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, 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). The historical record confirms Hare’s importance in shaping Surrealism in America and making it a source for the birth of Abstract Expressionism. Between 1948 and 1953, Hare lived in Paris, where he became the American editor for Sartre and De Beauvoir’s journal, Les Temps modernes. As early as 1946, in an issue dedicated to America and American writers, Hare contributed an essay entitled ‘Comics’, which explored the surrealists’ fascination with this new genre. Sartre, despite his attacks on the surrealists for their failure to stay and fight in the Resistance, developed a relationship with Hare and admired his work, writing of his sculpture, “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). In this paper, I examine the visual art and writing of Hare and Sartre, in terms of their movement philosophy, as each grapple with “the perpetual bypassing of the object by the mind,” in contrast to the materialist hope shared with André Breton in Nadja that “all of the beyond is here in this life.”
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, Jean Paul Sartre, Surrealism, Existentialism, Literature as Philosophy
