b. Montclair, NJ, 1899
d. Bagni di Lucca, Italy, 1978
Charles Houghton Howard was a self-taught artist associated with American Surrealism and a significant figure in American modernism. Active in New York, London, and the San Francisco Bay Area, Howard developed a meticulous approach to compositions suggesting the metamorphosis of forms floating in voids.
Howard enrolled in the University of California and joined the Students’ Army Training Corps, with which he served until the WWI armistice in 1918. He re-entered the University of California in 1919 focusing on journalism. Howard continued his education with graduate studies in Journalism and English at Harvard and Columbia Universities before embarking on a two-year trip to Europe.
Howard decided to pursue painting after seeing a picture by Giorgione in a remote town outside of Venice. He returned to the United States in 1925, where he joined the decorating workshop of Louis Bouché and Rudolph Guertler and specialized in mural painting. During this time, Howard lived in Greenwich Village and immersed himself in the downtown avant-garde. In 1932, curator and dealer Julien Levy included Howard's work in the landmark "Surréalisme" exhibition, which helped introduce the term into the American mainstream.
Howard returned to London, where he married the English artist Madge Knight and became associated with Unit One, a group of modernist painters, sculptors, and architects defined by its members’ commitment to abstract and surrealist art. Howard participated in the landmark International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London, in 1936, the first show of Surrealism to be held in England, In 1939, Peggy Guggenheim mounted a solo Howard show at her London gallery, Guggenheim-Jeune.
Howard returned to San Francisco in 1940 at the beginning of World War II, working in a ship yard, as an Editor in the Office of War Information in San Francisco, and teaching painting at the California School of Fine Arts. Howard was included in the landmark Americans 1942 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and that same year he participated in the inaugural exhibition of Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century. In 1946, Howard’s work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition of thirty-three oils and a number of gouaches and drawings at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, among others.
