Sculptured world of Robert Howard
Robert Howard remains a vigorous, strapping figure — a man who “lived on a motorcycle” when he was in his teens, and a little more than a decade ago wrote an account for The Chronicle of a back-pack trip he made that summer along the border of Kings Canyon National Park.
Now he is helping greet visitors to a show at his studio, at 521 Francisco street. Curated by Paule Anglim and Phil Linhares, it is not an exhibition in the formal sense, but an opportunity for people to poke around the working space of one of the country’s foremost sculptors, and the Bay Region’s most durably creative artists.
To be sure, there are plenty of major pieces scattered through the two adjoining studios that Howard designed during the 1930s — one for his late wife, Adaline Kent — and the tiny garden, with its miniature redwood grove, that nests behind the twin spaces.
Following the recent death of Alexander Calder, one’s attention perhaps inevitably focuses on Howard’s mobile — the elegant “seed pod”: the sleek organic forms that coalesce to suggest some prehistoric bird in flight; the tiny, matchstick like construction that seems so delicate the slightest touch might ruin it.
Howard was a long-time friend of Calder’s, and their mobiles undoubtedly share a common source in Mìro. They share also a deft balance of humor and grace, but Howard’s sculptures rarely approach Calder’s degree of abstraction; almost always they retain a strong reference to a biomorphic image, such as the masterful mobile that looks like a suspended group of enlarged and streamlined chicken bones, and this becomes an integral part of their inspired wit.
Besides mobiles that are designed to move in the wind, Howard has spent most of his career creating articulated sculptures that the viewer is invited to activate by hand (and one can’t resist nudging these pieces, even when they are displayed in the don’t touch setting of a museum); by foot (a pilaster clam shell, made in 1971, raises its upper lid via a pedal to reveal pearls nested within); or that bob crazily around on water, exemplified by a barnacle-like creation that sets in an old barrel in the backyard.
Such pieces as these — their idiosyncratic organic forms, their sheer humor and vitality — undoubtedly had their effect on younger sculptures like Jeremy Anderson back in the days when Howard was teaching up the hill at the old California School of Fine arts — and that means on the entire course of Bay Region sculpture of the past three decades.
In recent years, Howard himself has focused on a magnificent series of larger than life nude figures in translucent polyesters — monumental in scale and form, feather-light in feeling — in which movement is suggested with the most stringent economy of attitude or gesture.
As fascinating as the sculptures are, however, the drawings, the old photographs, the memorabilia and “found objects” that crown the studio in a kind of ordered clutter — are a veritable treasure-house of insights into many of the thoughts and interests and curiosities that somehow take esthetic form in Howard’s sculptures.
There are schematic drawings and diagrams that focus strictly on the practical engineering of a joint or socket, tight, crisp little ink drawings that deal with the imaginative transformations of images: studies that center on the sheer abstraction of form, and humorous sketches that border on cartoons — in short, the drawings tend to concentrate individually on the various characteristics that are all fused together in Howard’s finished pieces.
Other sketches demonstrate Howard’s curiosity about optical illusion, and still another, his studies of symbolism. There is a marvelous old photograph showing one of the Christmas parties that used to take place in Howard’s studio.
As Alfred Frankenstein pointed out in these columns recently, Robert Howard is one member of an extraordinary family of Bay Region artists that included not only his wife, but his father, architect John Galen Howard, and three brothers and their wives. This would seem like a natural subject for a fullfledged museum show someday.
In recent years, Howard has focused on a magnificent series of larger than life nude figures in translucent polyesters — monumental in scale and form, feather-light in feeling.