TitleManhattan View, Twilight
Artist
Richard John Haas
(American, b. 1936)
Date1999
MediumEtching and aquatint on white BFK Rives paper
DimensionsImage size: 15 1/4 x 22 13/16 in.
Sheet size: 22 1/8 x 30 in.
SignedSigned in graphite at LR: "Richard Haas 1999".
MarkingsWatermark: BFK RIVES FRANCE
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, gift of the artist, 2005
Object number2005.17
Label TextKnown chiefly as a muralist and printmaker of highly detailed, realistic architectural subjects, Richard Haas was born in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and as a teenager spent two summers working at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin in 1955 and 1956. While there Haas had the opportunity to study Wright's drawings and watercolors, which had a lasting effect on him. He attended the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (then Wisconsin State College) and studied art education. Haas completed his MFA at the University of Minnesota in 1964 and by the mid-1960s he was teaching at Michigan State University and working in a geometrically-based abstract style of painting and printmaking. By the end of the decade this evolved into a grided pattern that ultimately brought him to his renderings of the grid-like cast-iron façades of SoHo buildings, for which he is perhaps best known.Given Haas' initial exposure to the processes of architecture at Taliesin, it is not surprising that architecture has been his most enduring subject. And, while New York has most often been his subject of choice, the artist has captured scenes of Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and many other cities. By the late-1970s Haas began rendering sweeping panoramic city views in both watercolors and prints. Manhattan View, Twilight is a bird's-eye view of the Manhattan skyline from the Brooklyn side of the East River. This is one of two views of lower Manhattan by the artist created after he took a helicopter trip around the city in 1999. Like the other print made from this trip, Manhattan View, Governor's Island (1999), the two towers of the World Trade Center--long a subject of interest for the artist--are dominant among the crowd of buildings.
