Artist Birthday: Hananiah Harari

Hananiah Harari was both an abstract painter and a commercial artist who designed advertising campaigns and magazine covers. Never a doctrinaire abstractionist, his work went freely between geometric abstraction and lyrical expressionism.

Artist Birthday for 29 August: Hananiah Harari (1912-2000 US)

Hananiah Harari, Jubilee, 1939, oil on canvas, 25 x 76 cm Brooklyn Museum, © 2025 Artist or Estate of Artist (BMA-585)

Jubilee by Harari is a work in which the artist approached total abstraction, one of very few examples. Harari's composition, however, does suggest space with the push and pull of high value and low value colors. And, the shapes suggest the abstraction of actual elements from the real world, although it is hard to put one's finger on what they are. The interconnected geometric shapes are reminiscent of Fernand Léger's (1881-1955) Machine Cubism, while his over-all composition (one that fills the entire surface of the canvas) is similar to what would be a dominant feature of Abstract Expressionist painting. The carefully planned, interconnected shapes -- reflecting the influence of the faceting of regular Cubism -- however, do not represent the end result of intuitive or automatist creation, but rather careful underlying structure of a solid composition.

Background

Many American artists experimented with European-inspired abstract styles from before World War I (1914-1918) up until the time of the Great Depression (1929-1940). The postwar period and subsequent Depression fostered isolationist and nationalistic attitudes. Modernist experiment in art was rejected by the public in favor of realistic scenes of everyday American life. On the entry of America into World War II (1939-1945) in 1942, American artists found it was impossible for American artists to follow the traditional modes of expression then current among the Social Realists and Regionalists who dominated the art scene when the world was in shambles. Eventually, it was the war that caused the ferment that would lead to the creation of the first original American modernist movement.

American artists seeking new forms of modern expression outside of the stale formulaic art of artists such as Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), were inspired by European Surrealism and the idea of subconscious and spontaneous creation. Many of the leading Surrealists in Europe emigrated to New York during the war. They acquainted American artists yearning for modernist experiment with their theories of automatism, painting intuitively rather than subjectively. This would allow American artists to explore new forms. Despite the common belief among Abstract Expressionists about the primacy of spontaneous creation, randomness and abstraction, Abstract Expressionism cannot be defined by a single style. For convenience’s sake, this so-called New York School is often divided into two main categories, action painting and color field, although there were a great number of other forms of expression as well.

Hananiah Harari was born Richard Goldman in Rochester, NY. His earliest painting lessons were at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, and he studied 1930 to 1932 at Syracuse University School of Fine Arts. He completed his degree after moving to Paris, where he studied under Cubists André Lhote (1885-1962) and Fernand Léger (1881-1955). He also copied Impressionist and old master works at the Louvre, supporting himself by painting portraits. After visiting Palestine in 1935, he changed his name to Hananiah Harari, stating that the name "better suited" an "important artist".

Returning to the US in 1936, he settled in New York. His mature modes of expression were semi-abstraction and trompe l'oeil (fool the eye) realism. He supplemented his income with portrait painting and painting trompe l'oeil still life in the manner of William Harnett (1848-1892). He was one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists group (1937), and painted murals during the Depression (1929-1940) for the artists' program of the Works Progress Administration. During the 1940s and 1950s he worked in graphic design, alongside his abstract painting. He taught art in the School of the Visual Arts, New York (1947-1990) and the Arts Student League (1984-1999) in New York.