Charles Howard: Retrospective Exhibition 1925-1946, May 10-June 9, 1946

Charles Houghton Howard was born on January 2, 1899 in Montclair, New Jersey but his family moved to California in 1902 when his father took a position as supervising architect of the new University of California campus at Berkeley and to serve as Professor of Architecture and the first Dean of the School of Architecture (established in 1903). Charles and his four brothers all grew up to be artists who all married artists, leaving a family legacy of art in the San Francisco Bay, most notably in design, murals, and reliefs at the Coit Tower and in buildings on the Berkeley campus.

Charles graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1921 as a journalism major, and pursued graduate studies in English at Harvard University and Columbia University before embarking on a two-year trip to Europe. A near-religious experience seeing a picture by Giorgione in a remote town outside of Venice proved a life-altering epiphany which instantly convinced Howard to pursue painting. He returned to the United States in 1925, settling in New York City and supporting himself as a painter in the decorating workshop of Louis Bouché and Rudolph Guertler, where he specialized in mural painting. Devoting spare time to his own work, he lived in Greenwich Village and immersed himself in the downtown culture. The late 1920s and early 1930s were the years of Howard’s art apprenticeship, though he never pursued formal art instruction. He found inspiration in the modernist movements of the day, including Surrealism. He was part of a group of American and European Surrealists clustered around Julien Levy when he opened his gallery in 1931 and rose to fame in January 1932, when he organized and hosted Surrealisme, the first ever exhibition of Surrealism in America, which included one work by Howard.

In 1933, Howard left New York for London, England where he became associated with Unit One, a group of modernist painters, sculptors, and architects defined by its members’ commitment to abstract and surrealist art. Howard flourished in this environment. He participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London in 1936, the first show of Surrealism to be held in England. In 1939, Peggy Guggenheim mounted a solo Howard show at her London gallery Guggenheim-Jeune. Howard lived for seven years in London before returning to San Francisco in 1940 at the beginning of World War II. He worked as a ship-fitter in a wartime shipyard, served as an Editor in the Office of War Information in San Francisco, and taught painting at the California School of Fine Arts. He was included in the landmark Americans 1942 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and that same year he participated in the inaugural exhibition of Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century. This 1946 Legion of Honor retrospective exhibition of thirty-three oils and gouaches and drawings established Howard as a major figure in American modernism. The Legion would have another show of his work in 1953. He returned to England in 1946, eventually settling in Helions Bumpstead, a small village in northwest Essex. He quickly reengaged himself in the London art community that had nourished his career in the 1930s. From 1959 to 1963, he taught painting at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London. Howard remained in England until 1970 when he and his wife Madge retired to Bagni di Lucca, Italy, where he died on November 11, 1978.

Source: https://www.hirschlandadler.com/galleries/charles-howard