Howard Cook (1901-1980)
We are especially interested in buying artwork by Howard Cook.
Biography
Howard Cook is considered one of America’s best-known print makers, and was also a painter, and illustrator. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and completed his formal art training at the Art Students League in New York in 1919 and then traveled extensively in Europe, North Africa, Turkey, Asia, and Central America. In 1926, he took his first trip West, where he married Barbara Latham, a modernist Southwest artist. Cook developed a great fascination for the Santa Fe and Taos areas, where he became a resident.
In 1937, he won the largest mural commission ever given to a Taos artist when the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture chose him to paint sixteen fresco murals in the lobby of the main post office in San Antonio, Texas. His frescoes portray a history of Texas from the days of the Spanish conquest to the 1930s. In the 1930s, he earned two Guggenheim Fellowships, during which he painted in Taxco, Mexico and the Deep South, where he painted and created prints depicting Black Americans. These works are now in the Georgia Museum of Art and the J. Frank Dobie Collection at the University of Texas. During World War II, he was an artist and war correspondent in the South Pacific. His illustrations from this time were exhibited at the War department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and later circulated as a traveling exhibition.
