Abstract
David Hare (1917-1992) came to prominence as an artist during the 1940s, when André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, Max Ernst, Kurt Seligmann, Salvador Dali, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, and other artists fleeing Nazi-occupied France arrived in New York. Hare, only twenty-four, became the managing editor of Breton’s journal, VVV (1942-1944). His leadership role in this movement as editor and artist in various genres is unique and deserves a reassessment.
The historical record confirms Hare’s importance in shaping Surrealism in America and making it a source for the birth of Abstract Expressionism (by adapting its premises to an American landscape), yet his demotion by powerful art critic, Clement Greenberg, in his review of Hare’s major retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1977, who proclaimed the artist’s use of myth as passé and codified pure abstraction in art, would lead to shrinking scholarship of a major artist and artworks lacking in ideas. Sartre had written of Hare’s work, “Each figure is hidden in its own shell…graceful and comical, mobile and congealed, realist and magical, indivisible and contradictory, showing simultaneously the mind which has become an object and the perpetual bypassing of the object by the mind” (N-Dimensional Sculpture, 1947).
Hare’s sculpture, paintings, drawings and prints often use myth to examine the relationship between space and figure. My goal here is to examine this relationship, but also the politics of genre in an increasingly post-disciplinary age, which since Foucault and Derrida has come to question by whose authority the parameters limits are established. .
Presenters
Barbara LekatsasProfessor of Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature, Languages & Linguistics, Hofstra University, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
David Hare, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, American Art, Genre, Post-disciplinarity
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