Making Room: Works from the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection

(Smithsonian American Art Museum)
At age eighteen Hack moved to San Francisco where he became closely allied with the Bay Area Figuration movement of the 1950s and 1960s. A summer student of Yasuo Kuniyoshi at Mills College, Hack also studied intermittently at the California College of Arts and Crafts in the late 1940s and 1950s, and in 1962 earned a B.S. in philosophy from the University of San Francisco. During the early 1960s Hack painted the simplified shapes of pavement markings and manhole lids using a heavily impastoed technique. In the mid 1960s he began portraying the old office windows and storefronts along picturesque Mission Street near his studio in a series that provides an early link between Bay Area Figuration and Photorealism, its late-1960s offshoot. In the smoothly painted window series Hack explored opacity and translucence of light and color and the dichotomy of real versus reflected imagery. More recently he has worked with graphic media, including silverpoint drawings and blueprints.

Howard Hack moved to San Francisco when he was eighteen and studied art and philosophy. In the mid-1960s, he began his Window series, a group of paintings that show distorted views through office and store windows near his studio. He played with light and reflection to emphasize groups of inanimate objects, in which human presence is merely suggested by the occasional dusty fingerprint.

(From Obituary - legacy.com)
Mr. Hack's career spanned seven decades, beginning in the late 1940s when as a teenager he first exhibited paintings at Vesusio Cafe and the The Coffee Gallery in North Beach.

Between 1950-1953, Mr. Hack attended California College of Arts and Crafts and the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as training independently in Flemish oil painting technique with Martin Baer. He also studied 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.

Upon returning to the U.S., Mr. Hack resumed painting, occupying studio space in the Spreckels Mansion, also known as the Ghost House, 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, where poet Alan Ginsberg debuted his poem Howl on October 7, 1955. Between 1957 and 1959, Hack lived in San Miguel de Allende, where he refined his painting style with works featuring Mexican religious and market scenes. Mr. Hack returned to the United States, enrolling as an undergraduate at the University of San Francisco (B.A. philosophy 1962).

In 1959, with a referral by Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Mr. Hack rented studio space with other artists on the third floor of the Audiffred Building in San Francisco. The artists included Frank Lobdell, Hassel Smith, Sonia Gechtoff, Madeline Dimond, Philip Roeber, Manuel Neri, and Joan Brown. Mr. Hack remained in the Audiffred Building until 1978, completing some of his most notable oil paintings and silverpoints.

In 1967, the M.H. De Young Museum, San Francisco, exhibited Mr. Hack's "Window Series," oil paintings depicting scenes from San Francisco's South of Market. In his review of the show, San Francisco Chronicle art critic Alfred Frankenstein used the phrase of New York Museum of Modern Art founding director Alfred H. Barr, when he praised the works as "magic realism."

In 1981, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor presented a collection of Mr. Hack's silverpoints. 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 the Richard Gump and John Bolles galleries. In New York, Hack's works were sold through Lee Nordness Gallery.

Mr. Hack's works are represented in the collections of numerous museums, including the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, San Francisco, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., Oakland Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Sara Robey Foundation, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Data researched and input by Anne Savage, 2020.