Biography
Charles Houghton Howard (b. Montclair, New Jersey, USA 1899 - d. Bagni di Lucca, Italy 1978) was one of the vanguards of American artists who introduced European surrealism and biomorphic expressionism into the American art world. His work is not only a surrealistic representation of the mind’s journey into the unconscious, but also an exploration of the sensing and feeling of self. Howard was the third son of a prominent family of architects, painters, and sculptors. When he was three his father, a successful architect in New York, moved the family to Berkeley, California, where he had been appointed supervising architect at the University of California. After graduating from Berkeley High School, Howard enrolled in the University of California and immediately joined the SATC (Students’ Army Training Corps), with which he served until the WWI armistice in 1918. He re-entered the University of California in 1919 focusing on journalism. With hopes of one day being a writer, Howard continued his education with graduate studies in Journalism and English on the East Coast.Determined to utilise his education in writing, Howard moved to Paris, where many American expatriates gathered to practice their art. Howard flung himself into that atmosphere and met painter Grant Wood, who “preached” the superiority of painting over words to Howard during their summer-long tour in Italy. This experience, coupled with Howard’s self-proclaimed life-altering encounter with a Giorgione altarpiece in Venice, encouraged him to return to New York City and begin painting.Howard had no formal training in art he simply began to draw and paint, learning the basic techniques as a journeyman painter in the New York studios of Louis Bouche and Rudolph Guertler. Living in Greenwich Village, Howard spent his spare time creating satirical literary sketches which became the subject of his first one-man show at Whitney Studio Club in 1926. Later his work was included in the landmark exhibition by the influential art dealer Julien Levy that introduced European surrealism to the United States. There were only two other Americans in the show, Man Ray and Joseph Cornell.In 1934 Howard married British painter Madge Knight and moved to London, England. Prior to the outbreak of WWII London was a centre for all types of international avant-garde artists. Howard soon became involved in London’s advanced artistic circles, and shortly after his arrival assisted the painter Edward Wadsworth on a mural for the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill. Through Wadsworth, Howard became associated with Unit One, a vanguard group of painters, sculptors, and architects influenced by tenets of Surrealism and Constructivism. Active with the English Surrealists, Howard participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition held at the New Burlington Galleries and later had a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim-Jeune Gallery in London. It was during this time that Howard developed the equilibrium that characterized his art as “a balance between reasoned construction and free intuition.1With the outbreak of World War II, Howard and Knight moved back to the family compound in the Bay Area, which had become a wartime oasis for the international avant-garde. Howard became an important catalyst for art in the region, introducing European abstract surrealist expressionist approaches to the local artists. He was very influential in the art community, acting as designing supervisor of the Works Progress Administration and lecturing on surrealism in a series with Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and the poet Georges Lemaitre at the California School of Fine Arts in 1945.During his stay in the Bay Area from 1940 to 1946, Howard’s art gained national recognition. His paintings were included in Dorothy Miller’s show Americans 1942: Eighteen Artists from nine Statesat the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Peggy Guggenheim’s inaugural exhibition at her Art of This Century Gallery that same year. Grace McCann Morley, director of the San Francisco Museum of Art, and Douglas MacAgy, director of the California School of Fine Arts, were also major supporters of Howard’s work through various exhibitions and writings. MacAgy’s wife, Jermayne MacAgy, organized Howard’s 1946 retrospective at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, where she was the acting director. During this time Howard’s art gained great support from prominent figures in the art world.While in San Francisco Howard made an artistic transformation. While working in a shipyard during the war, Howard was greatly influenced by the streamlined forms of the Victory ships and the shapes of twisted metal. At the same time Howard began delving into books on biology. The result of this convergence could be seen as his work began to integrate the metallic with the biological. His creations were noted to have a calm and cerebral beauty that appeared to be spiritually allied with the work of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. In 1946 Howard moved back to England and settled in Helions Bumpstead, Suffolk, where he continued his art creations and began to develop an austere minimalism, using primarily black, white, and gray paints. He continued to exhibit widely while teaching at the Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts in London. After six years of teaching, Howard retired and moved to Bagni di Lucca, Italy, where he died on November 11th 1978. As an artist Howard earned his place in American art history from his biological machinery abstractions and biomorphic paintings. He will also be remembered for helping to introduce European surrealism into the United States.
