LILY HARMON

(American, 1912-1998)

STANDING WOMAN

Oil on Canvas

12 x 9 Inches

Signed Lower Right, 'Lily Harmon'

Previously with:

Associated American Artists Gallery

(partial label verso)

 

Lily Harmon, born Lily Perlmutter, studied art at the Yale School of Fine Arts in New Haven and then at the Académie 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