HAROLD GARDE: A REAPPRAISAL OF AN IMPORTANT AMERICAN POST-WAR ARTIST
Photo Credit - Jack Mitchell
Stander 1995 Acrylic on canvas 55 "X 72"
Garde, who was born and raised in New York City, received his initial art education at the University of Wyoming through the GI Bill, where he studied with Ilya Bolotowsky, George McNeil and Leon Kelly. These artists exposed Garde to Geometric Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and Surrealism respectively. Upon his return to New York, he earned a Master of Fine Art and art education from Columbia and set about forging his own distinctive style, oscillating initially between gestural abstraction and figurative abstraction before settling most comfortably into the latter. He practiced at studios in New York, Belfast, Maine, and New Smyrna Beach, Florida until his death.
SCOPE Miami Beach 2023 and the Wyoming exhibitions offer opportunities to explore the highly emotional works of Garde, who was preoccupied with expressing the extraordinary variety of human experiences through his art. Arguably, Garde is best known in art circles as the developer of the revolutionary Strappo printmaking technique, whereby he transferred paintings made on glass or acrylic to paper after they dried. Many of these will be on view at both SCOPE and the University of Wyoming Art Museum. And various works that will be appearing at the museum will be available for pre-sale at SCOPE (50% of the sale price will be recorded as a donation to the University of Wyoming Art Museum to fund educational programming and bring world-class exhibitions to Wyoming).
“Harold Garde was a seminal figure in the contemporary art scene in Maine from the 1980s until his death,” recalls Suzette McAvoy, former director of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art and former curator of the Farnsworth Museum, both in Rockland. “His radically expressive art challenged the perception of Maine art as representational and nature-based. He came of age aesthetically during the post-World War II heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Though he later embraced figuration as a means to extend his exploration of the human condition, his abstract roots continued to run through his art.”
Indeed, the figures in Garde’s paintings and prints often embody the vulnerability and anxiousness of humanity as it tries to find resolution for the many issues of contemporary living. His subjects look out at the viewer pensively, oftentimes rendered in a quasi-childlike manner that emphasizes their vulnerability. Even his images of kimonos—a motif that could have been purely decorative—feel pregnant with meaning, as Garde often employed this imagery as a kind of triptych format for expressing abstracted landscapes or inner states of being. Another subject, chairs, either facing toward or away from each other, could be read as symbols of separation or connection. And figures often had dual countenances, implying the indistinct boundary between inner and outer identities. Much of the power of Garde’s oeuvre, in other words—whether intimately scaled or monumentally realized—resides in the profound psychological depth. However, his mastery of color and spontaneous technique are also impressive.
As independent curator Edward Robinson wrote in his catalog essay for a 2018 exhibition of Garde’s work, “Evident throughout Garde’s development is an extended interchange between the possibilities of abstract and figurative form to create new meaning. His achievements offer an exceptional vitality of color, gestural expression, and insistent insight into the vagaries of human engagement.”
Together, SCOPE and The University of Wyoming Art Museum events comprise a banner year for Garde, an artist whose relevance for our particular point in time, with all its attendant cataclysmic developments, seems particularly poignant. It is against our contemporary
backdrop, in fact, that Garde is newly revealed as the visionary he was in life and continues to be beyond it.
FOR PRESS INQUIRES, INTERVIEWS, OR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, please contact Carol Chenkin @ CLC Enterprises (561.929.0172).
About Harold Garde:
Harold Garde (b. New York, NY 1923 d. New Smyrna Beach, FL 2022) was an influential American artist most often associated with his innovative "Strappo" printing technique who made many contributions to the world of contemporary art as artist, innovator, instructor, and mentor for younger artists. Throughout a career spanning almost seven decades, Garde's work has been exhibited globally and is currently in many institutional collections, including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library (New York), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), the Portland Museum of Art and the Farnsworth Museum (Maine), Fine Arts Museum of New Mexico (Santa Fe), the University of Wyoming Art Museum (Laramie) and the Orlando Museum of Art (Florida). His work is also part of the private collections of Sheryl Sandberg (former COO of Meta Platforms Inc., formerly known as Facebook) and former NBC News producer Thomas Bernthal; Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer; and independent curator Edward Robinson (formerly of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).
Carol L Chenkin
CLC Enterprises
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