A RENAISSANCE IS NEAR! A Brief Introduction to d'Arcy Hayman

d’Arcy Hayman is one of the great unsung heroes of twentieth century art, a stateswoman and crusader for global art education in her capacity as head of the arts and education departments in UNESCO from 1960 to 1980—and a pioneering painter in her own right. Emerging from the milieu of the Jewish émigré community of Los Angeles and the bohemian subculture of San Francisco, d’Arcy’s brilliance as a painter and educator would take her across the globe, from to India to China, from Albania to Ghana and a multitude of other nations on missions as an art educator, holding fast to her unshakeable conviction that the artistic expression and enjoyment is a fundamental human right. She possessed an almost millenarian hope that with enough willpower and creativity, this right could be universalized in a new age of cultural enrichment—there lurks the possibility, to use her exhilarating phrase, that “a renaissance is near”.

d’Arcy’s work embodies the spirit of such a renaissance: in beautiful strokes of gouache and watercolor, she brings to life the movement and ambience of jazz clubs, beat cafes and burlesque houses; with unpredictable swipes of oil paint, d’Arcy conjures images of sexuality and sensuality which explore not only the the interplay and contradictions of femininity, masculinity, vulnerability, and embrace, but also the interplay of form and chaos: many paintings explore the boundaries of human, animal and architectural forms, exploring the threshold at which these forms dissolve into abstraction or primordial soup.

d’Arcy’s work, however, is not that of a lifeless academic: her work teems with playfulness: in one piece children flying over a cityscape in whimsical tones of lavender and umber invite the viewer into a fantastical, dreamlike world; in another, we find the artist herself in the nude, accented with beautiful, bold strokes of red as she looks off-canvas with a mischievous smile.

To use an oft-abused phrase, d’Arcy’s work is genius in the truest sense: exceptional not only for her time, but for ours as well. To borrow the words of Buckminster Fuller, “d’Arcy Hayman lives through the vision of an artist; everything she does is touched with her artist’s brush. All of her work will live on to be included with the best work of this extraordinary 20th century.”