Joan Brown could only truly be considered as part of Gen 2 of Bay Area Figurative from about 1955 until 65. That's when the lessons of her teacher and mentor Elmer Bischoff really began to hit home and her style changed from AbEx to figuration-so really only 5 years of mature figuration.

But Brown's figuration was even more autobiographical and personal than any of the others. As the sole woman, and a young mother and wife (she was much married, but these years included the years of her short marriages to Bill Brown and Manuel Neri) she incorporated her life into work as a kind of diary.

She had an unhappy childhood with repressive Catholic schools and wanted to 'get the hell out of there." Brown gave her some books of European artists which began her flight from AbEx, (a Bacon show at the Legion had also been important) but a crit that David Park came to give in Bischoff's class where they actually disagreed over her work was dispositive. Park was a big fan.

She was the youngest artist to be included in a Whitney show of 1960, and the trip she took to Europe with Neri in 61 had as much of an influence on her as on him. This painting, Girl Sitting, from 1962, the year her child was born, is possibly a partial self portrait, and has the thick impasto of Park all over it. It is considered to be one of the masterpieces of her Bay Area Figurative era. But some of the other work, less derivative, is also spectacular.

Brown moved her studio home to be near her son Noel, and was utterly absorbed in him. She abandoned this kind of figuration in 1964, bored of impasto and her career after was suffused with flatter work and even more autobiography and mysticism. This marked the most definitive end of the 'movement'. A coming retrospective of her work curated by Janet Bishop at SF MoMA will surely be a revelation.