Paul Harris studied with Johannes Molzahn at the New School for Social Research, New York City and with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His work has been exhibited in the New York Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum and in various museums in Europe and South America.
He was a Fulbright professor in Chile, a MacDowell Colony resident, a Guggenheim recipient and a visiting artist at the Rinehardt School of Sculpture, Baltimore. He taught at New York University, University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco Art Institute prior to becoming a faculty member at California College of Art 1968, where he taught until 1992.
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About Woman on the Beach:
Originally made from plaster in 1998, this sculpture was cast in bronze at the request of Paul Harris’ family specifically to be placed in the Bozeman Sculpture Park. Always intended to be cast in bronze, it is the vision of the artist himself that these tented legs be exhibited in a public park, to be enjoyed by viewers of all ages.
As Paul Harris wrote about his vision for the sculpture:
“I remember the last summer of 1929 when my family traveled for a weekend at the beach – Daytona Beach as I recall. I was only four years old but my memory of those days at the beach are as vivid as a snapshot from a Kodak. The young women at the beach wore “modern” bathing suits and when they relaxed in the sun after a dip in the ocean, they didn’t seem to mind a little boy staring at their legs. One young woman was particularly beautiful and very tall, her feet buried in the sand. To a little boy, her legs seemed to be like the sides of a small mountain and her knees were the mountain’s twin peaks. So vivid was this memory that 70 years later I felt compelled to create a sculpture to capture this moment of my childhood. The sculpture could only have one title: Woman on the Beach.”
