TitleBlue Bursts In
Artist
Richard John Haas
(American, b. 1936)
Printer
Richard John Haas
(American, b. 1936)
Date1966
MediumColor woodcut on paper
DimensionsSheet size: 29 1/4 x 24 1/2 in.
Image size: 23 7/8 × 17 3/4 in.
Mat size: 32 × 26 in.
SignedSigned in graphite at LR: "Richard Haas".
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of the artist, 2007
Object number2007.2
Label TextKnown chiefly as a muralist and printmaker of highly detailed, realistic architectural subjects, Richard Haas worked as an abstract artist in painting and printmaking for a good portion of his early career. Born in Spring Green, Wisconsin, the artist was interested in architecture and spent two summers as a teenager 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 as a viable alternative to pursuing a career as a fine artist. Haas recalled: "No one in their right mind would lie and tell you that you would make a living as an artist. It was just impossible. So you always had to have a hook." Following college, Haas took a teaching position at a high school in Milwaukee, but after two years entered the graduate program at the University of Minnesota in 1961, graduating with an MFA in 1964.After working in a gestural style that sometimes incorporated figuration and recalled many of the painters of the New York School, by the mid-1960s Haas began creating paintings, prints, and collages using a geometrically-based style that emphasized large areas of color. By then he had accepted a teaching position at Michigan State University where Charles Pollock (older brother of Jackson Pollock) was also teaching and responsible for inviting critics and artists such as Clement Greenberg, Anthony Caro, Jules Olitski, NA, and Barnet Newman to come and speak. At the time, Haas was particularly interested in Edvard Munch and the German Expressionists and utilized their woodblock printing technique of cutting the block into sections and then reassembling them, inking each section a different color, and then printing them together as a unit. Like his paintings of this period, the artist recalled that the prints "became objects, as such. They were no longer windows into space, kind of the opposite of where I went later. But they were about flattening and almost projecting into the room, from a wall, with exciting and almost jarring color interplays."
"Blue Bursts In" is a typical work during this period in Haas's career. He was prolific while at Michigan State (and continues to be), and his prints were shown in Detroit (where one was purchased by the Detroit Institute of Art), Chicago, and New York. The work's hard edges and broad geometric areas of saturated color recall the concurrent Color Field work of, Olitski, Frank Stella, NA elect, and others. Haas worked with both organic shapes as seen in this print and also more straight-edge geometric forms. These works subsequently led into his incorporation of the grid in the paintings done during the late 1960s that ultimately brought him to his renderings of the cast-iron façades of SoHo buildings, for which he is perhaps best known. Thus, while Haas's current work is representational, when seen in the context of his extensive career it is actually not far removed from his early abstractions.
