Harriet Korman (born 1947) is an American abstract painter based in New York City, who first gained attention in the early 1970s.Yau, John. "Harriet Korman's Formal Mastery," Hyperallergic, November 18, 2018. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Pincus-Witten, Robert. "Karl Schrag, Michael Goldberg, Jacqueline Gourevitch, Harriet Korman, Frank Lincoln Viner, Materials and Methods: A New View," Artforum, Summer 1972. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Smith, Roberta. "Harriet Korman," Artforum, September 1975, p. 73–4. Retrieved July 23, 2020. She is known for work that embraces improvisation and experimentation within a framework of self-imposed limitations that include simplicity of means, purity of color, and a strict rejection of allusion, illusion, naturalistic light and space, or other translations of reality.Yau, John. "One of New York's Purist Abstract Painters," Hyperallergic, May 23, 2020. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Cotter, Holland. "Harriet Korman at Sorkin," Art in America, July 1990, p. 163.Johnson, Ken. "Harriet Korman at Lennon, Weinberg," Art in America, November 1994. Writer John Yau describes Korman as "a pure abstract artist, one who doesn’t rely on a visual hook, cultural association, or anything that smacks of essentialization or the spiritual," a position he suggests few post-Warhol painters have taken.Yau, John. "Harriet Korman, Recent Drawings and Paintings," The Brooklyn Rail, March 2008. Retrieved July 23, 2020. While Korman's work may suggest early twentieth-century abstraction, critics such as Roberta Smith locate its roots among a cohort of early-1970s women artists who sought to reinvent painting using strategies from Process Art, then most associated with sculpture, installation art and performance.Smith, Roberta. "Harriet Korman," The New York Times, December 25, 1992, p. C29. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Mueller, Stephen. Harriet Korman: New Paintings," artcritical, May 1, 2004. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Smith, Roberta. "Mary Heilmann,"The New York Times, September 20, 2017. Retrieved July 23, 2020. Since the 1990s, critics and curators have championed this early work as unjustifiably neglected by a male-dominated 1970s art market and deserving of rediscovery.Kimmelman, Michael. "A Quirky Whitney Biennial," The New York Times, March 24, 1995, p. C1, C32. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Smith, Roberta. "Art In Review; Richard Aldrich," The New York Times, June 2, 2004, p. E32. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Artforum. "One Collection, Three Museums," News, April 23, 2007. Retrieved July 23, 2020.
Korman has exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museo Rufino Tamayo and MoMA PS1, among other institutions.Kramer, Hilton. "Guggenheim Shows 10 Young Artists," The New York Times, September 25, 1971. P. 27. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Bankowsky, Jack. "The Art of the Matter: Curating the Whitney Biennial," Artforum, January 1995. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Richard, Frances. "High Times, Hard Times," Artforum, April 2007. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Butler, Sharon. "9 painters receive 2013 Guggenheim Fellowships," Two Coats of Paint, April 15, 2013. Retrieved July 27, 2020. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts.Artforum. "2013 Guggenheim Fellows Announced," News, April 11, 2013. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Pollock-Krasner Foundation. "Harriet Korman," Artists. Retrieved July 27, 2020.Art Students League of New York. "Visiting Artists." Retrieved July 27, 2020.
Early life and career Korman was born in 1947 in Bridgeport, Connecticut.Maier Museum of Art. Untitled (Abstraction with Yellows and Red-orange), Harriet Korman, 1990, Collections. Retrieved July 27, 2020. She studied art at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Queens College (BA, 1969), where she received a fairly traditional, observation-based education in painting.Korman, Harriet. Harriet Korman: Notes on Painting 1969–2019, New York: Harriet Korman, 2020. In her final year, however, she encountered the contemporary work of artists such as Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and Lee Lozano, which shifted her focus toward a new painting language based on process and untethered to realistic observation or tradition.
After graduating, Korman shared a Lower East Side studio space with artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Charles Simonds and soon received recognition through exhibitions at The Institute of Art and Urban Resources (now MoMA PS1) and Guggenheim Museum ("10 Young Artists – Theodoron Awards") in 1971, a Whitney Annual (1972) and Biennial (1973), and a one-person exhibition at LoGiudice Gallery (1972).Kramer, Hilton. "An Artist Emerging from the 60's Counterculture; Chicago," The New York Times, December 13, 1981, Sect. 2, p. 39. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Siegal, Jeanne. ARTnews, November 1972.Boice, Bruce. "Harriet Korman," Artforum, December 1972. Retrieved July 23, 2020.
In subsequent decades, Korman has had exhibitions at Galerie Ricke in Cologne; the Willard Gallery (1976–87), Lennon, Weinberg (1992–2019) and Thomas Erben Gallery in New York; Jancar Gallery (Los Angeles) and Daniel Weinberg Gallery (San Francisco and Los Angeles); Texas Gallery (Houston); and Häusler Contemporary (Munich), among others.Kramer, Hilton. "Harriet Korman," The New York Times, December 3, 1976. P. 67. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Westfall, Stephen. "Harriet Korman," Arts Magazine, April 1984. She has also been included in the Whitney Biennial 1995, the international traveling exhibition, "High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975" (2006–8), and shows at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, National Academy Museum, and MoMA PS1.Avgikos, Jan. "1995 Biennial," Artforum, Summer 1995. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Siegel, Katy. High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967 – 1975, New York: Independent Curators International, 2006. Retrieved August 6, 2020.
In addition to her art career, Korman has taught in the Fine Arts Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology since 1989; she has also served on the faculties at Queens College and Virginia Commonwealth University.Fashion Institute of Technology. "FIT Professor Harriet Korman Wins Guggenheim Fellowship," July 9, 2013. Retrieved July 23, 2020. Korman lives and works in New York City with her husband, artist John Mendelsohn.John Mendelsohn website. Bio. Retrieved July 27, 2020.
Work and reception Korman's work is consistent in terms of thought and inquiry rather than a signature style, motif, process or movement. She emerged in the wake of Minimalist and Conceptualist critiques of the painting tradition as "dead," but rejected them and embraced its legacy and limitations (e.g., the two-dimensional rectangle, flatness) as challenges. Her paintings employ frank, direct processes and often oscillate between fragmentation and wholeness, improvisation and structure.Fyfe, Joe. "Harriet Korman at Lennon, Weinberg," Art in America, September 2001.Golden, Deven. "The Tremolo Effect: Harriet Korman at Lennon, Weinberg," artcritical, April 13, 2012. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Rubinstein, Raphael. "Harriet Korman: 'Permeable/Resistant'", The Brooklyn Rail, December 2018. Retrieved July 23, 2020. In her early series, Korman—and others such as Jennifer Bartlett, Louise Fishman, Mary Heilmann and Joan Snyder—sought to reduce mark-making and gesture to the essential in deceptively simple works.Smith, Roberta. "Building on the Bare, Bare Bones," The New York Times, August 12, 1994, p. C22. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Schapiro, Miriam (ed). Art: A Woman's Sensibility, Valencia, CA: California Institute of the Arts, Feminist Art Program, 1975. Retrieved August 6, 2020. In subsequent work, she has experimented with livelier color, loose grids, geometries of interlocking shapes, and canvases with symmetrical subdivided formats, often based on drawings.Corn, Alfred. "Harriet Korman at Lennon, Weinberg," Art in America, April 1997.Hirsch, Faye. "Harriet Korman at Lennon, Weinberg," Art in America, October 2004.
Early process paintings Korman's early paintings (1969–75) investigate subtle gestural problems and compositional means that break with modernist tradition, using predetermined processes of addition and subtraction and loose grid structures.Smith, Roberta. "Harriet Korman," The New York Times, March 2, 1990, p. C30. Retrieved July 23, 2020. Her first three New York solo exhibitions (1972–6) largely featured paintings in which she drew parallel lines, dots, dashes or numbers in crayon (sometimes forming shapes), covered them over with a layer of white gesso, and then scraped with emphatic, varying marks using a palette knife to bring together the two layers.
Reviewers described the resulting work as surprisingly compelling given her easily comprehended, simple method; in conceptual terms, they noted Korman's emphasis on arbitrariness and seeming nonchalance about the end product, which ran counter to the more heroic narratives of minimalism. Hilton Kramer described both an "appealing delicacy and purity" and pictorial insistency in Korman's spare forms (like stems and stitches) and pale, close-value colors, which recalled work by Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse; Roberta Smith wrote that Korman's work—denser, less taut, and more confident and inattentive—advanced Martin's, yielding "quietly radiant surfaces" that pulsate between fragility and robustness like breathing.
Painting (1976–1996) In 1976, Korman shifted to oil paints for greater flexibility and experimented with radically different directions, sometimes at the same time. Overall, her work of this period features livelier color, looser wet-on-wet brushwork and more raucous rhythms, which take forms ranging from uneven bands of color and free-form shapes to buckling grid patterns and loosely geometric shapes to gestural lines and scribbles.Whelan, Richard. "Harriet Korman," ARTnews, May 1980.Smith, Roberta. "Harriet Korman," The Village Voice, June 8, 1982. Stephen Westfall commended her experimentation in a review of her 1984 exhibition (Willard Gallery), which he described as a "surprisingly warm combination" of witty, slightly ragged touch, rigorous planarity and vivid, emotionally colored ideas.
Critics suggest Korman's late-1980s-to-early-1990s paintings circle back in style to refigure her past by turning the signature Minimalist grid into something loose and tactile, like textile design.Zimmer, William. "Abstract Expressionism Is Alive and Well," The New York Times, November 27, 1994, Sect. 13WC, p. 18. Retrieved July 23, 2020. She retained certain aspects—loose organizing principles and frankly evident processes—while introducing a vibrant palette, fleet paint application, and greater movement among styles.Cotter, Holland. "Group Show," The New York Times, June 26, 1992, p. C24. Retrieved July 23, 2020. The paintings generally emerge from monochromatic grounds built of layered color, onto which Korman painted notational dashes, squares and wavy strokes of contrasting color that suggest gently disintegrating grids or plaids, thatches of grass or abstract calligraphy. Reviews most consistently commented on the work's controlled spontaneity, which Ken Johnson described as "operat[ing] in the gap between painterly hedonism and formal puritanism"; Holland Cotter compared the work to "a good dance performance" combining "skill with an instinctive grace." Between 1993 and 1996, Korman turned to mostly black, white and gray canvasses with askew grids and irregular, geometric "compartments" containing densely worked, calligraphic circles, diamonds, stripes, figure-eight and pretzel-like forms, and emblems.Smith, Roberta. "Harriet Korman," The New York Times, November 8, 1996, p. C23. Retrieved July 23, 2020.Perl, Jed. "The Age of Recovery," The New Republic, February 17, 1997, p. 28–31.
Painting (1997–present)