Charles Howard: A Margin of Chaos


 Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The work of Bay Area artist Charles Houghton Howard (1899–1978) spans five decades, beginning in the mid-1920s and continuing into the 1960s. During his active and distinguished career, Howard became known for enigmatic, meticulous paintings, often intimate in scale, that bridged figurative, Surrealist, and abstract currents in modern art across the United States and Europe. Fluid lines, suspended forms, exquisite sense of balance and proportion, and elusive imagery characterize Howard’s arresting style. Organized by BAMPFA, this exhibition is the first museum survey of Howard’s singular oeuvre in a US museum in over sixty years. This career-spanning exhibition features approximately fifty of Howard’s paintings and works on paper.

Curated by Apsara DiQuinzio, curator of modern and contemporary art and Phyllis C. Wattis MATRIX Curator at BAMPFA, the presentation will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, the first ever scholarly publication to explore Howard's work and life.