About Harriette Joffe

Discovery

Provocative, vibrant, and unapologetically feminine, Harriette Joffe was a pioneer in the postwar American painting scene for more than six decades. Her paintings challenged the art world with the same tenacity, bold exuberance, and mastery of those who, because of their gender, have gotten much more acclaim. Less introspective than the European-born “first-generation” Abstract Expressionists who she knew and worked with, her work employed ecstatic motion, color, and sensual line to ceaselessly explore the mysteries of life and the celebration of human experience.

Harriette Joffe was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1935, later attended Rhode Island School of Design, Upsala College, and received her MFA/MA at City College of New York. During the formative years of 20th Century American Art, Joffe developed her career in the east end of Long Island, showing her work with artists such as Elaine DeKooning, Lynda Benglis, Larry Rivers, Eric Fischl, and April Gornik.

In the 1970s, Joffe worked alongside the avant-garde artists of the pioneering “Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass” or DUMBO. She thrived in the rebellious and energetic nature of New York City, explored new ideas, staged performance pieces, and experimented with nontraditional materials. During this time, she taught at numerous institutions in New York and New Jersey while exhibiting at local galleries; Tower Gallery Southampton NY, Elaine Benson Gallery Bridgehampton NY, and the Guild Hall Museum East Hampton NY.

Harriette relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1990, where her curiosity extended to ancient cultures, religion, and history of the surrounding area. Through a chance meeting with the historian Stanley Hordes —whose research involved the Spanish Inquisition and the crypto-Jews in New Mexico— Joffe began to explore the history of her Jewish ancestry and its effects on her Heritage. This exploration took form in her work through a fiery color palette depicting biblical figures and Jewish fairy tales' narratives.

The cumulation of Joffe's time in New Mexico, as well as her extensive travels through Italy, France, and the Iberian Peninsula, added immensely to the rich layers and texture of her work. Her experiences influenced her exploration into a vast range of techniques and materials, including encaustic wax painting, wood carving, and printmaking. Her most dynamic works arrived through her ability to push the boundaries of figuration and abstraction through painting.

Writing for the Hampton Star in 1988, Rose Slivka said, "Ms. Joffe's myth churns her high-keyed paintings… her charging strokes and landscapes, the prism of her sinewy color writhing with visceral energy."

In 2005 Joffe expanded her vision once again, becoming a part of the world of physics and working as a biographer and researcher for Dr. Keith Boyer and Dr. Charles Kirkham Rhodes, the University of Illinois at Chicago. This experience informed Harriette's art and opened her to ideas of ancient myth, cosmology, and scientific phenomena.

In her own words, "Myth, legend and ancient lore reach out and invite me into a world rich with infinite possibility. World music is the magic carpet to my creative process, evoking color, images, and stories without end. All that I am, all that I have experienced becomes my art."

Harriette Joffe had numerous solo and group gallery and museum exhibitions, including The Guild Hall Museum, Lawrence Fine Art, Vered Gallery, The Springs Invitational, and Art Basel Miami. The artist's works are in public collections nationally, including Jewish Center of the Hamptons NY, College of Santa Fe NM, and Merrill Lynch, Dallas TX. Joffe's contribution to the history of Abstract Expressionism is also featured in the East Hampton Parrish Museum's "oral histories" series.

The sensuous and energetic quality of paint allowed Joffe to write with color, movement, and texture, creating a bridge between worlds in her attempt to make the intangible visible.

"The paintings are a metaphor for all that can be concealed by nature." -Harriette Joffe

Harriette Joffe died surrounded by her loving family on Tuesday, October 16, 2018, in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Myth, legend, and ancient lore reach out and invite me into a world rich with infinite possibility. World music is the magic carpet to my creative process, evoking color, images, and stories without end. All that I am, all that I have experienced becomes my art.

Each time that I enter the studio I am open to thoughts and images touching me from a higher source, a distant place. Music, color, and line become dialogue—paintings unfold. “Our hands know how to settle the riddle which our intellects struggle with in vain.” Rumi

In 2005, I had the opportunity of being a part of the world of physics. Because of a set of synchronistic circumstances that included my background in health care and research, I was invited to work for 90-year-old physicist Dr. Keith Boyer. Eventually, I became his biographer, conveying research between Dr. Boyer and Dr. Charles Kirkham Rhodes, Physics Department, University of Illinois at Chicago. As an intermediary and witness to ideas relating to physics, and its applications to enhance medicine, cosmology, mathematics etc., I became deeply aware of and drawn to the intimate relationship between ancient myth and scientific phenomena.

The paradox between Creation and birth and Death and destruction are sometimes revealed in the study of Torah and demonstrated in the sacred literature of most ancient traditions. Leroy Little Bear, a Navajo Elder, has said, “We have reached the limits of our language. Therefore, to exclude anything (i.e., physics, mathematics, biology. or ecology) as separate from visual arts or dance is an inconceivable notion.” Recently in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the conceptual and multi-faceted composer, Tan Dun, premiered Ghost Opera…, “a cross-temporal, cross-cultural, and cross-media dialogue touching on past, present, future, and the eternal,” based on Chinese Shamanistic tradition.

Ancient creation myths parallel scientific reasoning sparking one’s imagination. Through a series of departures and returns, artists and scientists have had to explore new perspectives that have led them to discovery, revelation, and transformations never imagined possible.

My art speaks of an extended human condition extracting an essence and universality out of human events, recasting everyday life to create a new myth. I believe that magic happens when we let spirit guide us. Like the Latin American poet, Jorge Luis Borges, I see a universe in every grain of sand, in every star.

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