David Hare | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

David Hare (1917-1992)

David Hare created painting and sculpture that firmly placed him at the center of Surrealism. He went on to define his own style in later decades. Raised in New York City, Colorado, and New Mexico, Hare did not have formal training in art as a child. His family lineage, however, was impressively avant-garde; his mother, Elizabeth Sage Goodwin, was a backer of the 1913 Armory Show and a friend to artists including Constantin Brancusi and Marcel Duchamp, and her brother-in-law, Philip Goodwin, was architect of the Museum of Modern Art and a trustee of the museum. After high school, Hare was drawn to aesthetics. He began a commercial photography business and in his early 20s was commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History to photograph a series of portraits of Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni Indians in the Southwest.

Through his cousin, painter Kay Sage, Hare developed relationships with the artists and intellectuals who would bring him to the center of Surrealism in the United States. Exiled from Europe at the beginning of World War II, artists including André Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson, Matta, and Sage’s husband, Yves Tanguy, created a community in the U. S. Hare participated fully in the intellectual efforts of the group. He served as editor of Breton’s magazine VVV and collaborated with Jean-Paul Sartre on the writer’s publication Le Temps Moderne. Through his work on VVV, Hare met artist Jacqueline Lamba, Breton’s wife. Within a few years, Lamba and Breton split, and she and Hare married. At Lamba’s suggestion, Hare began experimenting with sculpture; the medium became his main focus for the next decade and cemented his place within Surrealist production. Attenuated, exaggerated forms in welded or cast metal, referring to figures and tableaux with ambiguous narratives, such as Magician’s Game (1994, Museum of Modern Art), characterized his sculpture.

In the 1940s, Hare earned substantial critical recognition. He exhibited at the premiere venues for the Surrealists: Julien Levy’s gallery, the Samuel Kootz Gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of the Century. With Mark Rothko, William Baziotes, and Robert Motherwell, Hare founded the Subjects of the Artists School, an informal school in Greenwich Village designed to serve as what Clyfford Still described as a “center of free activity for imaginative effort”(1). The school closed in 1949; it continued as “Studio 35” and eventually became the Eighth Street Club.

In the late 1950s, Hare began painting in earnest for the first time. “I thought that painting wouldn’t be a very hard thing to do,” he recalled. “I thought it would take six months to get into. Instead, it took me three years, and by the time I was into it, I got fascinated with painting all by itself. In a way, I didn’t know what I was doing, but it was marvelous, because for me it was something entirely new”. (2)

Hare began his two major series in the medium at this time. The first series centered on myth and legend, exploring symbolism that suggested savagery and madness. Featuring enraged faces, bared teeth, and jagged edges, these paintings became the Cronus series, named after the mythological king overthrown by his son, Zeus. Hare would explore this theme for the next decades, and in 1977 the Guggenheim Museum featured them in a solo exhibition.

Hare taught at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore, the Philadelphia College of Art, and the New York Studio School. He was visiting artist at numerous institutions including the Skowhegan School of Arts and Design. He died in 1992 in Victor, Idaho.

(1) Clyfford Still quoted in James Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 263.
(2) David Hare quoted in The Artist Observed: 28 Interviews with Contemporary Artists, 1972-1987 (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 1991), 202.