Double Trouble

Hananiah Harari is a slick, meticulous commercial artist whose sharp-focus Coca-Cola ads, whisky displays (Old Sunny Brook) and magazine covers (FORTUNE) look even more real than the photographs he often paints from. He is also a solemn abstractionist. Last week Harari's "serious" paintings were on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery. They looked like nothing so much as houses built of cards for a game unknown to Hoyle.

Born in Rochester in 1912, "Dick" Harari had "a routine academic training" there and later a modern schooling under Fernand Leger and Marcel Gromaire in Paris. Back in the U.S. he did both realistic landscapes and abstract murals for the WPA, exhibited fool-the-eye still lifes at the Museum of Modern Art and sold an abstraction to the Whitney Museum before he discovered his flair for commercial work.

His present double life clearly troubles Harari. Pale and frail-looking, he keeps two easels and two drawing tables in his studio at Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., uses one set of equipment for morning abstractions and the other for afternoon commercial jobs. Like any artist, Harari longs to be both independent and popular: "I'd like to be close to people, but you know how the ordinary Joe feels about abstractions. Without being patronizing I'd like to be akin, to express what people are feeling. For example, there were 6,000,000 Jews killed in Europe. I'd like to paint about that but not in a trite, illustrative way. I'd like to paint abstractions that will move people . . ."

How does he plan to go about it? Says Harari anxiously: "I just don't know." Meanwhile, he has a lot of work piled up ahead of him, painting pretty teen-agers and frosted Coke glasses.

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