Biography

As a professor of art at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1930 to 1972, John Haley was known as the unofficial leader of a group of art department faculty members who began painting outdoors together in the 1930s. Their watercolor and gouache paintings are characterized by expressive color washes and opaque line reflecting the dynamism of the art department at the time, and collectively became known as the “Berkeley school” style of watercolor. Haley was also instrumental in creating and implementing an art curriculum based on European modernism at its best—a synthesis of postimpressionism, cubism, and the abstract flattening of the picture plane as espoused by the European abstract painter Hans Hofmann, with whom many of the Berkeley professors had studied.

Born in Minneapolis in 1905, Haley studied at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts (now Minneapolis College of Art and Design) where his art education included the typical academic Beaux Arts traditions of figure drawing, shading, modeling, and perspective. In 1927, he received a scholarship to study in Europe, where he soaked up the lessons of French modernism and studied intensively with Hofmann.

Following his year abroad, Haley returned to the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts, this time as a painting instructor. In the fall of 1930 he received an invitation to join the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had visited two summers before. This was indeed an honor; the art department at Berkeley, established in 1923, was considered one of the most progressive university art programs in the country. The curriculum stressed a synthesis of historic techniques, such as the use of egg tempera from Byzantine painting, with the European modernism of Cézanne, Picasso, and others. Although seemingly unrelated, both the Byzantine painters and European modernists strove to flatten the picture plane, one of the essential elements of Hofmann’s nonobjective abstraction. Of the merging of modern art with past styles and traditions, Haley said, “Modern art … is tradition expressing itself in a new way.”1
San Francisco art critic Alfred Frankenstein was the first to suggest that there was such a thing as a “Berkeley school,” referring to the landscapes and cityscapes of Haley, Erle Loran, and Worth Ryder, who together explored the technique of laying down washes of transparent watercolor, then overpainting line to define forms. “Theirs is an essentially graphic way of looking at things. Their line is lighthanded, neat and precisely delicate. Their composition is usually an element of feeling rather than an element of form or modeling.”2 The three of them worked closely together and their individual styles meshed into one seemingly cohesive approach.

Although some historians and critics have considered the Berkeley school simply another regional example of American Scene painting, Haley, Loran, and Ryder did not have the same political agenda and social aims common to other American Scene painters. Rather, they were more deeply interested in the formal aspects of painting gleaned from European modernism—color, line, and the flat picture plane.

The painting End of Ocean Avenue was completed just three years after Haley’s arrival in Berkeley, but already it exhibited all the stylistic elements of the Berkeley school paintings: transparent washes of color to set the composition, opaque lines that delineate the structures, a flattened picture plane, and expressive color. It was painted at the site of his residence in the Point Richmond area of Berkeley, where he and Worth Ryder had built twin studios.3 The connected buildings (seen in the upper right of the picture) feature multipaned windows that must have made for beautifully illuminated interior spaces. This painting serves as both a record of their close artistic ties, as well as a reminder of their deep friendship that extended beyond walls of the Berkeley campus.

End of Ocean Avenue is a classic example of Berkeley school painting completed at a time when the art department was rich with ideas and energy and led by passionate people. But John Haley’s legacy, as is the case with most teachers, is not only to be found in his work, which over the years embraced many of the most important painting movements of the 20th century. In addition, he made fundamental contributions to the Berkeley program that produced some of the brightest lights of the new generation—Elmer Bischoff, Virginia Gould, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, and other artists who would go on to achieve national and international recognition. —M.H.S.

1. John Haley, quoted in “Professor Explains Agreement in Modern, Classic Art Types,” The Daily Californian, 17 April 1933.
2. Alfred Frankenstein, “Schools of Water Color,” San Francisco Chronicle, 7 November 1937.
3. Karl Kasten, a student of Haley’s from 1938 to 1941, recalled that “Haley and Ryder purchased adjoining lots on the bay shoreline in the early 1930s and proceeded to erect identical structures on the properties.” Kasten, email to the author, 9 March 2004.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

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