Charles H. Howard and Clay Spohn

By the time he returned home from London to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1940, Charles Howard had already exhibited his first paintings, small, nature-based abstractions, alongside pioneers of Surrealism—Max Ernst, Man Ray, Joseph Cornell, Herbert Bayer, and the poets and painters of the Bloomsbury Group. He regularly had sent work to exhibitions in San Francisco, where the Howard family of artists comprised the region’s art royalty—his father was architect John Galen Howard, founder of the architecture school at the University of California, Berkeley, and his brothers were modernist sculptor Robert Howard and American Scene painter John Langley Howard. Yet, never mind his reputation abroad, Charles Howard was now little known in America outside of the Bay Area. His Works Progress Administration (WPA) mural projects for the Alameda Air Station would, in an indirect way, change that.

Howard was at work on designs for the officer’s recreation hall in the new Naval Air Station when Dorothy Miller, the now legendary curator of paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, visited his studio with her husband, Holger Cahill, who, in his position as national director of the Federal Fine Arts Program, was taking stock of new work underway in the Northern California regional center. [1] Miller saw an opportunity to reintroduce Howard’s work to a New York audience and selected him as one of eighteen artists from far-flung places to be highlighted in her groundbreaking exhibition, Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States. The show established national reputations for any number of little-known regional artists—Morris

Graves, Helen Lundeberg, Fletcher Martin, and Howard made up the West Coast cohort. In her catalogue forward Miller lauded the government-sponsored work of the artists as the catalyst to their productivity and success and thereby their emergence now onto the national art scene. [2]

Howard’s WPA mural commissions would appear to be a direct contradiction of his impulse to paint biomorphic and mechanical abstract fantasies on an intimate scale—a photograph of Howard’s installation in Americans 1942 shows the artist’s other work from this period. But Howard had always been a decorative muralist, learning to paint he said, in the workshop of interior designer Louis Bouché. The Naval Air Station commission was not simply an opportunity for Howard to “scale up” his easel work, but rather it allowed him to recalibrate for the occasion and embrace the idea of architectural embellishment for a military installation in a singularly appropriate way. One project he designed as an enormous tapestry depicting the aerodynamics of an airplane wing. The other, this mural, which would hang in the officer’s bar, would be a monument to Alameda’s maritime past, with its whimsical display of marine objects that includes a ship’s figure head, its helm, a compass rose, and the great round bowl of a cowl vent. And it would be rather cleverly executed in a nineteenth-century technique, too, one that possessed singular properties for filling a barroom with light: reverse painting on glass. [3]

The historic practice of reverse-painting on glass had been revived by modernists from Russian Wassily Kandinsky to Americans Rockwell Kent, Joseph Stella, Marsden Hartley, and most especially Rebecca Salsbury James. [4] The process involved putting down paint layers in reverse sequence, starting with the frontmost contour drawing and ending with the backing layer. Howard chose platinum leaf for his background, just as nineteenth-century artisans had employed tin foil and tinsel in their reverse glass paintings to reflect light. The shimmering effect on this large scale also suggests an old-time barroom mirror. The execution of the great bold nautical forms required an unfaltering hand, and Howard enlisted the help of his San Francisco painter friend Clay Spohn, who, like Howard, was a superb marine draftsman.

— Patricia Junker

[1] About this visit: see Oral history interview with Urban Neininger, September 22, 1964, conducted by Harlan Phillips, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; and Oral history interview with Clay Spohn, October 5, 1964, and September 25, 1965, conducted by Harlan Phillips, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

[2] Dorothy Miller, “Foreword,” in Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1942), 9. Miller was emphatic that all the work was new to New York audiences, and none of the artists included were from New York. The exhibition was on view from January 21 through March 8, 1942.

3. There is confusion in the published record about the final disposition of Howard’s commissions. The tapestry was never executed, and the full-scale painting for it was deposited by the United States General Services Administration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1943; see Apsara DiQuinzio, “In and Around Margins,” in Charles Howard: A Margin of Chaos (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2017), 26–27. But Clay Spohn, Urban Neininger, and Harlan Phillips all make clear in their oral histories that the reverse glass mural hung and remained hanging in the officer’s bar. The mural was eventually returned to Spohn, but this was probably well after Spohn’s interviews in 1964 and 1965, when the officer’s building was renovated in the 1970s; see the brochure by Marshall Davis, Alameda Naval Air Station, 1940–1944: History of NAS Alameda, the Piers, and Building 77 (Alameda, CA: Alameda Naval Air Museum, 2014).

[4] I have relied on these studies of modernism’s reverse painting revivals: Karli Wurzelbacher, “Reverse Painting on Glass: Seeing Through the Surface of American Modernism,” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2018; and Simon Seger, et al., “Kandinsky’s Fragile Art: A Multidisciplinary Investigation of Four Early Reverse Glass Paintings (1911–1914) by Wassily Kandinsky,” Heritage Science. 7, no. 27 (2019).