NV to DC

Born in England, Colleen Browning received a classical art education at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, graduating in 1938. Over the next decade she drew wartime maps for the RAF and worked in set decoration with the Arthur Rank Film Corporation, holding her first one-woman show in 1948 and then migrating to New York City in 1949 to marry the writer Geoffrey Wagner, subject of one of her early American works, Head.

Browning adapted her realistic figurative style almost immediately to the new city. Her paintings of street scenes, telephone booths, children, and fire escapes, were praised, exhibited, and reproduced in TIME Magazine. She appeared at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum, and the Pennsylvania Gallery of the Fine Arts.

By 1953 she was holding solo shows again. "She comes to the States and quickly recognized the beauty of the iron grid of New York's tenement landscape," said Philip Eliasoph, author of Colleen Browning: The Enchantment of Realism, talking to the New York Times in February 2013 while several Browning retrospectives were running in different parts of the country. "Think of her prescience."

Browning herself described her work as a form of evocative realism, true to life but uncanny. "I have tried to evoke the magical from reality by an accurate visual reconstruction of the facts, so that the viewer can share my aesthetic shock in unexpected revelations."

In 1950 she became an American citizen. In 1966 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She taught at Pratt Institute, the City College of New York, and the National Gallery of Design, where her work was included in numerous shows. Her subject matter and her media changed from year to year as she hunted for new ways to approach her surroundings. Yet she never completely abandoned realism.

During the early 1970s she became proficient in lithography. At the end of the decade she worked on a series of subway train paintings, the passengers' faces framed by windows and graffiti. After that she turned towards depictions of clairvoyants, circuses, and dreamy mysteries.

DK Sole, UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum 2013

Bibliography:
Gerrit Henry, Colleen Browning: Telephones 1954, Butler Art
Susan Hodara, High Points and Other Stops, in a Painter's Career, New York Times
Multiple authors, Colleen Browning at Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art