ZEV(American, born Daniel Harris 1914-1986) – “Eating,” 1957

In the 1950’s Europe saw the ascendancy of Cocteau, Miro, Ernst, Dubuffet, Brauner…….and ZEV!  Before 1950, he exhibited under the name of Dan Harris,–he has written of his early years:

“I have always painted……but not seriously until I was six  years old!”   

His good friend from the days in Big Sur, author Henry Miller, wrote in the Paris Review, 1955:

“You could make a child’s book that would put Alice in Wonderland to shame.  And what of the moon? And who made it, if not Zev? That Zev was an ‘old soul’ I recognized immediately… he recognizes nothing but the radiance and reflections of his own bright spirit everywhere.”

And the important art critic, Dore Ashton, wrote in the New York Times, 1958:

“A gentle fantasist who sometimes shows himself as a skilled satirist.  Zev’s facial types resemble the potato-headed personnages of ‘l’art brut,’–meaning Dubuffet’s–or, at times, the sylphic heads of Picasso’s later tender period…. fittingly ridiculous, mixed chivalric and picaresque parentage into a modern world…”

Education: 

Roerich Museum and the National Academy of Design, New York

Selected collections:   Katharine Hepburn, Zachary Scott, Henry Miller, William Copley, Baroness de Rothschild, Sidney Janis, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum, Corcoran Museum, Chicago Art Institute, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museé d’Art Moderne, Paris