Joe Goode

Joe Goode, born Jose Bueno in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 23, 1937, did not graduate from high school. In 1959 he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute, where he studied until 1961 without pursuing or completing a degree.

Goode's early Milk Bottle paintings, real glass bottles set before flatly painted canvases, brought him into the orbit of Pop art almost immediately. In 1962 he was included in New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum alongside Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jim Dine, one of the first museum exhibitions to treat Pop art as a movement. Over the following decades his work shifted through the Cloud paintings and, later, the Fire series, works that used torn and burned canvas to register light and destruction, aligning him with the perceptual concerns of the Light and Space artists working in Los Angeles at the same time.

He continued to show steadily through galleries including Manny Silverman Gallery, Texas Gallery in Houston, Franklin Parrasch Gallery in New York, and Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, which represented him and later his estate. Joe Goode died at his home in Los Angeles on March 22, 2025, one day before his 88th birthday.

Goode's reputation rests on his early and lasting association with two movements that defined Los Angeles art in the 1960s. His inclusion in the 1962 New Painting of Common Objects exhibition placed him, alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Dine, among the first artists shown as part of an emerging Pop sensibility, while institutions including the Whitney Museum have since described him within the Light and Space tradition for the way later series like the Clouds and the Fire paintings treat surface, light, and material change. Museums that hold his work, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, LACMA, and MOCA Los Angeles, have generally framed him as a consistent, if understated, figure across six decades of California painting rather than an artist defined by a single breakthrough moment.

Goode's auction market is small relative to his museum standing. The highest publicly documented auction price identified is USD 138,600, paid for Untitled (Torn Cloud Triptych) at Phillips; the exact sale date has not been independently confirmed. Bonhams separately described a sale of Ocean Blue Series #25, 1989, for USD 20,000 as the second-highest price then recorded for his work, though the exact sale date was not stated in that press release. No catalogue raisonne of his output has been identified; his estate, represented by Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles and Zander Galerie in Cologne, is the primary source for verification.

Goode's auction record is thin: a small number of sales define the top of his market, and any individual result should be read with that scarcity in mind rather than as evidence of a smooth or steadily rising price trend. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance research and verification through the estate's representing galleries carry extra weight. His deep and long-standing presence in major museum collections is the strongest signal of lasting art-historical standing, even where the secondary market has not yet caught up to that standing in scale.