Robert Boardman Howard
| Robert Boardman Howard | |
|---|---|
| Born |
September 20, 1896 New York City, New York |
| Died | February 18, 1983 (aged 86) Santa Cruz, CA |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Sculpture |
| Spouse(s) | Adaline Kent |
Robert Boardman Howard (1896–1983), was a prominent American artist active in Northern California in the first half of the twentieth century. He is also known as Robert Howard, Robert B. Howard and Bob Howard. Howard was celebrated for his graphic art, watercolors, oils, and murals as well as his Art Deco bas-reliefs and his "Modernist" sculptures and mobiles.
Howard was born in New York City on September 20, 1896, to architect John Galen Howard and society belle Mary Bradbury. When he was six years old, the family moved to Northern California. They settled in Berkeley where John G Howard was hired to supervise the erection of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at the University of California. Robert completed grammar school, but dropped out of Berkeley High School and was tutored privately.
Between 1913 and 1916 he studied under Xavier Martinez, Eric Spencer Macky, Worth Ryder, and Perham Wilhelm Nahl at Berkeley's California School of Arts and Crafts (today's California College of the Arts). He became acquainted with Alexander Calder in 1915. After graduation he traveled across country on a motorcycle to New York City to continue his training at the Art Students League under Kenneth Hayes Miller and F. Luis Mora. He returned to California in 1918, joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and was sent to France. At the end of World War I he studied in Koblenz with the famous American printmaker, George Plowman, and in Paris at the Academie Colarossi and the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere. He again met Alexander Calder and the two traveled together. One of Howard's paintings, The Road to Hell, was accepted to the 1920 Salon in Paris and was later exhibited in San Francisco.
In February 1923 he found employment at the firm of J. H. Keefe in San Francisco making architectural ornaments. He crested several stage sets for the Berkeley Playhouse. In March 1925 his display of "Modernist" paintings and sculpture at San Francisco's Galerie des Beaux Arts created much interest as well as a storm of controversy over the "unfortunate nude" in his painting Misfortune in a Hayfield. Howard dismissed the hullabaloo and asserted his right to artistic freedom. That summer, after he completed "ornaments" for the new Temple Emanuel in San Francisco and for the First Congregational Church in Oakland, he traveled to Europe to study Romanesque sculpture. By December 1926 he had returned to the San Francisco Bay Area via New York City, and accepted several commissions to paint decorative mural maps for the bay ferries. The following spring and summer he exhibited frequently in Berkeley and San Francisco. He also began to experiment with articulated sculptures and created for the Puppet Players Theatre a series of marionettes, which were praised by the master puppeteer James Blanding Sloan. Most of 1928 was spent on a grand tour around the world. His letters describing adventures in Europe, the Middle East, India, Ceylon, and Indonesia were serialized in The Argus. In January 1929 the Galerie des Beaux Arts staged a one-man show of his recent drawings, watercolors, and carvings to rave reviews.
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