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Howard Lamar was born in 1947, but, like so many artists of the post-war generation, his story begins earlier. In the trenches of World War I, our meager human bodies found themselves face to face with airplanes, chemical weapons, and all matter of modern technological advances. In the conflict, we lost more than the lives strewn across the battlefield. The bonds of aristocracy were fraying, and scientific discoveries were shattering modes of thought spanning millennia – fundamental assumptions about reality based on the experience of countless lifetimes. If the bulwarks of the past could not stand against the unstoppable tsunami of progress, how could anything survive?
World War II, of course, only solidified these societal fears, forcing us to encounter the unfathomable depths of our collective capacity for evil. All our advancements, rather than bringing about an era of utopia, had proven that they were merely new tools in man’s hands, as liable to bring about destruction as peace.
We have repeated and rehearsed this narrative of history so often that it has become almost a cliché in our discourse. Still, for the artists of the mid and late-twentieth century, it was nevertheless a very real, nebulous shadow that cast its pall over all their work. The “old ways” had faltered and betrayed us; tradition, it seemed, had cannibalized itself. But its absence remained keenly felt: Western culture had become a fallow field with few viable seeds to sow. What, if anything, could grow there?
Howard Lamar, Monsoon, 1988
This sweeping historical lens is a helpful one when viewing Howard Lamar’s art. He is, in many ways, an artist of contradictions and paradoxes. His work straddles the boundary between representation and abstraction, physical and metaphysical, material and formal, and even – though it may not be as immediately apparent – old and new.
Lamar’s art is, in one sense, a product of its time; he is clearly sensitive to the liminal space that suffused the Zeitgeist of the twentieth century: the vacuum in which the tatters of old conventions struggled with optimistically humanist calls for reform to dominate cultural identity. Lamar relies on many oil and watercolor techniques often associated with those who embraced a more nihilistic, hedonistic approach to this issue. Still, as one delves into his pieces, his rich, instinctual connection with the past and optimism for the future emerge, undergirded all by an unwavering faith in the power of human connection.
Howard Lamar, Blinded by Love with Gentle Strength, 2009
If Lamar’s work were to be placed in any one artistic category, it would be that of French Modernism. His art engages in conversation with the trends of Cubism and Dadaism, drawing inspiration from the likes of Picasso (whose linework Lamar greatly admired) and Matisse. And yet, where many of his contemporaries in the post-war years leaned into absurdism and a kind of rabid despair, Lamar’s work adapts the artistic principles of these movements, refashioning them into a style that – in addition to surpassing the boundaries of the French Modernist style – serves as a refreshing ode to beauty, meaning, and connection amid the rubble of Western civilization.
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