Lily PERLMUTTERAge: 85 years1912–1998
- Name
- Lily PERLMUTTER
- Given names
- Lily
- Surname
- PERLMUTTER
- Hebrew
- לילי פרלמוטר
- Married name
- Lily HARMON
- Married name
- Lily HIRSHHORN
- Married name
- Lily HARDEN
- Married name
- Lily SCHACTER
| Birth | November 18, 1912 (Kislev 8, 5673) New Haven, Connecticut, USA - ניו היבן, ארה"ב |
| Marriage | Sidney HARMON — View this family 1934 (5694) (Age 21 years) |
| Death of a husband | Sidney HARMON February 29, 1988 (Adar 11, 5748) (Age 75 years) Palm Springs, California, USA - פאלם ספרינגס, ארה"ב |
| Occupation | Artist - Portraiture and Book Illustration Note: Lily Harmon, an artist who worked in portraiture, assemblage and book illustration, and whose third … |
| Residence | Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA - פרובינסטאון, ארה"ב Address: 627 Commercial Street
Provincetown MA
USA |
| Death | February 11, 1998 (Shevat 15, 5758) (Age 85 years) New York, New York State, USA - ניו יורק, ארה"ב |
| Family with Milton SCHACTER |
| husband |
|
| herself |
לילי פרלמוטר Birth: November 18, 1912 (Kislev 8, 5673) — New Haven, Connecticut, USA Death: February 11, 1998 (Shevat 15, 5758) — New York, New York State, USA |
| Family with Sidney HARMON |
| husband |
Sidney HARMON סידני הרמון Birth: April 30, 1907 (Iyar 16, 5667) — Poughkeepsie, New York State, USA Death: February 29, 1988 (Adar 11, 5748) — Palm Springs, California, USA |
| herself |
לילי פרלמוטר Birth: November 18, 1912 (Kislev 8, 5673) — New Haven, Connecticut, USA Death: February 11, 1998 (Shevat 15, 5758) — New York, New York State, USA |
|
Marriage: 1934 (5694) — |
| Source | Jewish Gen Family Finder - Family Tree 15822, Gene LePere - genealogical research Publication: Gene Hirshhorn-LePere [ghlinla@att.net] |
| Occupation | Lily Harmon, an artist who worked in portraiture, assemblage and book illustration, and whose third husband was the collector Joseph H. Hirshhorn.
Ms. Harmon, whose original name was Lily Perlmutter, was born in 1912 in New Haven. 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. By the early 1930's 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's, 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 1970's. Her subjects tended to be relatives or art-world friends: her grandmother; the painter Helen Frankenthaler; Mimi Gross, the daughter of the sculptor Chaim Gross; and the mother of her first husband, Philip Graham Harden, shown in a work from 1931 titled "My Nude Mother-in-Law."
Ms. 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 40's 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 1960's and 70's, which will close on March 1.
Ms. Harmon is represented in public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the Jewish Museum in New York City, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington.
From 1945 to 1976, Ms. 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 (Simon & Schuster).
http://www.butlerartcollection.com/artist.php?artistId=1469
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/images/detail/lily-harmon-5781 |
| Residence | Provincetown MA is a New England town located at the extreme tip of Cape Cod.
Norman Mailer lived in this big brick dwelling in the East End. It was subsequently home to the artist Lily Harmon (1912-1988) and to the author and art critic B. H. Friedman (1926-2011). They sold the house in 1956 to Harmon, who was newly divorced from Joseph H. Hirshhorn, the multimillionaire art collector and, later, founding patron and namesake of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery in Washington. Harmon left the marriage with $5 million for herself and $1 million in trust for her daughters, Amy and Jo Ann Hirshhorn, according to Little Man in a Big Hurry. Her purchase of the Collins Guest House, through John C. Snow, was “one of the most significant sales in recent years of waterfront property along the exclusive East End harbor front,” The Advocate said. She remaned the place Harmony, but that name came with her when she moved next door, to 629 Commercial Street. |
| Death | New York Times - Obituaries
February 14, 1998
Lily Harmon, 85, Portraitist and Book Illustrator
By ROBERTA SMITH
Lily Harmon, an artist who worked in portraiture, assemblage and book illustration, and whose third husband was the collector Joseph H. Hirshhorn, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.
Ms. Harmon, whose original name was Lily Perlmutter, was born in 1912 in New Haven. 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. By the early 1930's 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's, 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 1970's. Her subjects tended to be relatives or art-world friends: her grandmother; the painter Helen Frankenthaler; Mimi Gross, the daughter of the sculptor Chaim Gross; and the mother of her first husband, Philip Graham Harden, shown in a work from 1931 titled ''My Nude Mother-in-Law.''
Ms. 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 40's 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/14/nyregion/lily-harmon-85-portraitist-and-book-illustrator.html |
| Note | LILY HARMON
Lily Harmon studied in Provincetown with Henry Henshe in 1929 when she was 17, and went on to a long and accomplished career as a painter in Provincetown and New York. Most admired for her fine and original portraits, Harmon transcended physical description and expressed in a distinct painterly style the dignity and character of her subjects.
She was a leading American painter, etcher, lithographer and illustrator who once studied at Yale University School of Fine Arts, The Arts Student League of New York and the Academie Colarossi in Paris France. She received her first solo exhibition of paintings and graphic works of art in New York City in 1944 and since then her work has 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 travelling 50 year retrospective exhibition in 1983, which opened at the Witchita (KS) Art Museum, moving on to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Butler (OH) Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH.
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 and in her autobiography, Freehand published in 1981, she said of time spent at a well known and highly respected New York City art school, "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 musts 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."
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. There was also El Greco, of whom she said, "I was tremendously influenced by El Greco...to the swirling lines and all the things I foud exciting about [his work]." 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. "...because the more I get into realism certainly in terms of portraits, the more intrigued I am with his love of reality, the splendor of his models, the clothes that they wore and certianly his psychological insight into them."
She 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. When in the early 1980's, she was asked by Howard Wooden where she thought her work was going, she said, "I think it's going toward a good thing now. I tink 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 tings join in and I think it will be terrific."
Not only was she 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. In her interview with Wooden she said, "There was one man that I heard of who had a great furor one year and he was painting window shades. And I thought, 'My God, what's he going to do when he finishes the window shades?' And I think he disappeared entirely. But how many window shades can you paint...before people get bored with it?"
Lily Harmon was a true American Icon, an original individualist who was working during some of the most turbulent and exciting times the art world has ever seen. It is hoped the reintroduction of Lily's work will rekindle an interest in the creative spirit of this great artist and re-open more scholarship into her style.
http://www.erndengallery.com/lilyharmon.html |