Robert Vale Faro

Doctor Faustus — Mid-century American Surrealism

1946

Robert Vale Faro was a modernist architect and artist associated with the Chicago Bauhaus. He received his degree in architecture and design from the Armour Institute in Chicago and worked at L'Ecole Des Beaux-arts, Paris, from 1924–27, where he was influenced by Harry Kurt Bieg and Le Corbusier. Upon his return to Chicago, Faro worked with the important modernist Chicago architects George and William Keck under Louis Sullivan. Faro founded the avant-garde printmaking group Vanguard in 1945. The group counted Atelier 17 artists Stanley William Hayter, Sue Fuller and Anne Ryan as New York members and Francine Felsenthal in Chicago. The Brooklyn Museum mounted a show of Vanguard artists' work in 1946, which subsequently toured several other institutions in the United States. Faro's visionary graphics from the 1940s are a sophisticated blend of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, and Indian Space Painting, with a humorous, often satiric bent, perhaps serving the artist as an emotional counterpoint to Bauhaus Formalism. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art and the Seattle Art Museum.