In 1986 Michael Brenson wrote a review in the New York Times of “Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business,” an exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. He said that “in today’s art world, Hans Haacke may be not only inevitable but also indispensable. With the money now invested in art, with the growing corporate and political involvement, with a new breed of collector who approaches art as something to display, like jewelry, or barter, like stocks, it is logical that some artists want no part of art making as usual. Of the artists who are determined to preserve their independence, to define art within a social and political context … Haacke is the most influential.” This judgment is universally held. As Michael Kimmelman wrote in the New York Times in 1994, “Over the years, Mr. Haacke has become the dean of political artists, and scores of followers have tried to imitate his blend of reportage, visual bite and wit.”
Haacke was born in 1936 in Cologne, Germany. He received an MFA from the State Art Academy in Kassel, Germany, in 1960, then, with a travel grant from the German government, studied in Paris at the etching atelier of Stanley William Hayter. The following year, with a Fulbright grant, he studied in the United States at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and after that spent a year in New York. He returned to Germany in 1963, but in 1965 moved permanently to New York. He taught at Cooper Union in New York from 1967 until he retired in 2002, when the College Art Association gave him a Distinguished Teaching Award. Although Haacke began his career as a printmaker and has used printed materials in most of his works, only a few fine art prints are part of his mature work. His Upstairs at Mobil, published by Crown Point Press in 1982, has been widely shown and is a major work in the printmaking field.
Throughout his career, Haacke has exhibited worldwide in important theme shows, including “When Attitudes Become Form” in 1969 at the Kunsthalle in Bern and “Information” in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has had many solo exhibitions in museums, including the Tate Gallery in London in 1984 and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1989. In 1993, with Nam June Paik, he represented Germany in the Venice Biennale. The installation won the Golden Lion award for the best pavilion. Haacke’s work is in the collections of many international museums, including the Australian National Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. He is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
- Rachel Lyon
