Untitled, 1997-98
oil on canvas
24 x 18 in./25 x 19 x 2 in.
www.lalouver.com

From the LA Times

William Brice, 86; artist, teacher known for grand scale abstracts
By Mary Rourke, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 9, 2008
William Brice, an artist best known for grand-scale abstract paintings that suggest fragments of ancient classical ruins, has died. He was 86.

Brice, who also was an influential art teacher at UCLA for decades, died Monday at UCLA Medical Center, according to Kimberly Davis, director of L.A. Louver Gallery, which represents him.

Davis said the exact cause of death was not known but that Brice had recently taken a fall, hit his head and never regained consciousness.

The son of comedian Fanny Brice and Jules “Nicky” Arnstein, Brice taught art at UCLA from the early 1950s and became an emeritus professor in 1991.

“Bill was beloved by artists,” said Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As a teacher and a dedicated artist himself, he inspired generations of younger talents. “For artists coming of age in the 1950s and ’60s, Bill was a giant,” Barron said.

Brice’s privileged young years in the 1920s and ’30s included tours of the great art museums of Europe with his family and a private art tutor from age 13. He admired the work of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and others of their era, who were still active when Brice was young. At 14 he bought a work by Picasso, a gouache of a boy standing.

“Bill offered younger artists a window onto something bigger,” Barron said. “He provided a connection to European Modernism.”

At the start of his painting career in the late 1940s, Brice made figurative works, many of them still lifes, “that stress the geometrical aspects of common objects,” according to a Times review of his solo exhibition at the Frank Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills in 1950.

He returned often to subjects in nature until he exhausted the possibilities they offered him. A series of flowers from the 1950s ended with paintings of nothing but petals bathed in atmospheric light. [Read More…]