David Hare (artist)

American painter

David Hare (March 10, 1917 – December 21, 1992) was an American artist, associated with the Surrealist movement. He is primarily known for his sculpture, though he also worked extensively in photography and painting. The VVV Surrealism Magazine was first published and edited by Hare in 1942.

Born March 10, 1917, in New York City, New York to father Meredith Hare, a lawyer and mother Elizabeth Sage Goodwin, an art collector. In the 1920s the family moved first to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and later to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in hope that the fresh air would help heal Meredith Hare's tuberculosis. His mother founded the Fountain Valley School, where David attended high school. In 1940 he received a commission from the American Museum of Natural History to document the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest, for which he eventually produced 20 prints developed using Eastman Kodak's then new dye transfer process (a time consuming and complicated technique). In the same year, he also opened his own commercial photography studio in New York City and exhibited his photographs in a solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery. In the next few years, through his cousin the painter Kay Sage, he came into contact with a number of Surrealist artists who had fled their native Europe because of World War II. Hare continued to be closely associated with influential artists and thinkers throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, counting Jean Paul Sartre, Balthus, Alberto Giacometti, and Pablo Picasso among his friends and acquaintances. He belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist artists whose artistic innovation by the 1950s had been recognized across the Atlantic, including Paris. He participated from 1954 to 1957 in the invitational New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals. These Annuals were important because the participants were chosen by the artists themselves. During the 1960s and 1970s Hare held teaching positions at several different schools, including the Philadelphia College of Art. During this period, he began work on his Cronus series of sculpture, paintings, and drawings, which became the subject of a solo show at New York's Guggenheim Museum in 1977. Marcel Duchamp was Hare’s best man at David’s third marriage, to photographer Denise Browne.

He died on December 21, 1992, in Jackson, Wyoming, after an emergency operation for an aortic aneurysm. He was included in many Surrealist retrospectives, primarily represented by his sculpture and painting.

Reuniting an Era abstract expressionists of the 1950s, Exhibition: Nov. 12, 2004 Jan. 25, 2005, Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, IL
The Third Dimension Sculpture of the New York School, by Lisa Phillips, Exhibition circ. : December 6, 1984 – March 3, 1985, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
American Painting of the 1970s, essay by Linda L. Cathcart, Exhibition circ. :December 8, 1978 – January 14, 1979, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
200 Years of American Sculpture, Bicentennial Exhibition: March 16 September 26, 1976, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, David R. Godine, Publisher in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art HC