David Hare (artist)

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.

In the late 1930s, with no previous artistic training, he began to experiment with color photography. Using his previous education in chemistry Hare developed an automatist technique called "heatage" in which he heated the unfixed negative from an 8 by 10-inch plate, causing the image to ripple and distort.

Hare's Surrealist experiments in photography were only one of his many projects. 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 became closely involved with the émigré Surrealist movement and collaborated closely with them on projects such as the Surrealist journal VVV, which he cofounded and edited from 1941 to 1944 with André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp. He began to experiment with Surrealist sculpture, which soon became his primary focus, and exhibited his work as solo shows in a number of prestigious venues, including Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century gallery. Meets and marries Jacqueline Lamba.

In 1948 he became a founding member, along with Mark Rothko, William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell, of the Subjects of the Artist School in New York. 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 to1957 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. In subsequent years he was included in many Surrealist retrospectives, primarily represented by his sculpture and painting.

He died on December 21, 1992 in Jackson, Wyoming, after an emergency operation for an aortic aneurysm.

• 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 ISBN 0-87427-002-2
• 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 ISBN 0-87923-185-8 HC

• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. pp. 158–161
• The Annual & Biennial Exhibition Record of the Whitney Museum of American Art 1918-1989. Incorporating the serial exhibitions of The Whitney Studio Club, 1918–1928; The Whitney Studio Club Galleries, 1928–1930; The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1932–1989, ed. by Peter Falk, Sound View Press, 1991 ISBN 0-932087-12-4
• New York Cultural Capital of the World 1940-1965 ed. Leonard Wallock, Rizzoli, New York 1988 ISBN 0-8478-0990-0
• American Sculpture in Process: 1930/1970 by Wayne Andersen, New York Graphic Society Boston, Massachusetts, Little, Brown and Company Publisher, 1975 ISBN 0-316-03681-1
• American Art of the 20th Century by Sam Hunter and John Jacobus, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1973 ISBN 0-8109-0135-8
• American Art Since 1900 A Critical History by Barbara Rose, Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, New York, Washington 1967 Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 67-20743
• Modern Sculpture from the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Collection, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1962 Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 62-19719
• The Sculpture of this Century by Michel Seuphor, Gorge Braziller Inc., New York, 1960 Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 60-7807
• Sculpture of the Twentieth Century by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Thames & Hudson, Ltd., London, December, 1952.
• Welded Sculpture of the Twentieth Century by Judy Collischan, The Neuberger Museum of Art, New York, Hudson Hills Press, New York, 2000 ISBN 1-55595-167-8.
• Hadler, Mona “David Hare, Surrealism, and the Comics,” The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945, VII: 1, (December 2011), 93-108.