HARRY SMITH CELESTIAL HOBO
HARRY SMITH: CELESTIAL HOBO By ERIK VOLET March 5, 2024 Harry Everett Smith (May 29, 1923 - November 27, 1991) spent the larger part of his life in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. He was a polymath whose interests and work extended into the arts, humanities, social sciences and beyond. His interest in creating idiosyncratic models for organising and combining disparate fields of knowledge had much in common with the figure of the ‘Renaissance-man’ or magician of times past. Simultaneously rooted in his own time Harry Smith was an American Magus of the twentieth century. In the midst of reading Harry Smith American Magus [1], I discovered that a major exhibition was on at the Whitney in New York, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: the Art of Harry Smith [2]. To my knowledge this is the first major exhibition devoted to his work that ran from October 4, 2023 to January 28, 2024 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Harry Smith is best known publicly fo...