Harriette Joffe Figurative Paintings

This work exhibits many of the themes that preoccupied her during her career, including the repudiation of the distinction between abstraction and figuration, a distinction that preoccupied her mentor Willem De Kooning, the introduction of a female perspective to her art through the reinterpretation of classical art, and the incorporation of a kind of secular, esoteric, materialistic Jewish tradition into her work. Joffe was serious in a way that many artists today are not: she was an artist engaged with the major questions of her time, attuned to the development of her chosen métier, its intrinsic problems and possibilities. Joffe's career spans the post-World War II Abstract Expressionist movement to the present. She is known for her powerful images of women and horses, often intertwined, and representing reciprocal ideas of power, grace and beauty. Indeed, one NYT critic said that she returned the beauty and grace to the female form that De Kooning had taken away. Embraced by the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters on the East End of Long Island, she represented a link to central figures in the avant-garde of 20th century American art, including such artists as Willem De Kooning (she was a studio assistant), Philip Pavia, Ibram Lassaw, John Little and Balcomb Greene. She did Tai Chi with Elaine De Kooning on the beach in East Hampton. She exhibited nationally in galleries and museums, showing alongside artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Eric Fischel, Linda Benglis, April Gornick, Larry Rivers, and Jackie Windsor. Joffe also worked with the pioneering Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass, or DUMBO, artists finding a voice within the then emerging New York City avant-garde in the 1970s. Joffe's contribution to the history of Abstract Expressionism is featured in the East Hampton Parrish Museum's "oral histories" series. Note: this work was the cover image of the catalogue for the Joffe Retrospective at Lawrence Fine Art...

Sometimes a single work of art sums up where an artist has gotten to; sometimes it prefigures to where an artist is headed. Matanza, a masterful work by Harriette Joffe (1935-2018), ...

Oil on paper Joffe's career spans the post-World War II Abstract Expressionist movement to the present. She is known for her powerful images of women and horses, often intertwined, a...

Joffe's career spans the post-World War II Abstract Expressionist movement to the present. She is known for her powerful images of women and horses, often intertwined, and representi...

Signed, titled and dated en verso Joffe's career spans the post-World War II Abstract Expressionist movement to the present. She is known for her powerful images of women and horses...