David Hare

David Hare is best known as a sculptor and was a member of the first generation of New York School artists. Hare was born in New York City and grew up in a family of artists. His mother, Elizabeth Sage Goodwin, was an art collector and supporter of the Armory Show of 1913, and his uncle, Philip Goodwin, was a trustee and original architect of the Museum of Modern Art. During the 1930s, while living in Roxbury, Connecticut, Hare worked as a color photographer and met artists such as Alexander Calder, Arshile Gorky, and Yves Tanguy.

In New York Hare continued as a photographer, operating a commercial photography studio, but during the early 1940s he became fully engaged with Surrealism, working with Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp in editing the Surrealist magazine VVV. In 1948 David Hare was a founding member, together with William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko of The Subjects for Artist School in New York. This same year, Hare moved to Paris where he met Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. David Hare returned to New York in 1953, but spent the next two summers in Paris.

Though Hare had no formal training in art, he started making abstract sculpture inspired by Surrealist forms and motifs. His sculpture was composed of biomorphic forms combined in complex arrangements with symbolic overtones. Hare received wide-acclaim for his work, and he began exhibiting at leading New York galleries, including Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century and at the Samuel Kootz Gallery. While Hare's sculptures of the mid-1940s were usually made of plaster; Hare later worked in bronze and welded metals like iron & steel. Hare was also active as a teacher, holding positions at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore and the New York Studio School. Hare's works were exhibited in the United States and in Europe, and collected by many art museums, including the Guggenheim, MoMA, Smithsonian, Whitney and the Metropolitan. Hare is an extremely important sculptor in many collections around the world.