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Lily Harmon'Girl Holding a Bird', Yale, Colarossi, Corcoran, Whitney, Metropolitan MuseumCirca 1945
Circa 1945
About the Item
Signed lower right, 'Lily Harmon' (American, 1912-1998) and painted circa 1945.
Previously with: Associated American Artists Gallery (partial label verso)
An exceptionally lyrical and sensitive figural painting by this notable mid-century modernist whose works are held in the nation's premier public collections.
Lily Harmon, born Lily Perlmutter, studied art at the Yale School of Fine Arts in New Haven and then at the Academie Colarossi in Paris and the Art Students' League in New York. By the early 1930's she was working in a Social Realist style that would remain the mainstay of her style for the balance of her career.
Harmon had her first solo exhibition at the Associated American Artists Gallery in New York in 1944 and, subsequently, exhibited regularly including at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute. In 1982, a 50-year retrospective of Harmon's work organized by the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas traveled to the Provincetown Art Association in Massachusetts and the Butler Institute of American Art. In December, the Butler Institute mounted a second show, devoted to the found-object assemblages and collages that Harmon had constructed intermittently during the 1960's and 70's.
From 1945 to 1976, Lily Harmon illustrated a number of books, notably works by Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann, Edith Wharton and Franz Kafka. "Freehand," her autobiography, was published in 1981 (Simon & Schuster).
Over the course of a long and successful career, Harmon exhibited widely and with success and her work is held in private and public collections including in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC. and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art
Reference:
Who Was Who in American Art 1564-1975: 400 Years of Artists in America, Peter Hastings Falk, Sound View Press 1999, Vol. 2, page 1462; E. Benezit, Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs, et Graveurs, Jacques Busse, 1999 Nouvelle Édition, Gründ 1911, Vol. 6, page 760; Vollmer Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler des 20. Jarhhunderts, Hans Vollmer, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1992, Vol. 2, page 376
- Creator:Lily Harmon (1912 - 1998)
- Creation Year:Circa 1945
- Dimensions:Height: 12 in (30.48 cm)Width: 9 in (22.86 cm)Depth: 0.75 in (1.91 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:minor losses, minor restoration, minor craquelure; unframed; shows well.
- Gallery Location:Santa Cruz, CA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU34411414422
Lily Harmon
Lily Harmon, whose original name was Lily Perlmutter, was born in 1912 in New Haven. She studied art at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, then at the Académie Colarossi in Paris and the Art Students League in New York. By the early 1930s, she was working in a Social Realist style that with adjustments would be the mainstay of her work. Ms. Harmon's art could lean toward social satire similar to Philip Evergood, or scenes of poetic introspection, like some of Philip Guston's early works. But it usually followed a tradition of sympathetic portraiture personified by Raphael Soyer, becoming increasingly refined in the 1970s. Her subjects tended to be relatives or art-world friends like her grandmother, the painter Helen Frankenthaler, Mimi Gross and the mother of her first husband, Philip Graham Harden, shown in a work from 1931 titled My Nude Mother-in-Law. Lily Harmon had her first solo exhibition at the Associated American Artists Gallery in New York in 1944. She met the millionaire Joseph Hirshhorn, one of the most active art collectors of his generation, in the early 1940s when he visited her studio to see her paintings. They were married in 1945 and adopted two infant daughters, in 1946 and 1950. The marriage ended in divorce in 1956. Ms. Harmon exhibited regularly in surveys of contemporary American art in museums across the country, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In 1982, a 50-year retrospective organized by the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas traveled to the Provincetown Art Association in Massachusetts and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. In December, the Butler Institute mounted a second show, devoted to the found-object assemblages and collages that Ms. Harmon made intermittently in the 1960s and 70s. Lily Harmon is represented in public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Jewish Museum in New York City, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. From 1945–76, Lily Harmon illustrated books, most notably works by André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann, Edith Wharton and Franz Kafka. Freehand, her autobiography, was published in 1981 by Simon & Schuster. She died on February 11, 1998, in New York.
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