Howard Rackliffe

Howard Rackliffe (1917-1987)

“A Hartford Biography”

© Gary W. Knoble, 2015

Rackliffe was a mystic, romantic, solitary, self-taught, painter, poet, musician, and lover of modern dance who spent his life pursuing art in his own way

Howard Rackliffe was born in New Britain, Connecticut on January 6, 1917. He was the youngest of four sons of Thomas Winship Rackliffe and Alice Gibson Rackliffe. He attended public school in New Britain from 1924 until 1933 when he left Junior High School at age 16 to, “devote full time to self-development as a painter”. From 1933 until 1941 he continued to live in New Britain taking some life drawing courses at Sanford Low’s New Britain Art League, listening to music, improvising on the piano (he never learned to read or notate music), writing poetry, and exploring modern dance, interests that continued to occupy him throughout his life.

“As early on in school as I can remember, I was doing these things…called the arts. It’s a cliché really, just dyed in the wool, but the whole fabric is in these, so in a way, there were very few options. If you could see my marks in math and my other subjects. you’d understand why I clung so tenaciously to them. They are there and I’m there. It’s very absolute. I could never step back and say, ‘What could I do other than what I’m doing?’ There’s no such question.”

In 1941 he moved to New York City for the first of his extended stays there. The Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania bought one of his paintings titled “Winter Warf” in 1947. In New York, he worked in a series of jobs, including a stint at the Airwick Company in 1948. He took a leave of absence to pursue his artistic interests and decided not to return. His boss asked to see some of his works and awarded him a Florida Chemical Research painting grant of $1,500, which allowed him to spend a year painting in Sarasota, Florida.

In 1951 he returned to New Britain and continued to paint full time. He was involved in an automobile accident in 1952 and received a financial settlement for his injuries. He used the money to open the Studio Art Gallery in New Britain, which remained open for only a year. In 1953 he received the Peter MacGregor Frazier Prize for gouache from the Connecticut Watercolor Society. Sanford Low, who was the director of the New Britain Museum of American Art, helped found the Watercolor Society in 1938. He also founded the New Britain Art League where Rackliffe had taken lessons early on.

Rackliffe returned to New York City in 1955 where he reviewed art, music, and theater for The Village Voice. He said he became disenchanted with New York because of the drug scene and in 1959 again returned to Connecticut. He intended to go to Europe but wanted to first see the Maine coast where some of his ancestors had lived. He fell in love with the Maine coast and continued to travel and paint there in the summers for most of the rest of his life, particularly in Acadia National Park, Mount Katahdin , and the Porcupine Islands. Mount Katahdin was also a frequent subject for Marsden Hartley, who’s work Rackliffe particularly admired. He never did make it to Europe.

From 1960-1968 he continued to visit Maine in the summers and to travel throughout the Northeast. He was also awarded another prize by the Connecticut Watercolor Society.

In April of 1960 he took part in the Atheneum show, “8 From Connecticut”, along with Bernard Chaet, Cleve Gray, John Gregoropoulos, Joseph Gualtieri, Thomas Ingle, Irving Katzenstein, and Anthony Terenzio. Since the time of A. Everett Austin, the Atheneum had shunned contemporary local talent in favor of showcasing major American and European art. This show was a part of an ongoing effort by the director C. C. Cunningham, to regularly feature the work of contemporary Connecticut artists, “along with the showing of the work of artists of other regions and countries as well as the art of the past.” In his essay on Rackliffe in the exhibit catalogue, Cunningham describes Rackliffe’s approach to painting.

“In describing his working method, Rackliffe compared painting to sowing and reaping. First it is a matter of ploughing up a white field and casting seeds. Next comes a selective weeding out of unnecessary elements and further development of ideas. The harvesting is in an intellectual ‘pre-framing gesture’, which brings all the elements of the picture together into a context. When all contentions between the parts are resolved the painting is finished.”

In 1972, Rackliffe was the visiting artist in residence at Saint Francis Xavier University in Nova, Scotia. In 1975 he received an award from the Connecticut Academy of Fine Art.

Rackliffe painted many self-portraits.

“In regards to the self-portraits….my interest in my face began after I was in an accident (1952). Bones that used to be one place were someplace else. When I used to shave, I’d find that it had been partially changed. I think that might have triggered the first self-portraits.”

While he seldom had much money, he was always restless and driven to paint and write. From 1976-1984, he continued his travels about the Northeast and always his summer trips to Maine. However, his health began to decline. He had two major open-heart surgeries, but continued to paint and exhibit regularly. In his final years he lived at Clemens Place in Hartford and could often be seen walking along Sisson Street and Farmington Avenue near where he lived. He was always writing poetry, improvising on the piano, and painting with whatever supplies he could find, sometimes using such things as cardboard, discarded pieces of wood, and house paint. He often traded his paintings for other things he needed. Michael Shortell, a friend and patron near the end of Rackliffe’s life, says he was always adding or subtracting things from his paintings. So much so that when he visited friends who had paintings of his, they would often put them away before his visits to prevent them from being altered. He did the same thing with his poetry, often changing the poems by hand after they were published.

In 1981 there was another show of local artists at the Atheneum. The New York Times critic Vivien Raynor found little to like in the exhibition, but did single out Rackliffe for praise.

“But the pictures that have lingered longest in the reviewer's memory are the two small acrylic landscapes by Howard Rackliffe. While the artist owes something to Milton Avery and, possibly to Arthur Dove, he has his own personal panache, especially in '’Salt Pond.’”

He is often compared with John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove, but said he was cheifly influenced by Hartley, Max Beckmann, and Ernest Lawson. He also retained his life-long love for music, particularly the music of Mozart, Sibelius, and the Russian Romantics.

He never married, but according to Michael Shortell, he told of a major love affair that ended tragically. He and a woman were in love and decided to meet secretly to run away and get married. Rackliffe went to the arranged place but the woman never appeared. Dejected, he ran away without her. He learned many years latter that she had died in an automobile accident on the way to their meeting place.

Rackliffe himself died in Hartford on October 21, 1987.

In 1990 the New Britain Museum of American Art mounted a major exhibition of his works, “Howard Rackliffe (1917-1987): Selected Works”, curated by Janis La Motta. His long time supporter Kevin Rita of Brick Walk Fine Art published a catalogue for the exhibition titled, “Howard Rackliffe 1917-1987 Paintings and Poems”, the only major published documentation of his paintings and poetry. Bernard Hanson, then dean of The Hartford Art School at The University of Hartford wrote:

“Like so many other Americans, Howard Rackliffe was less than content with the status quo; he, like others-Charles Ives, William James, or Walt Whitman-heard a different drummer and moved in a tempo and with a rhythm different from those felt by other men. Rackliffe did not ignore the past, he did not reject representation, but he never felt obliged to imitate what had gone before.”

“The mystical American qualities, a lingering on of Emerson and the transcendentalists, runs throughout much of his work. Although his paintings are always representational, there are also strong abstract elements in many of them, touches particularly reminiscent of the simplified shapes of Matisse. Some of this simplification, this tendency toward abstraction, may have been the result of Rackliffe’s devotion to the work of Marsden Hartley.”

Janis La Motta, wrote in the same catalogue:

“It was always through careful self-education and intelligent responsiveness to life’s visual ‘soundings’ that this artist’s abilities transcended the ‘self-taught’. Howard Rackliffe was a rare and unique personality. Unafraid to follow his own course, he pursued solitary yet life-affirming existence. His passion for the arts was present in every aspect of his life. His gift of great sensitivity and his ‘cherishin’ a world full of wonders filled his poems, his music, and his paintings.”

Douglas Hyland, director of the New Britain Museum wrote in 2007 on the discussion board for Rackliffe on the Ask/ART website:

“Howard Rackliffe has emerged as one of Connecticut’s most original 20th century artists….. His landscapes, especially those that incorporate the sea are sublime. In many ways he was an eccentric, a man who loved to paint and create. He was a loner and his paintings are an extension of his spirituality……..Since his death collectors, critics and museum curators have grown to appreciate his genius all the more.”

Kevin Rita, quoted in the Hartford Courant on December 22, 2011, said:

"He (Rackliffe) was a total Bohemian. He wrote poetry, played piano. He was a real artist."

Local galleries continue to show his works on a regular basis, including a 1995 show, “Selected Works” at the 100 Pearl Street Gallery, Hartford; a 2006 show, “Mountains and Sea, Selected Works” at Brick Walk Fine Art, West Hartford; a 2008 show sponsored by Paper New England, “Towards Abstraction – 3 Connecticut Artists, Katzenstein, Rackliffe, and Scoville” at the Promenade Gallery at the Bushnell, Hartford; a 2009 show, “Vital Ground, Howard Rackliffe and Jonathan A. Scoville” at La Motta Gallery, Hartford; and a 2011 show, “Mainly Maine” at Brick Walk Fine Art, West Hartford.

barnesfoundation.org

Dudley Talcott & Howard Rackliffe, 1985, Aetna

Hartford Courant, 11/12/1995

Hanson, Bernard, “Howard Rackliffe”, Raven Editions book

Hyland, Douglas, Rackliffe Discussion Board for Howard Rackliffe, Ask/art.com

LaMotta, Janice, “Forward”, to the Raven Editions book

Rackliffe, Howard, “Poems”, 1983

Raven Editions, “Howard Rackliffe 1917-1987”, 1990

Raynor, Vivien, “Art; Regional Artists’ Work at Atheneum”, The New York Times, 3/22/1981