Background
Lily Harmon was born on November 19, 1912, in New Haven, Connecticut, United States to the family of Benjamin Perlmutter and Bessie Horowitz.
Lily Harmon studied in Provincetown under Henry Henshe at Cape Cod School of Art in 1929 when she was 17 and went on to a long and accomplished career as a painter in Provincetown and New York.
Lily Harmon studied art at the Yale School of Fine Arts in New Haven.
Lily Harmon studied art at the Academie Colarossi in Paris.
Lily Harmon studied art at the Art Students' League in New York.
Lily Harmon was born on November 19, 1912, in New Haven, Connecticut, United States to the family of Benjamin Perlmutter and Bessie Horowitz.
Lily Harmon studied in Provincetown under Henry Henshe at Cape Cod School of Art in 1929 and went on to a long and accomplished career as a painter in Provincetown and New York. She studied art at the Yale School of Fine Arts in New Haven, then at the Academie Colarossi in Paris and the Art Students' League in New York.
Lily Harmon was a leading American painter, etcher, lithographer, and illustrator. She had her first solo exhibition of paintings and graphic works of art in New York City in 1944 and since then her works have been exhibited in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Academy of Design, as well as the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, The University of Chicago, The Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. Harmon was honored with a 50-year retrospective exhibition in 1983, which opened at the Witchita Art Museum, Kansas moving on to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.
From 1945 to 1976, Harmon illustrated books, most notably works by Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann, Edith Wharton, and Franz Kafka. "Freehand," her autobiography was published in 1981. Later in her life, she was a professor of painting at the National Academy of Design from 1974 until her retirement.
Lily Harmon died on February 11, 1998, aged 85 in New York City, New York, United States.
Blue Eggs
1943Mañana Island
1959Party Dress
1942Virginia
1945Monhegan
1959Sheila O'Rourke Murphy
1943Child
1947Moonlight Sonata
1953Canadian Landscape
1951Senorita
1946Winter Landscape
1956Coat Of Many Colors
1950Self Portrait
1943Central Park
1954Dining Room
1948Marussia Burliuk
1943The Midnight Oil
Blind River
1955Sunset and White Trees
Location X
1950Blue Landscape
The Twins
1984Landscape
Mother And Child
1946Self Portrait
1941Self Portrait
1981Secrets
Couple
1972Summer Night
Provincetown Bacchanalia
Lily Harmon was influenced by every artist she looked at or studied. The Mexican painters had a large influence on some of her earlier works. In her autobiography, she speaks of Klee, for his use of color and the playful quality of his work, and Piero della Francesco and many, many others, but particularly of Goya who she felt influenced her the most.
Harmon was an advocate of studying and drawing from the live model and felt over the years art schools and artists had moved away from this most important aspect of painting. The human figure would prepare an artist to be able to paint or draw in a realistic, abstract or abstract figurative manner, but without the ability to draw the human figure, the artist was not truly able to exhibit her or his own abilities to the fullest.
Not only was Harmon a realist painter and sculptor, but she was also very much involved with abstraction, especially after she returned from Japan, where she observed that the Japanese worked more with form than anything else. Her ability to move in different worlds of art made her a unique artist and she was fully aware that gimmicks were something that could and were used by some. However, she felt strongly that this type of work would neither hold up or move an artist to a higher level of recognition.
Quotations:
"I am to be practical. I must make a living at art. I am told we are to draw by dynamic symmetry. 'What's that?' 'It t's the golden mean.' They teach with a diagram, a bisected oblong. Everything must fit into it. It strikes me as stupid. I don't need guidelines to draw. It inhibits me. I think it is meant for people who can't draw and will never learn. 'Where are those guidelines?' asks the teacher. There are none. I have drawn it freehand."
"I was tremendously influenced by El Greco to the swirling lines and all the things I found exciting about his work."
"I think it's [Harmon's work] going toward a good thing now. I think it's going to be a synthesis of that kind of realism we spoke about, with the advantage of abstract art, actions painting, all those things join in and I think it will be terrific."
Truly a free spirit, Harmon refused to fall in line with what the art world saw as her place as a 'woman artist'. She befriended many artists during her six decades of paintings, many of whom went on to become cultural icons. She was determined to speak with her own voice.
Lily Harmon had five marriages with Philip Graham Harden, Sidney Harmon, Joseph Hirshhorn, Henry Rothman, and Milton Schachter. With Hirshhorn, she adopted two daughters, named Amy and Jo Ann.