Joe Goode, Californian Painter Known for His ‘Milk Bottle’ Series, Dies at 88

Joe Goode, a painter who counted as a core figure of the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, died on March 22 at his home in Los Angeles at 88. He would have turned 89 the following day. Michael Kohn Gallery and Zander Galerie, Goode’s representatives in LA and Cologne, respectively, announced his death this week but did not specify a cause.

Goode’s painting practice has been tough to categorize, which may be the reason it has yet to receive canonization across the country—even though his work was praised widely and seen by many during the ’60s.

Though lumped by some with the Pop art movement, Goode’s work did not contain the same obsession with commercial imagery that Andy Warhol’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s did. And though he frequently alluded to ready-made objects and pictures in his paintings, his work had a lighter touch than that of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

Goode remains most famous for his “Milk Bottle” paintings of the early ’60s, in which hand-painted milk bottles are set before near-monochromes that feature small silhouettes of these containers as if they were shadows of the found object. “I think of it as a kind of image that is fragile, can spill, it’s nourishing, it’s all of these different weird things in one image,” Goode once told his longtime friend, the artist Ed Ruscha.

The bottles have also been interpreted as references to the domestic sphere, minus the homey quality typically associated with it. (Ironically, these paintings often have warm names: a 1962 one owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is called Happy Birthday.) Critic John Coplans, writing in Artforum, once called these works “the loneliest paintings imaginable.”

Goode later moved fully into the third dimension, creating a series of sculptural pieces that resemble stairs that can be set in corners or against walls. In all cases, Goode’s stairs lead nowhere at all.

His off-kilter humor aligned him with the artists being shown by Ferus Gallery, the Los Angeles space founded by Walter Hopps, his wife Shirley, and artist Edward Kienholz. Although Goode never showed there, Hopps included his work in “New Paintings of Common Objects,” a famed 1962 show held at the Pasadena Art Museum, where Hopps had taken a curatorial position.

Born in 1937 in Oklahoma City, Goode was raised in a Catholic family. Ruscha became his friend at age 7, and the two attended Catholic school together. Having gained a reputation as a “schoolyard scrapper,” as the Los Angeles Times once put it, Goode failed to graduate high school.

But seeing what the Chouinard Art Institute had done for Ruscha, Goode decided to join his friend out West and soon followed suit himself. At that school, Goode’s cohort included Llyn Foulkes, John Altoon, and Larry Bell; his teachers included Robert Irwin.

He married Judy Winans, also a Chouinard student, and had a daughter, Stephanie. The marriage soon ended, and Goode attributed its demise to the couple’s dire finances.

Seeking an income, Goode began more aggressively pursuing an art career, and he ended up falling in with a tight-knit group. In 1961, he appeared alongside Bell, Ed Bereal, and Ron Miyashira in “War Babies,” a Huysman Gallery group show that was premised—provocatively for its day—upon its racially integrated artist list. Its controversial poster featured the show’s participants dining together on foods that could be considered stereotypes; Goode can be seen here, eating a mackerel, referring to a 19th-century slur for Catholics.

Gradually, Goode’s work began appearing on both sides of the US, with his CV ultimately including shows with beloved gallerists such as LA’s Margo Leavin and New York’s Jack Tilton. He married artist Natalie Bieser in 1978. Around this time, he left Los Angeles for a ranch near Springville, California, where he continued to produce bizarre and intriguing art, including a series of abstractions made using gunshot marks.

Later in his career, he moved back to LA. Having begun a series of paintings depicting fire in the 2000s, he found himself shocked one night to wake up to his dog Pollock warning him of a blaze at his Mar Vista home. The fire destroyed Goode’s studio and many artworks held within it, forcing him to briefly take up residence in Ruscha’s.

While Goode remains something of a cult figure, he did receive a survey at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2015. The show’s description touted him as “one of America’s most innovative yet under-recognized painters.”