Weinstein Gallery is pleased to present DAVID HARE, a retrospective exhibition of painting, sculpture, and works on paper  on view  from September 22 - October 20, 2012 . The gallery will host an opening reception on Saturday, September 22 from 6-9pm preceded by a roundtable discussion at 4:00 pm featuring Stephen Robeson Miller, a Surrealism historian who most recently co-curated the groundbreaking exhibition Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, and Martica Sawin, author of Surrealism in Exile.

For nearly a decade, Weinstein Gallery has been dedicated to bringing to light the the rich period of art history between the wars and the unprecedented exchange of artistic and intellectual ideas that took place between the exiled European Surrealists and their American counterparts. Unquestionably, one of the most significant players in this cultural evolution was the young David Hare, described by the respected dealer Julien Levy aptly as “brilliant, taciturn, and full of promise.”

Hare was a brassy twenty-four year old whose artistic path was just beginning when Andre Breton and the old guard of the Surrealist movement arrived in New York City. Hare was one of only a few Americans to be accepted among this community as one of their own. His immediate comfort with and recognition by this group was due to his charming, straightforward, and self-assured character as well as his enthusiastic embrace of mythology and the automatism reflected in his early photography and sculptures. Hare as a man, artist and intellectual perfectly embodied the Surrealists’ temporarily adopted country. Not surprisingly, Hare quickly found himself as a pivotal figure in two of the most important art movements of the twentieth century—Surrealism and Abstract Expre ssionism.

Invited by Breton to edit his new Surrealist magazine VVV, Hare was now working along side Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst and showing his photography in the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition organized by Breton, Duchamp, and Sidney Janis to announce Surrealist art in America.  Peggy Guggenheim, the pioneering art dealer whose gallery Art of This Century was one of the key proponents of both avante-garde and Abstract-Expressionist artists, gave Hare his first solo exhibition in 1944. Guggenheim’s praise was unwavering, describing him as “the best sculptor since Giacometti, Calder, and Moore.” Other than Jackson Pollock, Hare would be the second most exhibited artist in the gallery’s history.

Over the next few decades, Hare’s star would continue to rise as his work was included in some of the most important exhibitions and ground-breaking galleries of the day including Bloodflames organized by Nicolas Calas at Hugo Gallery; The International Exhibition of Surrealism of 1947 at Galerie Maeght; solo exhibitions at Art of This Century and at Julien Levy’s eponymous gallery as well as eighteen solo shows at Kootz Gallery. Clement Greenberg, the preeminent critic of the time and the man who coined the term Abstract Expressionism, stated: “Hare has already shown enough promise to place him in the forefront of what now begins to seem, not a renaissance, but a naissance of sculpture in America.”

Hare’s work was also being collected and exhibited by museums throughout the United States. Two pioneering curators from the West Coast were among the first to see Hare’s genius: Grace McCann Morley of the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) and Jermayne MacAgy of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco both acquired multiple pieces in the 1940s. Hare was selected for the historically important exhibition, Fourteen Americans, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which also collected several works, as well as in the l ater important survey 1968 Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage exhibition. He  also exhibited in the first Sao Paulo Bienial in 1951 and in numerous exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art including several Annuals and The New Decade: 35 American Painters and Sculptors in 1954.

It was at this time that he formed great life-long friendships, with a wide range of artists and intellectuals - Marcel Duchamp (thirty years his senior), Jean-Paul Sartre, Ibram Lassaw, William and Ethel Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Jeanne Reynal, and the famed art critic Harold Rosenberg to name a few. His various studios, in both the East and West Village, became central meeting places and Hare found himself part of a community of artists that would soon be recognized as the New York School. As one of the key players in the attempt to define this burgeoning art movement in American, Hare, along with Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Baziotes, founded the Subjects of the Artists School in 1948, a discussion group that focused on the pressing issues of contemporary art. Later he was an initial member of the Eighth Street Artists Club, which would be instrumental in defining Abstract Expressionism.

In the early 1960s, at the height of his renown as a sculptor, Hare took the unusual but important step of starting to paint. He described his move to painting: “I really didn’t want to stop making sculpture—it wasn’t that I lost interest in sculpture, but I got tired of being limited to an object.” The benefit of painting to him was that “there are certain things you absolutely cannot express in three dimensions. . . . And painting doesn’t exist; it’s not there. So you don’t have to fight the reality.”  Over the course of more than a decade Hare obsessed over, worked through and again, a series paintings and drawings surrounding the Cronus myth. The culmination of this work was a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1977, cite d by critic Harold Rosenberg as one of the most important shows of the year.

But Hare was nothing if not an independent spirit. His prescient comments during the important artists’ roundtable discussion in 1950, “Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35,” would set the tone for the later part of his career:

“The artist is a man who functions beyond or ahead of his society. In any case, seldom within it.... Some feel badly because they are not accepted by the public. We shouldn’t be accepted by the public. As soon as we are accepted we are no longer artists but decorators.. . . [The public] may agree in the course of years. They won’t agree now.”

In accordance with his earlier convictions, following his Guggenheim show Hare largely retreated out of the public eye, content in the last two decades of his life to paint and sculpt that his own vision commanded, moving eventually from his New York studio to live almost exclusively in the wilderness peace of his Idaho home, leaving the task of a full understanding of the work to later generations. 

It is with this prediction in mind that Weinstein Gallery is especially proud to present this five-decade retrospective of this art pioneer. Hare made his own world and forged his own path as he grew older and more mature as an artist. Hare was a major figure in two of the most important art movements of the twentieth century, and then like other great artists used that energy as fuel for the rest of his career where he set out an independent course that took him perhaps farther from the art world but closer to himself. These works are rich and difficult, forceful and honest, playful and smart, fierce and kind—an exact reflection of David Hare, an artist at home in the world yet delightfully free from it.

VIEW THE EXHIBITION AND CATALOGUE ONLINE 

http://www.weinstein.com/hare/david-hare.html

For more information contact Kendy Genovese

Weinstein Gallery    383 Geary Street   San Francisco  CA 94102

415-362-8151  kendy@weinstein.com