Born in New York in 1932, Harold Jacobs studied from 1950 to 1953 at the Cooper Union School of Art, where he received rigorous training in drawing and design.

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From 1953 to 1958, he worked as a graphic designer and illustrator for American television at the American Broadcasting Company, before traveling in Europe and Israel.

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In 1959, he decided to devote himself entirely to painting. That same year, he met the poet and philosopher Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, whose principle—“All opposites are one, and art shows this”—became a cornerstone of his artistic thinking.

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In 1960, he met the Frenchwoman Bérénice Opoczynski in New York, whom he married the following year in Paris. Awarded a Fulbright grant in 1961, he settled in France, where he presented his first solo exhibitions at the Galerie du Pont-Neuf (Paris), and saw his work Five Faces enter the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).

During the 1960s, he exhibited at the Amel Gallery and the John Heller Gallery alongside artists such as Eva Hesse.

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Harold and Bérénice Jacobs

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In 1963, he taught at the School of Fine Arts in Portland, Oregon, and from 1966 at the Moore College of Art, where he remained until his retirement in 1989. During this period, he experimented with relief painting, collage, and inflatable sculpture, often in connection with music and contemporary dance, notably for the Philadelphia Orchestra and the dance company Group Motion.

In 1969, he took a sabbatical year in France, acquired a house in Ligré in the Loire Valley, and met Alexander Calder. From then on, France became a central anchor in his life. His daughter Galia was born there in 1970.

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Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Jacobs exhibited regularly in Philadelphia, New York, Washington, D.C., and Paris. His work evolved toward a sensitive form of abstraction, using varied materials—fabric, wood, metal, plexiglass, cement, sand… Situated at the boundary between painting and sculpture, his work is distinguished by a constant interplay between surface and depth, shadow and light, density and lightness.

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In 1983, he received the Distinguished Artist Award from Moore College of Art for his artistic and pedagogical influence. Settling permanently in Ligré in 1989, he continued his artistic research, notably through the creation of terrazzo objects and furniture, which he exhibited in Paris and the surrounding region.

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In the 1990s and 2000s, he presented numerous exhibitions at Galerie Convergence, Galerie Rambert, Galerie Romagny, and Galerie Thessa Herold. He was also the subject of major retrospectives at the Château de Tours (2001, 2010).

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A discreet and cosmopolitan artist, Harold Jacobs leaves behind a rich, independent, and deeply human body of work, in which formal rigor engages in dialogue with the poetry of materials and a search for balance between opposites—between art and life, mind and matter, gravity and lightness.