New York. He studied at the National Academy of Design from 1925 to 1928 with many well known artists including Charles Courtney Curran, Ivan Olinsky, Alice Murphy and Robert Aitkin. He was a member of the Artists Union. In 1940 he married fellow artist Rosalind Bengelsdorf. He taught painting at the Art Students League of New York from 1948 through 1959 and went on to teach at New York University. Near the end of his life Browne was very active in the Provincetown, Massachusetts art colony. the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum,

In 1936 he was one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists. Rosalind Bengelsdorf gives an account of the founding of American Abstract Artists as a "small group of abstract artists who met at Ibram Lassaw's studio at 232 Wooster Street, New York, early in 1936. The gathering consisted roughly of Byron Browne, Gertrude and Balcomb Greene, Harry Holtzman, George McNeil, Albert Swiden, Lassaw, Burgoyne Diller, and myself. It was on this occasion we decided to form a cooperative exhibition society. Therefore this association became the first actual meeting of the American Abstract Artists, and we were, in fact, its founders."