Charles Howard

First War Winter, 1939-40, SFMOMA

Brown-shingle Berkeley has been home to many artists, and at the dawn of the 20^th century, a whole family of them lived on Ridge Road. Imagine the dinner conversation when the Howard clan gathered—father John Galen Howard, architect of UC Berkeley; his wife Mary, a noted watercolorist; and sons Henry, John Langley, and Robert—all artists married to artists. Perhaps hoping to distinguish himself, son Charles opted for journalism. But in Castelfranco, a small town north of Venice, he was so moved by a picture by Renaissance master Giorgione that art became his vocation. In 1931, when Surrealism arrived in America in an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, it included the work of just two Americans--Man Ray and Charles Howard.

Howard’s works were widely exhibited in the 1930s; Peggy Guggenheim invited him to exhibit in the inaugural exhibit at her Art of This Century gallery in 1942. Despite some obvious characteristics of Surrealism, Howard’s works always landed a bit outside the box, governed by a sense of order and logic that he had responded to in Giorgione. Howard himself described Surrealism as “strange but not mysterious”; his work is more connected to biological than psychological states, and fuses those two eternally opposing forces, order and chaos.

Howard’s abstract, biomorphic forms feature vaguely representational imagery, often landscapes in a state of metamorphosis. Often dark, his works somehow put the viewer at ease. He claimed at one point that his paintings “are in fact all portraits of the same general subject, of the same idea, carried as far as I am able at the time.” He never disclosed what that idea might be, though.

Howard spent the war years in San Francisco, a town hungering for sophisticated modern art, and his arrival spurred the development of local abstraction. But perhaps because Howard straddles Surrealism and abstraction, or perhaps because he moved so often between Europe and the US, he was never considered one of the powerhouse artists of his era. San Francisco’s Legion of Honor organized a retrospective of Howard’s work in 1946; no American museum followed suit until 2017, when the Berkeley Art Museum brought this UCB alum to contemporary notice in A Margin of Chaos.

After the war, Howard returned to England. While art was being reborn in New York, Howard and his wife were tucked up in a thatched cottage in Helions Bumpstead, Essex. They eventually spent half the year in Tuscany, where Howard died in 1978.