Happy Birthday

A painter whose dalliance with Abstract Expressionism gave way to a style of realism and domestic warmth Warren Brandt was born in 1918 in Greensboro, N.C., and moved to New York after high school, attending Pratt Institute at night. He studied with Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League and, after five years as an official portraitist in the Army during World War II, continued his education under the G.I. Bill. He studied with Philip Guston and Max Beckmann at Washington University in St. Louis. All the while he kept close ties with Abstract Expressionists in New York, and his art reflected their influence. With his wife, Carolyn Coker, he traveled widely in the 1950s, throughout Europe and back and forth from New York to North Carolina and Mississippi, where Mr. Brandt held teaching positions. In 1960, after he and his wife were divorced, he married Grace Borgenicht, an artist and art dealer in New York who had a gallery on 57th Street and was an early champion of contemporary American art. Mr. Brandt moved to New York and made a radical change in his art, developing a Matissesque style in nudes, still life, and scenes from his studio. One painting, ''The Artist in His Studio,'' from 1979, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows an inviting domestic space filled with plants, fruit, a conch shell, and fine furniture; in the background Mr. Brandt is seen reflected in a mirror, working on his canvas in a homely apron. Mr. Brandt showed often at the Sachs gallery on Madison Avenue and the Fischbach gallery on 57th Street, and his paintings are in the collections of the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, in addition to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A retrospective traveled to museums in North Carolina, Florida and Long Island in 1992 and 1993.