The groundbreaking 1962 pop-art exhibition, New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps for the Pasadena Art Museum, eventually became known for launching world-famous pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. But there was a lesser-known artist in that show who also created an icon nearly as influential as the Campbell’s soup can—the milk bottle.
Joe Goode’s Milk Bottle paintings—coupling hand-painted, three-dimensional milk bottles with complementary abstract canvases—were an instant hit in the squeaky-clean era of the Beach Boys and John Wayne. Goode’s groundbreaking paintings managed to combine the everyday wholesomeness of Main Street and the beatnik underbelly of expressionist culture all in one succinct series.
Goode’s story starts as the son of Dust Bowl–era parents in Oklahoma City, more than 1,000 miles from the bright lights of Los Angeles. Goode spent most of his time hanging out with a friend from his local Catholic church named Ed Ruscha—both of them dabbled in drawing and painting on the side for fun. After high school, Goode decided to look for opportunity in Los Angeles, following in Ruscha’s footsteps to attend art school at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts).
“We both had to do a lot of catch-up when we arrived in LA,” says Ruscha in the foreword to Goode’s catalogue, “but we learned fast because we were in a school where there was a lot of competitive feeling going on between the students, especially among the five of us from Oklahoma who were living together. We had good instructors, but that competitive feeling really got us moving.”
Goode has found success over the years with this and other painting series, including Ocean Blue and California Summer, which reflect his adopted home of Los Angeles. His oeuvre was perhaps too quirky to ever achieve the type of star status reserved for artists like Willem de Kooning or Andy Warhol, as it always fell somewhere in between the strict frameworks of abstract expressionism and pop art that had been outlined by art historians of that era.
Goode’s new show, Old Ideas with New Solutions, at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, opened on March 23—Goode’s eightieth birthday—and reintroduces this one-of-a-kind painter to a new art-viewing public. Old Ideas will feature new paintings with a familiar feel, because they’re additions to four of the artist’s most important series: Ocean Blue, California Summer, TV Blues, and Milk Bottle.
“There is often a phenomenon with artists of a certain age, where they start to look back on the artwork they have created over a lifetime, and they revisit ideas—like old friends,” says gallery owner Michael Kohn. “Goode’s new works approach earlier motifs in a new and different way, informed by years of honing his artistic sense of abstract painting.”