Howard Hack | Fine Artist | The Window Series

THE WINDOW SERIES
The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California
March l0 to April 17, 1967

According to Webster's Dictionary, a window is "an opening in a building, vehicle, ship, etc., for admitting light and air, usually having a pane or panes of glass, set in a frame or sash that is generally movable for opening or shutting it." Hack has changed all that. According to his paintings, a window can be a sounding board, the focus of a world, or the eye of revelation. Its opacities and dusty finger-tracks can record significant history; what it reflects can be as important as what it reveals; what it hides may be most important of all.

Hack has lived for a long time with the moods of windows. Often they 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.

Perspective is handled here in very exceptional ways, including its total abandonment. The sheer forms of the objects play a major role. The color has little to do with observed fact and everything to do with those subtle differences that make all the difference in any expression of major quality. The subject matter sometimes implies symbolic values for above the literal; the repeated return of some motifs, like the Cat's Paw sign and the mirrored weighing machine, is especially noteworthy in this respect.

Hack may suggest, as he does in more than one painting in the present show, that we perceive not reality but its reflection at multiple levels, and the less "real" the level, the more concentrated and powerful the image. But he is no tricky diabolist accusing us of our illusions. Behind everything he does, I, at least, find serenity - the serenity of an artist who lives in our world, understands it in his own way, and enriches our understanding both with what he demonstrates and what his demonstration implies.
- Alfred Frankenstein, 1967

THE WINDOW SERIES