Hananiah Harari

Snyder Fine Art, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, by 1995

The present work was a proposed mural design Hananiah Harari submitted in 1938 for the Williamsburg Housing Project. The project was funded by the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Projects beginning in 1936 and while Harari’s work was not ultimately selected for inclusion, commissioned murals by Ilya Bolotowsky, Balcomb Greene, Paul Kelpe, and Albert Swinden were installed at the Brooklyn building. Artist Burgoyne Diller was responsible for recruiting innovative young talent to participate in the project and interpret the architect William Lescaze’s vision, and he selected Harari to participate. Harari chose to portray the tenants of the buildings navigating through scenes of everyday life in the borough. They appear throughout the composition as elegant stick figures navigating the city’s streets. Harari intended to evolve the artistic tastes of the American worker who would live alongside these murals and promoted the tenets of abstraction throughout his design.