Mr. Harari, who was born in Rochester, N.Y., studied with Fernand Leger in Paris from 1932 to 1934. He was one of a group of American painters who promoted the cause of international Modernism and abstraction in the United States in the 1930’s, a time when the country was politically in an isolationist mode. His own semi-abstract painting always retained a firm connection to realism; he sometimes painted a chosen subject in both modes.
He had a parallel career as a commercial illustrator until 1950, when he was blacklisted by the business community for doing political cartoons for the leftist magazine The Masses. Thereafter, he worked at commissioned portraiture, as well as with abstraction.
Mr. Harari first exhibited in New York at the Mercury Gallery in 1939, and most recently at the Susan Teller Gallery in SoHo in 1995. In 1997 he was the subject of career retrospectives at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y., and Dai Ichi Arts in Manhattan. Another retrospective was organized by the Memorial Arts Gallery in Rochester, N.Y., in 1998.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others. He taught at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan from 1974 to 1990, and at the Art Students League from 1984 to 1999.
www.nytimes.com/2000/07/25/arts/hananiah-harari-87-artist-who-championed-modernism.html