David Hare (1917 -1992)

In 1940, he was commissioned by New York's American Museum of Natural History to document the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona. Twenty images were produced in portfolio form through the complicated color-dye-transfer process.

By this time, Hare had developed an automatist process of photographic image-making, which was dubbed "heatage" by the gallery owner Sidney Janis (an unfixed negative from an 8-by-10-inch plate was heated from below, causing the emulsion, and thus the image, to melt and flow).

During the early 1940s, a time when he was closely involved with the emigre Surrealists in New York, Hare made his first sculpture, using wire and feathers. Experimenting with plaster, wax, cast bronze and stone, Hare developed forms that were visual analogues to portmanteau words. Taking two or three objects, one of which was usually a human form, Hare combined them into a hybrid entity that revealed characteristics of all its component parts ("Suicide," 1946, Chicago National Bank).

From 1941 to 1944 Hare founded and edited the surrealist magazine vvv with Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. Peggy Guggenheim presented solo shows of Hare's work in her Art of This Century Gallery from 1944 to 1947. In 1948 he was a founding member, together with William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, of The Subjects of the Artist school in New York and he became friendly with Jean Paul Sarte.

This same year he moved to Paris, where he met Balthus, Victor Brauner, Alberto Giacometti, and Pablo Picasso. He returned to New York in 1953 but spent the next two summers in Paris. Upon his return to the United States, Hare began to use steel rods melted and poured into plaster molds, and to make sculptures incorporating metal sprayed with a gun, as in "Sunrise" (1955, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York). Hare intensified the experimental approach, inventively devising multi-media combinations such as steel with alabaster. There, he also began his figure and landscape series, in which many materials interpenetrate to create connected images of rocks, plants, sky and celestial bodies.

A mythological series begun in the late 1950s developed into the "Chronos" series of drawings, collages, paintings, and sculpture, which was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1977. Hare's sculpture began to combine metal, Plexiglas, sand and polyurethane.

Hare was included in the Sao Paulo Bienal of 1951 and 1957, and in 1958 he received a sculpture commission for the Uris building at 750 Third Avenue, New York. Hare began to concentrate on painting in the 1960s. From the mid-1960s into the 1970s Hare held teaching positions at the Philadelphia College of Art, the University of Oregon, Eugene, and the Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. He was included in the Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition of 1968 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The following year he received an honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore. In 1977 he was included in Dada and Surrealism Revisited at the Hayward Gallery, London, and in 1978 he showed in American Painting of the 1970s at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

Hare died on December 21, 1992, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.