Larry Day
Lawrence James Day or Laurence J. Day, known professionally as Larry Day, was an American artist, influential visual arts instructor, and respected intellectual within the Philadelphia art scene. He was active in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York, New York; and Washington, D.C. during the second half of the 20th century. Day was known as “The Dean of Philadelphia Painters.” Although Day initially established his career with lyrical, nature-based abstract paintings, he's most known for his representational works. These realist paintings reference art historical traditions and depict narratives, portraits, and urban or suburban architectural subjects—such as residential areas, construction sites, abandoned warehouses, and empty streets—rendered in thin, luminous washes. His paintings and works on paper were included in many of the seminal exhibitions that refocused attention on figurative art in the 1960s, and to this day his art and teaching inspires generations of artists in Philadelphia, New York, and beyond, including notable artists Peter Paone, Eileen Neff, Joe Fyfe, and Sidney Goodman. His work is held in both national and international collections, including the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. with a major overview collection at Woodmere in Philadelphia.
Early life and education
Day was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to homemaker and seamstress Ethel Day and Laurence F. Day, an Italian immigrant, woodworker, and employee of the American Laundry Machinery Company. Day had a younger sister named Ethel. At age six, he moved to Cheltenham Township, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he lived until 1985. He attended Cheltenham High School where he excelled in music and poetry. He was a frequent visitor to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where he developed an interest in Egyptian art—particularly Fayum portraiture. He graduated second in a class of 260 in June 1940 and was referred to as the “uncrowned king of humor”. After graduating, he began working as a bookkeeper.In 1942, Day was inducted into the United States Army, reporting to the Local Board at Jenkintown Reading Railway Station. That fall, he was stationed in Chicago, where he regularly visited the Art Institute of Chicago. He was later stationed in Georgia, California, and Hawaii. During the Pacific Campaign, Day served in the 506th Antiaircraft Artillery Gun Battalion, Battery B, and participated in the invasion of Iwo Jima, narrowly escaping death on two occasions. He later served as a librarian and his fellow soldiers called him “Doc” because he was considered an intellectual and liked to read. He received Readjustment Returnee Travel Orders on November 22, 1945.
From 1946 to 1950, Day attended Temple University’s Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Arts on the G.I. Bill — critical support, as his parents could not afford his college education. Though he had been accepted to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, to study writing with poet John Crowe Ransom—and initially considered Tyler a temporary stop—he ultimately chose to stay, appreciating the school's strong support of all the arts. At Tyler, he studied fresco techniques, which he later credited as the foundation for his signature thinly painted surfaces. In June 1950, Day graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Science in Education, and received the Dean's Award for scholarship and achievement in art.
In 1948, Day saw the landmark exhibition, Henry ''Matisse: Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, organized in collaboration with the Artist, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The directness of Matisse's work struck Day as radically different from the academic methods he was learning, deeply influencing his understanding of painting.
After graduation Day worked in a frame business with former classmates Robert and Barbara Kulicke, and started a short-lived silkscreen greeting card business called Hanco-Piday, with Bertha Hanstein, Iris Cohen, and Phyllis Pittigoff. The name of company included a piece from each of their names.
Day was a reflective and philosophical artist, with a deep and lifelong engagement with literature, history, and the history of art. Literature was nearly as central to him as painting, and writing remained an important part of his practice. His journals and writings are now housed at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, while his visual art archives are best represented at Woodmere.
Day was also drawn to theater and acting. A natural performer who loved being onstage, he took part in several productions while at Tyler and at the Cheltenham Township Art Center, where he became a central figure. In 1950, he played the lead in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and on November 3 of that year, performed under the name Larry Regan with the Palette Players of the Cheltenham Township Art Center in Ayn Rand’s Night of January 16, staged at the Collingswood, N.J. Masonic Lodge.
By 1955, Day was president of the Cheltenham Art Center, a role he held until 1958. There, he helped organize and lead the Center's theater group, participating in and directing productions including Thornton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yonkers and William Inge’s Picnic''.
Career
Early career
Throughout the 1950s, Day had many successful exhibitions. His work was represented by private dealer Pearl Fox and by Dubin Galleries, both in Philadelphia. He was also included in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts annual exhibitions. He began his teaching career with high school students at Abraham Lincoln High School and Germantown High School. In the fall of 1953, he was invited to join the faculty of the Philadelphia Museum School of Art. There, he taught painting, drawing, and art theory, working alongside colleagues including Edna Andrade, Paul Froelich, Franz Kline, and Benton Spruance. Day made his first of several trips to Europe in 1952, on the maiden voyage of the SS United States, arriving in Southampton, England. He then stayed in Paris and visited Provence, London, the Netherlands, and Belgium. During this time he made art in his hotel room and drew from life models at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere.In the early 1950s, Day created figurative paintings, prints, and drawings. By the mid-1950s, however, his work shifted toward Abstract Expressionism, which was gaining prominence at the time. He frequently traveled to New York City, where he associated with the Abstract Expressionist circle at the Cedar Tavern, including Franz Kline, Charles Cajori, John Ferren, Philip Guston, and Mercedes Matter. By the mid-1950s, his work was represented by Parma Gallery in New York. In 1958, he also began exhibiting at Gallery 1015, directed by Gladys Myers in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. That same year, he co-founded the Interlocutors, a discussion group composed of members from diverse professions, which met monthly at the University of Pennsylvania. Scenes from the Interlocutors’ annual dinner parties would later appear in many of Day's drawings and paintings.
Mid-career
Day's professional career was well established by 1959. He exhibited his painting Dark Laughter in the 2nd Philadelphia Arts Festival: Regional Exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and contributed an essay titled “The Artist as Philadelphian” to the exhibition catalogue. On March 21, 1961, he participated as a panelist in Conversations with Artists: Where Do We Go from Here?, alongside Marcel Duchamp, Louise Nevelson, and Theodoros Stamos. The event was moderated by Katharine Kuh, art editor for Saturday Review of Literature. He was an artist-in-residence at Aspen Center of Contemporary Art when it opened in 1960, and also in 1961, 1962 and 1964. In 1962, he overlapped with fellow artist-in-residence and lifelong friend Leland Bell from June 22 to September 1.By 1962, Day had transitioned from abstraction back to representation, beginning with a loosely painted copy of a work by Jan Steen. This shift aligned with a broader movement in American art away from Abstract Expressionism, which critic Robert Hughes referred to as a “mandatory world style.” Artists at the time began to reengage with narrative and representation, diverging from the "pure aestheticism" described by Clement Greenberg. In a 1991 interview with Marina Pacini for the Archives of American Art, Day explained: “It's again this and that, rather than just this or just that.” During the 1960s, he began painting architectural scenes—primarily in Philadelphia—as well as narrative figure compositions in both indoor and outdoor settings.
Throughout the 1960s, Day exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions in Philadelphia and New York. His work was included in the 12th National Print Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1960, a two-person show with Sidney Goodman at the Proctor Arts Institute at Bard College in 1965, and exhibitions at Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, New York. Other notable group exhibitions during this period included 10/XII, Exhibition: Contemporary American Drawings at the Indiana University School of Fine Arts Gallery and Realism Now at the Vassar College Art Gallery, the latter curated by influential art historian Linda Nochlin.
He also was included in exhibitions organized by the American sculptor and curator Scott Burton, most notably The Realist Revival, a traveling group exhibition presented by the American Federation of Arts from September 1972 to September 1973. The show toured venues including the University of Alabama Art Gallery, Georgia Museum of Art, the New York Cultural Center, Ohio University, the J.B. Speed Art Museum, Kutztown State College, and others. The exhibition catalog featured Day's painting Game of Charades.
By the 1970s, Day exhibited regularly at galleries, universities, and museums across the United States and abroad. His work appeared in four traveling exhibitions, including American Figure Drawing, which was shown at Lehigh University, the Victorian College of the Arts Gallery, and the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Day gave the first of several lectures at the New York Studio School in January 1972 and served as a visiting artist at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, in 1974. Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia began representing his work in 1975. He co-juried Philadelphia in the Bicentennial Year: Drawings by Philadelphia Artists at the Atwood Gallery of Art, Beaver College with Grace Hartigan, who selected the exhibition's award recipients. Day's work was part of the bicentennial exhibition Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The catalogue, which was edited by George H. Marcus, included the painting Untitled, chosen by Anne d'Harnoncourt.
In 1978, Day was awarded a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony and presented a lecture titled Painting as Paradigm at the symposium What Is a Painting? held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He concluded the decade with a notable public appearance in Artists Talk on Art Forum: Figurative Art—A Dialogue with Four Generations, a panel discussion held on December 7, 1979, at Landmark Gallery in New York, where he appeared alongside John Benton, George Hildrew, and Alice Neel.