02 works, The Art Of The Nude, Hananiah Harari's Nude Descending a Stairs after Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones's The Golden Stairs, with footnotes #230

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt 1833–1898
The Golden Stairs, c. 1880
Oil paint on canvas
2692 × 1168mm
Tate 

The Golden Stairs is one of the best-known paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. It was begun in 1876 and was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880.

Unlike many of Burne-Jones's works, The Golden Stairs is not based on a literary source. It has been called Symbolist, as it has no recognisable narrative, but rather sets a mood. It is a harmony of color in the tradition of the Aesthetic works of the 1860s and 1870s, as a group of young women carrying musical instruments descend a spiraling staircase, dressed in classically inspired robes in tones of white, shading to gold and silver. More on this painting

Hananiah Harari, American, 1912-2000
Nude Descending a Stairs
Oil on canvas
74 x 38 inches
Private collection

Sold for $13,750 USD in June 2016

Statement by the Artist: "Serendipity led me to the Pre-Raphaelite Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones whose painting The Golden Stairs suggested a scaffold for my own. His Victorian maidens, a saccharine demiseraphic troupe, were for me quite naturally no more embraceable than Duchamp's metallic robots. However the sweep of Burne-Jones' design provided my nude her stage. She makes entrance, then descends to diverse portraits comprising not only head, but body & temper - revealed step by step as it were, in shifting colors, light, and action. After "performing" in choreographed (sometimes mocking) descent , she exits below to Art and to the World. (My debt to Burne-Jones is acknowledged in the lower right hand corner of my work, where his name can be seen on a crumpled candy-wrapper.) " 

Hananiah Harari (August 29, 1912 – July 19, 2000) was an American painter and illustrator.

Harari was born in Rochester, New York. He studied at the Syracuse University School of Fine Arts. He went to Paris in the 1930s, where he studied with Fernand Léger from 1932–34; he also studied with Marcel Gromaire and André Lhote. Following a visit to Palestine, he returned to the United States in 1935. 

His first New York exhibition was in 1939. He worked in both a semi-abstract style, and a precise realist style; he painted many trompe l'oeil still lifes. Several silkscreens from this period are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the Yale University Collection.

In the 1940s he produced artwork for the covers of magazines, and contributed cartoons to The New Masses Using his gifts for Realism, he became a successful portrait painter. One of his portraits is in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. Harari taught at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan from 1974 to 1990, and at the Art Students League from 1984 to 1999, where most of his classes were filled to capacity. He stopped teaching when he could no longer see. He was elected into the National Academy of Design in 1990 as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1994.

He died in Halthorne, New York in 2000. More on Hananiah Harari



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02 works, The Art Of The Nude, Hananiah Harari's Nude Descending a Stairs after Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones's The Golden Stairs, with footnotes #230

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt 1833–1898 The Golden Stairs, c. 1880 Oil paint on canvas 2692 × 1168mm Tate  The Golden Stairs is one of t...