Hare, David

Hare, David (1917–1992). American sculptor, painter, and photographer, born in New York. He initially studied chemistry and had no formal training in art, which he approached as a form of experimentation. In the late 1930s he worked as a commercial photographer and in about 1940 he began to experiment with the technique of ‘heatage’ (gently heating the emulsion of a photographic plate so that it melted and the image flowed). His interest in this technique (pioneered by Raoul Ubac) brought him into contact with the European Surrealists who had moved to New York to escape the Second World War, and Hare founded and edited the Surrealist magazine VVV, which ran from June 1942 to February 1944. In 1942 he began to make sculpture, using a variety of materials and showing a typically Surrealist interest in visual puns. From 1944 he had many one-man shows, the first at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery. In 1948 he was one of the founders of the Subjects of the Artist School; the other four founders were leading Abstract Expressionist painters and Hare's sculptures have been seen as three-dimensional analogues of their work. From 1948 to 1953 he lived in France. By the time he returned to New York he was working mainly in metal—welded or cast. In the 1960s he took up painting, but he returned to sculpture as his main medium in the 1970s.