EDWARD BRODNEY (American, 1910-2002)

The Southwest Regional Museum of Art and Art Center has added a dynamic oil painting to its Permanent Collection. This large painting, done in 1937 by Edward Brodney, shows a beautiful construction of opaque areas overlaid with rich glazes. The surface is almost jewel-like.

Although Brodney called the painting Homage to O'Keeffe, with three cow skulls as the main subject, his Eastern United States upbringing may have influenced his choice of a patchwork quilt for the skulls to rest on, and not a Navajo blanket. He knew of O'Keeffe only through her shows in New York.

Edward Brodney was an artist particularly noted for his drawings and paintings of World War II. He began formal studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and at the Massachusetts College of Art while he was still in high school in Boston. He also studied at the School of Fine Arts at Yale before finishing a six-year course at the museum school.

In 1936, Brodney won a Works Progress Administration competition to paint a mural for the Massachusetts State House in Boston. That mural, Columbia Knighting Her World War Disabled, was painted with friends posing as models, since the WPA could not afford to hire any. In 1938 he won a second WPA competition for another State House mural, World War Mothers, one of a handful of military murals with women as its subjects. He used women from settlement houses as his models, and after federal funds ran out, he paid out of his own pocket to finish the project.

Brodney was drafted in World War II and served in the South Pacific. Officially serving as a medic, he painted soldiers in their everyday activities. Pictures in an exhibition of his work in honor of Memorial Day 2007 show servicemen repairing engines, carrying supplies off ships, and storming a beach. He was under orders not to depict active fighting.

His wartime artwork is held by Framingham State University in Massachusetts.