Lily Harmon

born New Haven, Connecticut, 1912; died New York, New York, 1998

BiographyLily Harmon worked in portraiture, assemblage and book illustration. 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. Her subjects tended to be relatives or art-world friends.

Harmon had her first solo exhibition at the Associated American Artists Gallery in New York in 1944. She 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. 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, Harmon also 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 by Simon & Schuster.

Her third husband was the millionaire Joseph Hirshhorn, one of the most active art collectors of his generation.

(Source: Roberta Smith, New York Times, artist's obituary, February 14, 1998)

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