Anne Harvey “Arabesques”

Anne Harvey “Arabesques”

steven harvey fine art projects

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Anne Harvey’s parents took her to France when she was still a girl. Her early skills were nurtured by her culturally progressive family. Along with her mother and aunts, she spent the rest of her life in Paris as an expatriate artist. Her family became a part of the milieu of French artistic culture.

Harvey was mentored by Brancusi when she was 18 years old. She painted a major portrait of him, now in the collection of the Pierre and Gaetana Matisse Foundation. Her work made in the early 1930s, when she was just coming into her twenties, shows the influence of early figural Miro, whom she also knew. While discussing Dorothy Dudley’s projected article about his Barnes’s murals, Henri Matisse was asked to look at Anne’s work. He responded by encouraging her towards illustration, praising the element of “fantasie” in her work. Her work was later purchased by Giacometti and Calder, and the day before Marcel Duchamp died, his last correspondence was a note to Anne’s brother Jason, offering to help him find a suitable gallery for an exhibition of her work.

Anne came back to America during World War II with her mother, and after the war immediately returned to France where she worked until she died in 1967. After her death, her brother Jason Harvey organized a memorial exhibition at the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in New York City in 1971. In a review of this exhibition for Art News, Lawrence Campbell, who had met Anne in Paris in the sixties, described the dizzying qualities of her line:

“In her work one can truly sense what the privacy of the expression ‘travailler après la nature’ can mean to an artist as withdrawn and secretive as she was. The act of trying to draw the grain of a board on the studio floor; her studio was wherever she was, indoors or out, unfailingly triggered imaginative responses. She saw patterns inside other patterns, and these hair-like patterns became quirky fine ink lines or in paintings, paint: meandering, eddying, dissolving, disappearing, then coming into focus elsewhere, as though the wood grain pushed her ever deeper into a world she could see as well as invent at the same time.”

This exhibition will present drawings from across the artist’s career- from her precocious early work done while she was still a girl, through the surprisingly mature works of her late teens, to the increasingly complex art done before her premature death at age 51.

Anne Harvey’s work was included in both exhibitions of woman artists at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of The Century Gallery, 3 1 W o m e n in 1943 and T h e W o m e n in 1945. She had a memorial show at the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in New York in 1971. Her first one-person show in forty years was held at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in May 2017.

Media

• Drawing

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