Although Richard Haas began his career as a painter and printmaker, and although he was never formally trained as an architect, his reputation has been made in the arena of 20th century of architecture. Combining his skill as a painter with a deep commitment to architectural history and preservation, he has carved out a unique place for himself in the field of American Realism through the production of monumental trompe l’oeil painted schemes.

Born in Spring Green, Wisconson in 1936, at an early age, Haas started making trips to nearby Chicago. Chicago is well known as an art center, but especially as a birthplace of Modern American Architecture. It was here, after the great fire of 1870 had cleared the way, that masters such as H.H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright created landmark structures that gave definition to the new movement. Chicago became Haas’s artistic reference point throughout his student years; he absorbed the air of this important architectural center. He also frequented the Art Institute of Chicago. A celebrated series of miniature rooms, known as the Thorne Rooms (1930-1940), which replicate European and American decorative interiors are part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute. Haas was intrigued by the opportunities for artistic expression suggested by the Thorne Rooms. They became, in fact, the point of departure for his own series of early boxes, produced from 1956-1972, in which he recreated three dimensional versions of the interiors of famous Old Master pictures; for example, Vermeer’s The Artist’s Studio. The boxes, perhaps inspired also by the unique Dutch art form of the perspective box (made famous by such seventeenth-century masters as Samuel van Hoogstraten), also honed Haas’s skills in theories of perspective. His inherent sensibility for the third dimension had been sensitized. It is Haas’s unmatched imagination that compelled him to explode the latent energy of the microcosm of these miniature, self-contained units into titanic proportions. While his painter colleagues were scaling up to “Super Real” size, his vision was gearing toward the truly monumental scale of 20th century architectural facades.

His experience of the Art Institute’s Thorne Rooms also likely contributed to Haas’s development of his special brand of “alternative” architecture - that is the representation of architectural exterior and interior decorative schemes in other-than-traditional materials and scale, and in a mode set quite apart from the media and scale of highly developed architectural models (note: t is interesting to note that Cletus Johnson (also represented in the Seavest Collection), an artist who fabricates boxed fantastical theater facades on a miniature scale, acknowledges Haas as an important source for his own work.) The other critical component of his large-scale projects, his interest in and knowledge of historic architectural styles, is recorded in watercolors especially from the late ’70s.

Haas was exposed to the workings of one of the most prestigious architectural studios at a critical moment in his artistic development. In the summers of 1955 and 1956, he spent time in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin, as a fellowship worker cutting and laying stone. In the open atmosphere of the studio, he had the opportunity to witness staff meetings with the master architect, where conversations inevitably ranged from mundane matters to the philosophy of design. Wright’s lifelong quest to achieve an “organic unity” between site, structure, interior space, and furnishings is an essential element of Haas’s own artistic vision. Wright’s key was the use of geometric motifs to connect all parts to the whole. Haas’s “connective tissue” is architectural orders and site-specific thematic content.

Although the twentieth century has offered architects new versatility through materials such as cast concrete and through advanced building technologies, highly original projects are often cost-prohibitive and never leave the drafting table. Instead, stock materials often drive design. By virtue of his adaptation of alternative materials and methodologies, Haas revives the kind of grand-scale architectural programs that we associate with other centuries, producing refreshing and rehabilitating solutions for existing facades and interiors of public and private structures of all kinds.

Haas’s “canvases” are these blank elevations, primarily unadorned interior and exterior walls, which he transforms through the alchemy of highly sophisticated architectural illusionism. He designs and implements trompe l’oeil schemes and hypothetical perspectives (i.e., the view if a wall were removed) in twentieth-century megascale. Depending on the commission, these schemes feature artful combinations of the architectural orders (which serve as the armature), sculpture, inscriptions, historic narrative, and fantastical scenes thematically related to the history, use, or environment of the particular building or site. Turning the tables on the traditional media of painting and architecture, Haas builds the illusion of actual three-dimensional elements and surface textures with paint. In this he was inspired by, and is heir to, such masters of architectural vistas and trompe l’oeil effects as Mantegna (e.g., Camera degli Sposi, Mantua), Bramante (perspective illusion, east end of Santa Maria presso San Satiro, Milan), Andrea Pozzo (illusionistic dome and vaults, San Ignazio, Rome), G.B. Piranesi, Charles-Nicolas Ledoux, and H.H. Richardson. Haas generates the designs for all of his projects and produces detailed painted schemes; assistants and/or subcontractors execute the actual on-site painting. Amongst his best-known projects are the Fontainbleau Hilton project (Miami Beach), the 1211 LaSalle Street Building (Chicago), the Federal Court House (Kansas City, Kansas), the Periodical Room (NewYork Public Library at Forty-second Street), and the State Historical Society (Portland, Oregon).

Brooklyn Bridge (1993) from the Seavest Collection is a perfect example of Haas’s unique vision. Only in its inception does the painting differ from the bulk of his Ïuvre, which is made up primarily of sets of finished presentation pieces (executed either in paint or colored pencil) for his large-scale projects. Brooklyn Bridge was the response to an invitation extended to the artist to participate in a theme exhibition dedicated to this world-renowned landmark and favorite subject of artistic interpretation from the futurist vision of Jospeh Stella to the perspectival tours de force of Richard Estes.

Haas’s fascination with internal mechanisms, structural grids, transparent walls, architectural vistas, and skylines informs this vertical detail of one of the bridge’s main pylons. He presents the pylon in a soft, frescolike palette, nobly rendered against a blue sky, with the New York City skyline sitting low on the horizon in the background. In the four borders surrounding the featured pylon, he introduces graphite renderings. Akin to the animated sketches that fill Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, they are informative details, replete with the machinery and mechanisms used to construct the bridge. Their narrative force amplifies our view of the bridge, reminding us of the extraordinary engineering feat it represents. In the lower border, we encounter the most explicit of these sketches; here Haas virtually cuts through the foundation of the pylon, opening a “window” or “movie still” onto the past, and to the digging of the foundation for, and construction of, that very pylon. He cleverly contrasts the “living” color of the pylon in the present, and the monochromatic drawings that, in a wave of nostalgia, conjure the construction saga. In the border above, a shift in perspective sweeps us upward into the dynamic curves of the load-bearing cables. In the center of the painting, the roadbed connects the monochromatic borders (where it is drawn in graphite) to the colored central element; respecting its function of transit, it links the past and the present in an extraordinary whole. With his special brand of alchemy, Haas weaves his knowledge of architectural history, construction, and structure into a pictorial vehicle through which the viewer encounters the historic bridge from multiple perspectivesÑfrom the intimate knowledge of its engineering feat and fabrication to our own sympathetic late-twentieth-century view of a national landmark.

©by Virginia Anne Bonito, revised "Get Real" Haas essay, May 2, 2000.

For a more detailed printed view of the collection order the book:
	Get Real: Contemporary American Realism from the Seavest Collection Virginia Anne Bonito. Foreword by Michael Philip Mezzatesta, pp. 138, 68 colorplates, 2 b/w photographs Exhibition at DUMA April 4-July 6, 1997. Hard cover $40.00 Soft cover $25.00 To order contact: Duke University Museum of Art Click on Publications