Howard Hack

Early life and education

Hack was born July 6, 1932, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and moved with his family to Oakland, California, in 1939. As a youth, Hack established himself among San Francisco’s North Beach artists, exhibiting paintings at Vesuvio Cafe and The Coffee Gallery. Between 1950-1953, Hack learned Flemish techniques from Martin Baer, who had studied in Munich and Paris. Hack attended California College of Arts and Crafts and the San Francisco Art Institute in this period, as well as studying with Yasuo Kuniyoshi at Mills College in the summer of 1949. In 1953, Hack was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to Korea where he served as a truck driver and battalion clerk-typist (S-1).

Career

Upon returning to the U.S., Hack resumed painting, using images from his stay in Korea, and scenes from Oakland. Hack occupied studio space and lived in the Spreckels Mansion, also known as the Ghost House (1150 Franklin Street, San Francisco), along with other artists, including Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, and Hayward King. From the Ghost House Hack attended the gathering at the nearby Six Gallery (the Six Gallery Reading at 3119 Fillmore Street, San Francisco), where poet Alan Ginsberg debuted his poem Howl on October 7, 1955. Between 1957 and 1959, Hack lived primarily in San Miguel de Allende, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, a haven adopted by American artists and bohemians after WWII. In 1959, Hack returned to the United States, enrolling as a philosophy undergraduate at the University of San Francisco. At USF Hack studied the theories of the neo-Kantian idealist philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), in particular his concepts of symbolism.

The Audiffred Building

In 1959, after a referral by Beat poet and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Hack rented studio space with other artists on the third floor of the Audiffred Building located at 9 Mission Street in San Francisco. The artists included Frank Lobdell, Hassel Smith, Sonia Gechtoff, Madeline Dimond, Philip Roeber, Manuel Neri, and Joan Brown. Despite eviction efforts mounted in 1971, Hack alone used this studio space until 1978, completing some of his most notable oil paintings and silverpoints. In 2013, Hack donated the door from his Audiffred studio (salvaged in 1978), signed by artists who had worked on the premises, to the Beat Museum in San Francisco’s North Beach.

Major exhibitions

In 1967, the M.H. De Young Museum, San Francisco, exhibited Hack’s “Window Series,” oil paintings depicting scenes from San Francisco’s South of Market area designated for demolition. In his review of the show San Francisco Chronicle art critic Alfred Frankenstein referred to the works as “magic realism,” a phrase coined in 1943 by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of the New York Museum of Modern Art. (In her “Foreword and Acknowledgment” to the MoMA catalog for the exhibition Realists and Magic Realism, Dorothy Canning Miller referred to Barr’s definition of magic realism as “a term sometimes applied to painters who by means of an exact realistic technique try to make plausible and convincing their improbable dreamlike or fantastic visions.”) Frankenstein noted: “Hack has lived for a long time with the moods of windows…. (T)hey display for him the humble machinery of everyday living - shoemaker’s equipment, the chairs and cabinets of a barber shop, a tailor’s padded pressing iron – always silent, always at rest, intensified to the highest degree by isolation and close scrutiny. But his collection of Sunday morning glimpses into little offbeat shops is neither a social document, in the manner of Edward Hopper, nor a celebration of the mechanized, in the style of Charles Sheeler. It is a document of Howard Hack’s perceptions, reactions, and experiments.” In 1981, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor presented a collection of works in silverpoint by Howard Hack. The show’s catalog curator Robert Flynn Johnson wrote: “What will people think of Howard Hack’s art one hundred years from now? What will they think of the time, patience and concentration necessary to create these works? What will they think of his seductive style and idiosyncratic subject matter? I believe that Howard Hack’s art will age far more gracefully than the strained and artistic fashions that currently strut upon the stage of history. Time will tell.” In San Francisco, Howard Hack was represented by several galleries, including Richard Gump’s and John Bolles. In New York, Hack’s works were sold through Lee Nordness Gallery. His studio was left abandoned for more than 15 years, but sold in 2016 for 1.5 million dollars despite decrepit conditions.

Solo

Information regarding One-Person Shows, Group Exhibitions, Collections, Awards and Prizes for Howard Hack is drawn primarily from the catalog for Howard Hack: Silverpoint Drawing Series, 1967 - 1981, An Exhibition organized by the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor (1981).

Group

Collections

Hack's works are in private collections and the following public and institutional collections:

Awards and prizes