Howard Cook
1901-1980
Howard Norton Cook was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. Cook began his career with a $500 scholarship that sent him to New York City and the Art Students League from 1919-21. He began work as a commercial artist. From 1922 to 1927 he was an illustrator for Century, Scribner’s, and Harper’s. Cook lived for two months in Santa Fe before moving to an old hotel in Taos. There he met fellow artist Barbara Latham. They were married in Santa Fe in 1927. They traveled together for eight years before settling in Talpa, a tiny village south of Taos.
Cook and Latham traveled to Paris in 1929. It was there that Cook took up lithography. Cook devoted a decade of his life to the art of print making. He mastered each of the mediums – etching, aquatint, woodcut, wood engraving and lithography. He achieved first-rank nationally reputation through his prints. He turned to murals, pastel drawings, watercolors and finally to oils and collages.
Cook later served in the Navy as an artist-war correspondent in the South Pacific. In 1949 Cook was elected to membership in the National Academy as a graphic artist. Cook was awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, the S.F.B. Morse Gold Medal from the National Academy of Design, and the Logan Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago. His paintings are in permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and the Museum of New Mexico, to mention a few.
He passed away in Santa Fe from complications of multiple sclerosis.
