Paul Harris: Interior Interests 

4361 words

Leah Triplett 

“Becoming an artist is a serious undertaking rather like preparing for a trek across Antarctica,” wrote Paul Harris (1925–2018) in 2008 to a young cousin considering the life path. Harris, who would pass away ten years later in 2018, after a long career as a teacher (most notably at California College of the Arts from 1968 to 1992) and with exhibitions nationally and internationally, typed this letter from his longtime home in Bolinas, California. But his art—spanning disciplines and dimensions—had physically taken him and his family across the country, abroad to Chile and Jamaica, and around the world, as his work was exhibited in museums across Europe. Trained in painting but known for sculpture and a consummate drawer, Harris constantly practiced his hand and eye as he stroked crayon across paper or litho stone, molded wax for bronze to be poured, punctured fabric with a sewing needle, or pushed paint across canvas. Emotionally, artmaking was a means for articulating the ineffable, as it went from a boyhood outlet for grappling with the loss of his mother at five years old, a means to show kinship for his crewmates when he served in the Navy during World War II, and how he connected with his coterie of lifelong friends, artists or otherwise, throughout his 92 years. Spanning media, his work is united in a sense of a search; its surfaces, shapes, space, and shades of color, all an effort to survey the oscillations of human experience. 

Harris was an innovator of forms and materials, anticipating interdisciplinarity through abstract figuration that harnessed the possibilities of bronze, wood, fabric, and textile-based techniques alike. Accordingly, his prolific practice had been celebrated in his day through critical writing, significant exhibitions, and acquisition in important private and public collections alike. Harris became an artist to critical esteem beyond the reach of most. But, as Harris’s son Christopher reflected in his father’s eulogy, “fame came by his door but never knocked.” Indeed, despite his decades of accolades, as well as his place at the forefront of the leading artistic movements throughout the twentieth century, Harris is today less known compared to some of his closest friends (like Richard Diebenkorn or Elaine de Kooning), though no less awarded or lauded. Perhaps Harris felt his career had been like a trek to an unknown land. Writing this letter to an unnamed cousin, Harris must have reflected on moments along the journey; we can imagine him measuring each word in the short, twelve-lined letter, ensuring that they communicated the sum of his wisdom and experience in the most concise, accessible way possible, just as he had all his life in drawing, painting, printmaking, and, most significantly, sculpture. For this work, as Harris wrote to the young cousin, “the rewards were rarely monetary, but the trek can be most interesting.” 

It was this curiosity, this pursuit of the “interesting,” that fueled Harris to traverse media, movements, and materials (crayon, pencil, lithography, oil paint, bronze, wood, fabric, plexiglass, were just among the many he used), never resting in any one manifestation of art 

making. Today, one hundred years after Harris’s birth, artists are celebrated for such versatility and dexterity of materiality. In Harris’s day, a multi-faceted artist confounded the critics and curators who wrote art history. Emerging on the New York scene in the heady days of Abstract Expressionism and the hard lines it drew around style (of which Harris was well aware as both an artist and editorial associate for ARTnews), those scaffolding the critical pillars of the postmodern acknowledged a stylistic splintering yet struggled to dispel with silos of simple definitions. As art historian Jo Applin writes in her book Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America, early postmodern critics “recognised the developing art scene as being marked by a number of unusual and seemingly out of place or unfamiliar new directions,” but the “complexity of the period” has nevertheless been fairly reduced to be synonymous with Minimalism. Similarly, almost all of the essayists in the catalogue for the seminal American Sculpture of the Sixties (1967), curated by Maurice Tuchman for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, and including Harris, began their discussion of the form as it related to painting. Likewise, the equally watershed Sewn, Stitched, & Stuffed (1973–1974) curated by Sandra R. Zimmerman for the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, NY (now the Museum of Arts and  Design), all nineteen artists adhered to traditional ideations of how fabric could be manipulated, as in the characteristic sewing, stitching, and stuffing. And though Harris used all three techniques in his sculpture included in that exhibition (Flo Waiting, 1971–72), he singularly fused an abundant sense of space with a sparseness of form, essentially coalescing the tenets of Minimalism with the painterly sensibility of abstraction and figuration. This stylistic fusion typifies Harris's work, regardless of the material or form, while his singular focus on the interiority of an object differentiated him from other artists, critics, and curators of the postmodern period. His chase of the "interesting" is reflected in the confounding but enthralling inwardness, suggesting a pulsating emotionality beyond the formalism of the day. This placed him on a maverick, parallel track to the prevailing taste of his contemporaries, who were much more invested in the surface and exterior. His chase of the "interesting" is reflected in the confounding but enthralling inwardness, suggesting a pulsating emotionality beyond formalism. As fellow artist and critic Donald Judd wrote in Specific Objects, his 1964 essay on new sculpture sweeping the American scene, “the most obvious difference within this diverse work is between that which is something of an object, a single thing, and that which is open and extended, more or less environmental....A work needs only to be interesting.” Mentioning Harris as one such artist heralding the “open and extended,” Judd obliquely suggests that the interesting is that which elucidates or intrigues. For Harris, the interesting is interiority. 

Quintessentially postmodern, Harris relentlessly pursued new forms and materials throughout his career, driven to eloquently externalize his personal experiences, narratives, and subjectivities. Harris’s integration of personal narrative in his work, in concert with his stylistic hybridity, effectively estranged him from a postmodernism that extolled essential objecthood, complicating the criticism of his work. Harris made objects, but in doing so, summed up a tension between interiority and exteriority by integrating a simplicity of form with an expansiveness of shape and surface. Nowhere is this more evident than in his soft and stuffed sculptures, widely exhibited during the 1960s and 1970s; these works presage the Pattern and Decoration movement and foreshadow the synthesis of high and low art forms of the late twentieth century, offering a foundation for artists working intermedially today. In them, he used domestic materials (furniture, fabric, stuffing) to create surface tensions and messy forms from the inside out, making palpable a private, inward domain that referenced his life, simultaneously gesturing towards a more universal experience. 

Throughout his writings and teaching, Harris would evoke a sense of emotional interiority as well as a sense of space, just as he did in the letter to the young cousin. Once, on a computer-typed, yet undated but hand-edited note, Harris suggested that artists’ works were like extensions of their psyches; he wrote that 

When an artist is making a piece, there’s an unchecked open channel between the artist’s unconsciousness and the work. When one has finished that process the door closes in some way, and the artist is almost a stranger to the work itself.

Harris printed and edited this two-sentence philosophy in bright blue pen; despite this statement, the act of editing nevertheless indicates a meditative, iterative quality to his practice. All of Harris’s seven-decade career could be read as something of an iteration on form and content, a consistent attempt to create an open channel between his unconsciousness, his work, his community, and viewers that germinated in his youth. 

Born on November 5, 1925, Harris grew up with one sister, a year older, Shirley, in Orlando, Florida. His father, Julian, was an orange broker who also dynamited hardpan–the layer of dense ground just below topsoil–for more orange trees, while his mother, Dorothy Paul Harris, was a homemaker. Given the domestic scenes of solitary, anonymous women that Harris created starting in the 1960s with stuffed sculpture when he was a family man himself, one wonders what his early home life was like and how that may have influenced his later work. Is the elongated, immense woman that so often figures in this work his mother or another caregiver? Sadly, in 1931, when Harris was only five years old, his mother suddenly and tragically died of unknown causes, precipitating him and his sister moving in with his maternal grandparents. Her unexpected death—and disappearance from his life— powerfully impacted Harris and, according to his son Christopher, who stated in his eulogy that his father “unconsciously tried to heal that wound by immersing himself in artwork and embracing friendships.” Truly, artwork and friendship would be the two contours of his life, which would take him from the orange groves of Florida to South America, the South China Sea, Jamaica, Germany, New Mexico, California, and Montana. 

Relationships with women (maternal, romantic, or as close friends) were particularly significant to Harris, influencing or guiding him at opportune or fortuitous moments. In 1936, Julian Harris married Helga Ebsen, whose father, Christian Ludolf Ebsen, had a dance studio in Orlando. Alongside her sister, actress Vilma Ebsen, Helga taught Harris and his sister Shirely to dance and encouraged him to pursue the arts. (The Harris siblings eventually performed a tap dance routine at local venues to bring in extra cash for the family.) Meanwhile, a schoolteacher introduced Harris to his lifelong artistic medium—the crayon—when he was in the sixth grade. The waxy, colorful marks that crayons make are limitlessly varied and malleable, and over his lifetime, Harris would create innumerable drawings in crayon that have both material and graphic presence. For instance, in the pastel Waterboy (1939), one of Harris’s earliest works and a self-portrait, he is depicted in action, carrying a heavy bucket with an arm jutting outward for balance.  His whole body leaning from the weight, Harris’s eyes look outward, towards some unknown action beyond the picture plane. The picture itself almost appears as a contour drawing, with heavy, curvilinear lines outlining the figure’s shape, its volume implied by the heft of Harris’s shading. Though heaviness (both thematic and formal) is the dominant feeling of the drawing, the roundness of Harris’s line suggested a supple softness, presaging the subtle rotundity of his stuffed sculpture. Further, the pull of primary colors red, yellow, and blue, accented by the secondary greens, portend the “push pull” relationships between colors that Hans Hoffman would teach Harris ten years later at his Provincetown, Massachusetts, during the summer of 1949. The start of that season saw Harris living in a wharf-side shack below Elaine de Kooning, a tenacious artist and prescient writer married to the becoming famous Willem de Kooning (who was fresh off his pivotal 1948 exhibition at Egan Gallery). That summer, the two struck up a close and mutually supportive friendship—often sending each other drawings or other works for critique—that would persist for decades to come. In one such exchange from 1954, after Harris had sent de Kooning some masks (that she hung on her studio wall) as well as drawings, she wrote her impressions of the drawings, calling one depicting a female form “magnificent.” de Kooning also critiqued another set of drawings, which, by her description, seem dimensional in Harris’s method of adhering cut paper to the surface. “When those little pieces of paper are pasted on and you paint or draw over them, the drawing is made sharper or more unpredictable…the indirection-ness (?) [sic] helps.” Was this early “indirection-ness” a budding attempt at the interdisciplinarity that Haris would later embrace in sculpture? Or an example of how Harris’s hand (and its gesture) always pervaded his work, as he selected small particles of paper to affix and manipulate? Regardless, de Kooning’s letter encouraged him and demonstrates that, even in these years of Abstract Expressionism’s dominance, Harris was already resolutely invested in figuration, dimensionality, and evidencing his hand. 

Drawing and handwork were integral to Harris’s late teenage years and early adulthood. In 1943, six years before his summer in Provincetown, his stepmother and her sister would take him from the Orlando orange groves to Pacific Palisades, California, where he attended classes at the Chouinard School of Art (now the California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts). With World War II raging, he also worked as a riveter for Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles, but returned home to Florida to graduate from Orlando High School in 1944 and enlisted in the Navy shortly thereafter. By December of that year, he was aboard the USS Ault and entering the Pacific Theater, making fast friends who would nevertheless endure for decades (many of whom would be the subjects of sketches that Harris constantly drew while at sea). One such pal was Servando Trujulo from New Mexico, whose descriptions of the arid and open landscape inspired Harris to enroll in the University of New Mexico following the war in 1946. There, he met Peggy, a classmate whose mother, Mrs. Cannedy, and sister, Billie Bob, ran a rooming house for sixteen boarders that became his home away from home. “All of us had become a family,” Harris would later say. Harris lived with the Cannedy family throughout his first stint in Albuquerque and would eventually create the bronze Our Lady of Sorrows (1991) for the UNM campus in honor of Billie Bob. Still referencing softness and femininity, despite its materiality and angularity, this bronze is among the most spare of Harris’s sculptures. In dialogue with many of his referential bronzes of the 1980s and 1990s, the black, patinated bell shape in this work is an oversized, pleated skirt in mid-swish, although the wearer is nonexistent. This absence (much like the voided faces of the female figures in his soft sculptures) is perhaps referencing that of his mother, whom he had drawn as a nameless woman at six years old, recalling a figure at once deeply personal and universal. Recalling this during his remarks to inaugurate the sculpture in 1991, Harris said of Our Lady of Sorrows emanated from this “simple drawing” that he 

found great comfort in this drawing…A few months earlier my mother had died…Although she didn’t wear floor length skirts she must have had some robes or gowns that went to the floor…behind which I could hide. Something lost had been somewhat regained. A six year old had discovered that art has astonishing possibilities.

Indeed, the female figure, along with a textured, worked surface, would be a hallmark of Harris’s work across media, the form and aesthetic abstractedly disclosing a powerful, poignant psychological realm. Slender on top and billowing in neat, vertical folds, the “skirt” in Our Lady of Sorrows is hewn with linear, hand-drawn, scratch-like marks throughout its surface, imbuing not only a sense of movement but also a sense of wear and tear, thus of time passing and imprinting its duration on our bodies. 

Harris’s matriculation in Albuquerque was the start of a fervent, if itinerant, education and early career as an art professor. While there, he met Agnes Martin, who recently moved from New York to study for her MFA at UNM. Still a beat away from the deceptively simple formal compositions of color and line, Martin nevertheless heralded an evolution beyond Expressionism or Action Painting toward the essentialism of Minimalism as well as the relationality of assemblage. Form—what it was, its potential, and its importance to all art forms—dominated conversations at the UNM studios and beyond. Already occupied with questions of form, Harris sought acquaintance with a myriad of cultures, places, and teachers; before he completed his BFA and MFA from UNM, Harris traveled around Central America, studied in New York with Johannes Molzahn at the New School for Social Research, and spent a summer in Provincetown with Hoffman, de Kooning, and other leading lights of American painting. By the mid-1950s, he had married Marguerite Kirk and completed an EdD at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, where he wrote a thesis on artists-as-teachers and patronage. Like generations of artists after him, Harris assumed a career in education as a means for stable, if not substantial, financial support. And like generations of women artists before and after him, his family (by 1954, sons Christopher and Nicholas) and home life ordered his artistic one. The public and private fed from each other as the Harrises moved to Jamaica in 1952, where Harris taught at the Quaker School in Highgate and then Knox College, and then to Santiago, Chile, where he was a Fulbright Professor at the Universidad Catolica from 1961–1963. While in Chile, Harris wrote to his friend, Richard Diebenkorn, whom he had first met in New Mexico, asking for leads on a job in the Bay Area, where Diebenkorn lived with his wife, Phyllis, and two kids. This eventually led to a job at the San Francisco Art Institute and then, finally, in 1968, at the cutting edge California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco. In 1964, the Harrises settled about an hour north in Bolinas, where they would mostly reside for the rest of their lives. 

In the family's first Bolinas home, Harris found and reclaimed furniture, clothing, and other detritus that the previous occupant had left after a fire. As thrifty as he was inventive, Harris quickly landed on the sculptural potential of these discarded household items. Brightly colored fabrics were collaged and stitched together in an assemblage of patterns, while upholstery was repurposed as stuffing to create figurative forms, almost cartoonish in their swell and scale alike. For instance, in Woman in Blue Slacks (1963), one of his earliest stuffed works, a singular woman sits on a chair striped with blue, grey, black, and white. Her legs are crossed at the knees, and her arms rest on her lap and to her side, respectively. The titular woman is lifelike in both gesture and form. Nevertheless, a certain absurd roundness pervades her body, melding her into the similar fullness of her chair. Her upturned face, raised in attention as if she's just been called to, is disturbingly blank, a void in a work otherwise rich in detail (her blue ballet slipper shoes, the seams in her denim-colored outfit, and the tawny tone of her hair). This uncanny edge between lifelike and abstract is further teased in works like Woman Looking Out to Sea (1965), in which a female figure lies almost prostrate, her legs swept beneath her and hidden under a floral skirt, on another striped chair, this one rounded with layers of orange and blue. The depicted woman rests her chin on a hand along the top edge of the chair, while her other stretches out behind her and onto the azure blossoms of her skirt. The woman's dark crimson hair appears windblown, pieced together with white seams, and our gaze naturally follows hers away from the sculpture and into its surroundings, as it does with Woman in Blue Slacks. Like the earlier work, the face in Woman Looking Out to Sea is but an absence, left for the viewer to project their own interpretations of what that countenance might be, thereby drawing on their own memories or experiences of similar scenes. Harris evoked gestures, patterns, and body language that, while extracted from his domestic and everyday life in Bolinas, nevertheless articulated something of an emotional universality.

Like Pop artists Duane Hanson or Claes Oldenburg, Harris’s work in the 1960s and 1970s relied on seemingly ubiquitous or mundane objects or environments to meditate on the everyday life of the turbulent times. Often extracting the prosaic from their typical contexts, these artists critiqued or celebrated the mass-produced and hyper-commercialized ethos of the post-war period; in his work, Harris extracted and elevated the ordinary as a means of personal expression. Manipulating the aesthetic characteristics of the soft to make strange the familiar, Harris, like Oldenburg, relied on a sense of humor or the absurd to enchant and enthrall the viewer. However, Harris’s use of the soft was less a means of critique and more a way to create an “open channel” between himself, his unconscious, and his viewers. The soft emotionally charged and otherwise straightforward representation or figuration, as the reality of the material distorted and abstracted into the poetic. As Maurice Tuchman wrote in his catalogue essay introducing American Sculpture of the Sixties: 

Many artists of this decade are explicitly concerned with the presentation of Man, and say so clearly…Real props fill out these works. [Harris] makes savagely mutilated life-sized freestanding figure assemblages, primarily from cloths and fabrics…in his sewn and stuffed personages…his effigies are as poignant as they are terrifying…the “representational” element–the potency of the image–is so charged as to blind our cognizance of the forms. Originality of content seemingly overpowers “style.” In a period marked by the contributions of abstraction, objects and figures have been re-introduced [sic] into sculpture with directness and conviction.

Tuchman selected four vibrantly colorful soft sculptures depicting women for the exhibition: Women Laughing (1964), Woman Giving Her Greeting (1964), Woman in Green Gown (1965), and Woman Smelling Her Roses (1966). In each, Harris’s female figures perform a routine action that suggests another person or thing (such as laughing, greeting, looking, or smelling). All but Woman Giving Her Greeting incorporates a patterned, rotund, and seemingly comfortable chair or chaise with which the figure’s simplified physicality coalesces. These early stuffed works are tableaus not unlike those of Marisol or Edward Kienholz made in through hard materials, and they anticipate the installation or “environmental” work that these artists would explore over the decades from the 1970s onward. However, Harris would explore the relational and situational aspects in his soft sculpture, emphasizing a volume of form instead of an emptied-out, “hollow” of object that Barbara Rose describes in “Post-Cubist Sculpture,” her essay for American Sculpture of the Sixties.

As critics grappled with the aesthetic and material diversity of the postmodern (fractured in style, yet unified in a distrust of grand narrative as well as embrace of irony and material purity) sculpture, Harris continued to exploit the emotional possibilities of softness. For this, he was among a vanguard of artists across the US manipulating fabric, string, and batting through deskilled or sophisticated needlework and weaving. Included in a groundbreaking show of such work, Sewn, Stitched, and Stuffed (1973-74), Harris’s Flo Waiting (1971-72) is a room-sized installation with walls enclosing a single female form, her hands almost clasped as she stands erect off center in the room, her head pointed up in anticipation. Her solid, royal purple floor-length gown contrasts with the tight lines of bell-shaped flowers and vines that pattern the installation’s wallpaper. Two potted plants bookend the figure along the right wall. Do the plants, which are about as tall as a third of the wall, signify a burgeoning growth as yet unrealized? Is the figure between the pair of these two young greens, just as Harris was amidst representation and abstraction, sculpture and installation, with this work? Unlike many of his soft sculptures of the period, Flo Waiting has a smoothness of surface—all of its edges flattened and seamless—that belies the full shapeliness of the stuffed technique. This flatness, coupled with the relationship between figure and ground, light and shadow, serves to emphasize the poignancy of the figure’s expectation and sensuality, as its objecthood is sneakily and neatly rendered into clean volume, shape, and spatiality, more traditionally associated with sculpture. 

Lucy Lippard, surveying the new sculpture of the 1960s, identified such evocative formalism as “eccentric abstraction.” Writing her essay to introduce her 1966 exhibition of the same title at Fischbach Gallery, Lippard states that artists in this vein 

refuse to eschew imagination and the extension of sensuous experience while they also refuse to sacrifice the solid formal basis demanded of the best in current non-objective art…the eccentric idiom is more closely related to abstract painting than to sculptural forms.

Harris, with his commitment to representation and figuration, does not fit squarely in Lippard’s definition. However, his abstract style, so informed by painterly color and surface tension, nevertheless commands a psychological sphere through the nature of his materials. This is inscribed in his surfaces, which, no matter his media, tend toward the rough-hewn, the haptic, or the tactile. Preoccupied with form throughout his career, Harris summons a formlessness within his forms, letting an eccentricity take hold once it is contained. Not intrinsic to his materiality, his forms were rooted in emotion. As he wrote on form following a class for San Quentin inmates co-taught with his friend and former CCA student, Rick Hall, forms emerge “from concentrated yearning or desire…Sculpture must engage, arouse, disturb, and irritate some tiny particle within us that nothing else touches.” This definition of sculpture assumes that forms—figurative or otherwise—tease a certain eccentricity, an interiority felt singularly but, through art, shared widely. 

Harris would never surrender his pursuit to give form to “our loneliness, our desperations, our delights,” as evidenced in his drawings, prints, and sculptures from his last decades, marked by rich texture and dynamism that reflect the varied verisimilitude of emotion. Drawings and prints from the 1980s on (such as The Way Down to the Sea, 1983, or Flores, 1993) build up surface and shades of color through quick, urgent scrawls of line that feel, as de Kooning called his drawings a half-century beforehand, “unpredictable.” With a similar aesthetic, in 2007 (a year before writing his young cousin), Harris completed a portrait in bronze depicting nothing but his face. His mouth opened in agony, his eyes hauntingly vacant, the intricately rough, Rodin-like finish betraying an anguish as well as a mesmerizing passion. Across the dark patina, the skin is folded and almost craggy, effectively drawing interest to see the facial features through the veneer. Like all of his life’s work, this bronze manifests inside behind the face, and searches outward to the trek of finding connection beyond the unchecked channel between form and psyche.