THE CRONUS SERIES DAVID HARE
Cover illustration:
David Hare (1917-1992)
Cronus Asleep in the Cave (detail), 1971
Acrylic on linen
55 x 67 inches
All rights reserved, 2024. This catalog may not be reproduced in whole or in any part, in any form or by any means both electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of Lincoln Glenn.
Essay © Mona Hadler.
Catalog design and photography by Clanci Jo Conover.
David Hare, by an Unknown Photographer, 1942, courtesy David Hare Estate
Foreword
We are honored for our inaugural exhibition on the artist David Hare (19171922) and the artist’s Cronus series. This exhibition marks a significant milestone as it is not only the first time our gallery is exhibiting David Hare, but also our initial foray into the realm of Surrealism. We are privileged to present this collection of Hare's works, offering a unique glimpse into his profound artistic vision of Cronus, a series that has not been exhibited in such a focused manner since Hare's solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1977. As the editor of the Surrealist magazine VVV, Hare was a pivotal figure in the global Surrealist movement. His progressive views on gender and sexuality, as reflected in his art, resonate deeply in today's discourse on LGBTQ and transgender issues, reminding us that the exploration of gender fluidity is far from a contemporary phenomenon.
Hare's work in the Cronus Series delves into the rich tapestry of mythological themes, combined with a deep, introspective quest for understanding the human condition. This exhibition not only celebrates Hare's artistic achievements but also highlights his enduring relevance in today's society.
This exhibition is personal for us as it is the first in a series exhibition at our gallery dedicated to Surrealism, with a survey on Gerome Kamrowski set to follow this fall and an exhibition of paintings by female surrealist Juanita Guccione scheduled for early 2025. These forthcoming exhibitions will further illuminate the diverse and innovative contributions of Surrealist artists in the mosaic of 20th century American Art.
We extend our deepest gratitude to the David Hare Estate for granting us the exclusive opportunity to present these remarkable works. Our heartfelt thanks also goes to Michael Harrison, whose expertise and enthusiasm have been instrumental in bringing this exhibition to life. Additionally, we are immensely grateful to Mona Hadler for her invaluable assistance in writing our catalogue essay and her decades of dedicated research on David Hare.
We invite you to immerse yourself in the enigmatic and captivating world of David Hare's Cronus series, and we hope this exhibition inspires a deeper appreciation for the timeless and transformative power of art.
Warmly,
Doug Gold & Eli SterngassDavid Hare’s Cronus Series Revisited
by Mona HadlerThe painter Carroll Dunham was stopped in his tracks by the goofy strangeness of William Baziotes’s 1947 “little gimlet-eyed monster” Dwarf, which Carroll described as “like us: asymmetrical, unformed, unreal and yet somehow loveable.”1 How do we look at David Hare today? Hare and Baziotes knew each other well, exhibited together, and both had deep roots in Surrealism.2 How do we situate Hare’s monstrous, sexual, surreal amalgams of animals and humans and polyvalent couplings? He was, after all, one of the few artists of the Abstract Expressionist circle,3 along with Willem de Kooning, to support Philip Guston’s “hard left turn,” to quote Carroll again (whose abjectly humorous work travels in the surreal). It is time to look again at Hare’s own left turn in light of current discourses on Surrealism, formalism, the monstrous, the comic grotesque, radical sexuality, animal studies, and transgressive couplings.
In Hare’s 1971 painting Cronus Descending, a strange creature stares out at the viewer with prominent eyes, sharp teeth, and a quizzical look of the comic grotesque. This monstrous being emerges from the chthonic darkness where the subterranean Cronus resides (see Cronus Asleep in the Cave, 1971). They slip genders while commingling the human and animal with the landscape.
Compositionally organized by a cross within a cross, the piercing eyes of the vertical “figure” can be read alternatively as the breasts of a woman whose legs are spread horizontally. Conversely, as Hare himself has explained, a prone man dominates the composition with a central erection.4 In yet another iteration—Cronus Elephant of 1975—the rising phallus morphs again into an animal trunk. Here, as elsewhere, Hare confuses boundaries and disturbs hierarchies.
The myth of Cronus, which inspired over 250 of Hare’s works for a decade beginning in the late 1960s, is a particularly savage tale involving castration, cannibalism, and filicide. Cronus, the primordial Titan, swallowed his children to guarantee his continued reign, a transgression immortalized in Francisco de Goya’s image of
Saturn devouring his young (1820–1823)—a painting well known to Hare.5 Hare was drawn to this brutal myth in particular and as part of the larger appeal of mythology in the postwar era. He had read and was inspired by Carl Jung like many others in the “mythic 1940s,” as the early Abstract Expressionist years were often called. But Hare’s continuing preoccupation with myth places him even more squarely within the Surrealist group, whom he knew well working with and for André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst as the editor of the Surrealist magazine VVV in the early 1940s. As he said in the 1970s:
These artists were the first that I met when I was a young man. This was the first telescope that I was given. I changed the lenses and adjusted the focus to a lesser or greater extent for my own purposes. It doesn’t work in exactly the same way, nor look quite like it did when it was first given to me, but I suppose I still find it basically more interesting than other telescopes I’ve come across.6
The profound impact of Surrealism on Hare, as quoted above, was noted to his detriment by critics. When Clement Greenberg, who was no fan of Surrealism, wrote a review on Hare for The Nation in 1946, he singled out Hare’s use of “Gothic Surrealism” and, in a totalizing and unabashedly negative statement, he labeled Hare’s art the “most intensely Surrealist art I have ever seen.”7 This statement speaks to Surrealism’s increasingly marginalized position in postwar formalist criticism in the United States in light of the growing ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism. But it needs to be recontextualized to revisionist thinking today, where Surrealism has been widely touted for its global and enduring reach. As the curators of the major exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2021 prove, Surrealism was not a passing moment in Paris and New York that “faded to the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism”8 but a transnational, revolutionary movement that continued throughout the late 1970s and arguably through to today. As 2024 marks the one hundredth anniversary of Breton’s 1924 “Surrealist Manifesto,” we are witnessing a plethora of exhibitions and books testifying to the continued relevance of Surrealist ideas, including those on politics, convulsive beauty, freedom, and the transformative, liberatory importance of the unconscious in the creative process.
Hare’s years as the editor of VVV introduced him to Surrealist thinking just when Breton was struggling to present mythology as a relevant antidote to the alienation and nihilism of the postwar condition.9 Hare lived through a period that both demonized and asserted the importance of myth. The Nazi’s insidious employment of myth was never far from the mindset of the Surrealist emigres who had suffered immeasurably from fascism’s pernicious fallout. Even Roland Barthes in his Mythologies, begun in 1952, characterized the mythical as a “dangerous ideological operation by which historically construed significations suddenly appear natural and eternal.”10 Nonetheless, the Surrealists were arguably, at this point in their
trajectory, engaged in studies of myths rather than individual villains in their attempt to understand violence.11 Hare’s photograph Hidden Fundamental is, after all, included in Breton’s 1942 montage work On the Survival of Certain Myths and on Certain Others in Growth or Formation under the heading Les Grands Transparents, which was Breton’s foray into a new mythology for the day. Myths, for the Surrealists, were believed to express something crucial that we all have in common and were therefore central to a discourse on community. At the same time, as Nikolaj Lübecker proposes, the poetic element of myth made it attractive to artists and writers—particularly those in the Surrealist circles (Lübecker includes Hare) who found a modicum of agency in these ideas.12 Hare gravitated to myth for its engagement with primal forces that transcended autobiography and, like sexuality, combatted alienation. Myths were open-ended sources of inspiration.13
Hare was drawn to Surrealism as an attitude of mind, not for its anti-imperialist agenda. In multiple interviews he described Surrealism as the real beyond the real and automatism as a conduit to the chaos and dark humor that troubled a veneer of rationality: “Outside of what you know is chaos and like a curtain if you go out you are crazy, incurably insane. If you reach through it and pull out little pieces and try to make a coherent work of art,” you continually “widen the horizons of mankind.”14
Having read the nineteenth-century author, the Comte de Lautréamont, and being conversant with Surrealist writings on dark humor, Hare repeatedly claimed that you could not have imagination without a feeling for evil, saying at one point: “One advantage in art is that you can commit murder in art and nobody suffers for it.”15
In a 1968 panel at The Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with their exhibition on Dada and Surrealism, Hare listed ambiguity, “the subliminal stuffing beyond apparent capacity” and “black humor, a sturdy defense against tragedy and chaos,” as two of the most critical and enduring elements of Surrealism.16 Hare extended these ideas to American pulp comics, which he devoured and wrote about as the Surrealists had done with crime novels.17
The brutal myth of Cronus in Hare’s hands is populated by monsters and laden with dark humor. He used the name monster for several works in the series and described others as monstrous, claiming that a monster is only frightening because we don’t know what it is—it is misunderstood.18 Mary Russo begins her important study of the female grotesque with words that resonate with Hare’s production. The word grotesque itself, “evokes the cave—the grotto-esque. Low, hidden, earthly, dark, material, immanent, visceral.”19 Monsters, for Hare, are shapeshifters. Like in Cronus Descending, they morph genders, can be born human and transform into animals, or vice versa, and they are strangely humorous: qualities extolled by Jean-Paul Sartre, who found Hare’s metamorphic forms forced an active process of viewing. The monsters’ humor is not satirical but that of the comic grotesque, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s terminology. Hare’s monsters are abject, ludicrous images in the spirit of Lautréamont or Bakhtin that recoil from love and liberation as conceived by Breton in L’Amour Fou (1937). 4
Hare identified with animals, finding himself in wolves, elephants, and, of course, hares; in this regard, he was like Lautréamont who had animalized his fictional hero Maldoror in his writings hundreds of times. Both eschewed a playful anthropomorphism akin to the talking animals in popular cartoons. Animals and humans exchange parts and consciousness in the Cronus series in a manner that fits contemporary animal studies and, in turn, upsets the dominance and privilege of humans. As Steve Baker writes in The Postmodern Animal, “Neither the aesthetics of modernism, nor the philosophical values of humanism, it is believed, can cope easily with hybrid forms which unsettle boundaries, especially the boundaries of the human and non-human.”21 A wide range of scholars follow this line of reasoning, from Donna Haraway (who includes technology) to others who theorize a form of monsterology as an escape from limiting notions of morality. Hare too found the monstrous liberating.22
Cronus eats his loved ones, not to destroy them as Hare explains, but to become them—to possess what you love.23 The eyes of Cronus Descending twinkle with carnivalesque humor in a Bakhtinian sense, as he mischievously chomps down on his nonbinary prey that sports an upright phallus and breasts of a woman. Another absurd Cronus monster with bright pink labia and a penile elephant trunk hunts for food in Cronus Hunting (1967). Hare, who titled a key work in the series Cronus Hermaphrodite (1970), was in line with some of the more progressive ideas of the 1960s and 1970s in his articulation of gender complexity. David Getsy in his recent writing on abstract art of the same period has argued for the deep ramifications for understanding sexuality from the vantage point of transsexual, transgender, and intersex politics.24 Although this activist position was separate from Hare’s own life experiences—he was known for and at times critiqued for his multiple marriages and numerous heteronormative affairs25 —his art accords with radical understandings of gender diversity. It pairs with other transgressive artists, such as Louise Bourgeois in her latex over plaster Fillette (1968), as a little girl and hanging phallus in one, and draws upon Surrealist works that breach gender norms including sculptures by his close friend Alberto Giacometti or the photos of Claude Cahun.26
The overt vulva imagery in Hare’s painting Erotic #1 (Cronus Sex) of 1970, while on some level objectifying and an extension of the sexism of much of the male Surrealists’ production, also belongs to the resurgence of sexual subject matter that Rachel Middleman chronicles in Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s. Middleman’s book focuses on the disruptive and transgressive use of such charged imagery in the hands of key feminist artists of the decade, but she places them in a broader context that circles Hare’s art, and particularly his Cronus series. Describing the succès de scandale of Sydney Janis’s 1966 exhibition Erotic Art ‘66, Middleman explains that the erotic caused waves not just from its titillating subject matter but from its affront to the dominant formalist criticism of the day by “challenging the notion of disinterested viewing, a foundational element of formalist art criticism.”27 Hare was definitely in sync with this project. Sexuality, he felt, made the work alive.
Surrealism was a form of liberation for Hare as it became for so many artists over the decades and in multiple regions “a source of intellectual, creative and political
freedom.”28 Surrealism helped liberate Hare from a formalist mandate in his circle. He had supported Guston’s courageous shift from abstraction to a darkly funny, deeply political, and irreverent rejection of Abstract Expressionism that paved the way for so much of painting today. If 2024 has heralded in a rash of shows on Surrealism, it has also brought to the center marginalized paintings of intensity that fall under the rubric of “retinal hysteria” and the comic grotesque.29 From the 1960s with Funk Art and the Hairy Who to Carroll Dunham’s painterly outrage of today, Hare’s vulgar and humorous border crossings might find their place in these raucous groups, far from Greenberg’s condemnation of his “Gothic Surrealism.”
Endnotes
1. Carroll Dunham, “One-Eyed Jack.” Artforum International 49, no. 10 (2011): 327.
2. When the author was interviewing Ethel Baziotes in the late 1970s about her husband’s art, she led me to Hare, whom she felt knew him well, was a kindred spirit, & understood him. For Baziotes and Surrealism, see Mona Hadler, “Baziotes, Surrealism, and Boxing: ‘Life in a Squared Ring,’” The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–1945 9, no. 1 (Dec. 2013): 119-138.
3. Hare was as a founding member of the Subjects of the Artist school whose lecture series established the precedent for the Club’s Friday evenings.
4. See: Mona Hadler, “David Hare’s Cronus Series,” Arts Magazine 53, no. 8 (April 1979): 140–145. Hare described these many readings of the painting in an interview with the author, New York, April 4, 1977. This is one of series of interviews that the author conducted with Hare in the late 1970s in New York City that are drawn upon for this text.
5. David Hare, interview with the author, New York, October 10, 1978.
6. David Hare, interview with the author, New York, April 4, 1977. This quote is cited in Hadler, “David Hare’s Cronus Series,” 140.
7. Clement Greenberg, “Art,” The Nation, Feb. 9, 1946: 176. The author has discussed this quote and Greenberg’s response to Hare in Mona Hadler, “David Hare, Surrealism, and the Comics,” The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945 7, no 1 (Dec. 2011): 93-108
8. Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, “The World in the Time of the Surrealists,” in Surrealism Beyond Borders, eds. Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021), 14.
9. Nikolaj Lübecker, Community, Myth and Recognition in Twentieth-Century French Literature and Thought (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009),72.
10. For Lübecker on Roland Barthes, see Lübecker, Community, Myth and Recognition, 52.
11. Jonathan P. Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2008), 242. There are many writings on the Surrealists’ and the Abstract Expressionists’ use of mythology as an engagement or retreat from the malaise of the day.
12. Lübecker, Community, Myth and Recognition, 2–3.
13. David Hare, interview with the author, New York, April 4, 1977.
14. David Hare, interview with the author, New York, April 26, 1975. See Hadler “Surrealism and the Comics,” 98.
15. David Hare, interview with the author, New York, April 26, 1975.
16. David Hare, “Dada and Surrealism” [transcript], David Hare Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
17. See Eburne, Surrealism and David Hare, “Comics,” Les Temps Modernes 1 (1946): 353–61. See also Hadler, “Surrealism and the Comics.” Robin Walz argues that the Surrealists wanted to release the fantastic elements from the crime novel with a carnivalesque strategy that operates outside of logic or moral framework and exploits impossible detours and violence: Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in the Early Twentieth-Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 42.
18. David Hare, interview with the author, New York, April 4, 1977.
19. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1.
20. See: Mona Hadler, “David Hare: A Magician’s Game in Context,” Art Journal 47, no. 3 (Fall l988): 198. Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay, “Sculptures à n dimensions,” appeared in Oct. 1947 in a four-page, unnumbered insert for Derrière le Miroir 5.
21. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaction Books Ltd, 2000), 99.
22. See the discussion in Baker, The Postmodern Animal, 101.
23. David Hare, interview with the author, New York, April 4, 1977. Hare purposefully dropped the idea of consuming children.
24. David Getsy, Abstract Bodies, Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 191-92. Getsy writes on John Chamberlain & other abstract artists of the era who differed from Hare’s commitment to forms of figuration.
25. See Salomon Grimberg’s discussion of the waning years of Hare’s marriage to Jacqueline Lamba in Salomon Grimberg, “Jacqueline Lamba: From Darkness with Light,” Woman’s Art Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2001): 11.
26. Shanay Jhaveri, “Bodies of Desire,” in D’Alessandro and Gale, Surrealism Beyond Borders, 253–54.
27. Rachel Middleman, Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 9.
28. D’Alessandro and Gale, “Time of the Surrealists,” 14.
29. For example, Robert Storr, who has written for decades on the carnivalesque, curated a large exhibition in 2024 at Venus Over Manhattan (a gallery in New York City), which he titled Retinal Hysteria and included artists like Carroll Dunham. This circle, with its vulgar humor, is perhaps a fitting home for Hare’s Cronus series.
Cronus Elephant , 1975
82 x 60 inches
Acrylic on linenCronus Hunting, 1967
Acrylic and paper collage on linen
68 x 53 inches
27 1/2 x 38 1/4 inches
Cronus Asleep in the Cave, 1971 Acrylic on board
Acrylic and paper collage on linen
68 x 51 inches
Acrylic on linen 55 x 67 inches
Cronus Dining (Night), 1971
Acrylic, ink, paper collage on paper on board
39 1/2 x 29 5/8 inches
Graphite, acrylic, paper collage on paper on board
44 x 34 inches
Cronus View from the Cave, 1971
Graphite, ink, wash, paper collage on paper on board 25 x 33 inches
