American (1912-1979)

Like many of her compatriots, Agnes Hart first began to paint in a social realist, or WPA, style. Later in her career, after WWII, she moved to abstraction and created vibrant, impactful works culminating in a series of oil and sand paintings painted in the early 1970s for which she is best known. Hart was the wife of artist Josef Presser with whom she enjoyed a tempestuous marriage largely due to his bi-polar disorder.

Like many women of the period--think Lee Krasner or Elaine DeKooning--it is possible to say that she put her husband's career ahead of her own until his death. She was good friends with Sally and Milton Avery most of her career and first exhibited at RoKo Gallery in 1948. RoKo was the first to introduce the works of Milton Avery and Alex Katz.

Indeed Milton Avery was quite a fan of Hart's work. Hart's biographer relates the following story:

" I met Sally Avery once over lunch at Agnes’ apartment during which Sally, somewhat

unguardedly, pointed at a recent painting by Agnes and related about how not long before he died, Milton said to her he thought in some ways Agnes had already arrived where he was headed..."

Hart had numerous one-woman exhibitions, primarily in Woodstock in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and was in many group exhibitions including the Met "American Painting Today" (1950), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Butler Art Institute, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Academy of Design. Her work is in the collection of the Met, the Woodstock Artists' Association Museum and the Norfolk Museum.