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Harold Jerome Zegart was born July 4th, 1925, in Chicago, Ill. At 18 he joined the Navy, where he served in the Pacific as an ariel photographer from 1943 until 1946. Following his discharge, he attended the Institute of Design in Chicago with Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. The school followed the avant-garde design experiments of the German Bauhaus. The German Bauhaus was a school of art in Germany (circa: 1919 - 1933) famous for its approach to design with the idea of creating a "total" work of art where all arts would be brought together. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential movements in Modern design including Modernist architecture. The Bauhaus also had profound effects in other creative fields including art, graphic and interior design. Later Zegart moved to the West Coast and worked in UC Berkeley's Photography Department. In 1949-50 he studied with Minor White and Ansel Adams at The California School Of Fine Arts, where many of his peers and lifelong friends, such as Ira LaTour and Bill Heick excelled at their craft, documented in the book "The Golden Decade." Director Fred Zinneman saw his work and hired Harold for the film "Theresa" shot in Italy. He worked in New York in television and magazines like Harpers, Fortune, and Vogue. He helped start Phoenix Film Studio (later renamed Studio16) and was a successful advertising photographer with U.S. Steel, Quantas, Pan Am, and Lurine Steamship Company. His huge poster series of the Girls of the Pacific for Pan American was distributed throughout the world. He worked on San Francisco's waterfront as a longshoreman, where he continued with his photography to capture an end of an era, nature, and the human spirit with his camera. He began experimenting with form and color in paper cut-out collages, leading to his large acrylic paintings. He produced over 700 of these large acrylic paintings exhibited here. Zegart continued working in films, taking photographs, painting having shows and exhibiting. He has exhibited nationally and is in collections like The National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. For more information, please call Ben Zegart: (510) 374-9793. |
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