Lila Hartman (1920-2017) American, Oil on Canvas. Depicts an abstract spectral figure. Signature bottom right. Label on reverse with attribution and title: "Spirit Form." 

Overall Size: 10 1/2 x 8 3/4 in. 

Sight Size: 6 1/2 x 4 1/2 in. 

#8526 

Lila Detner Hartman was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1920 to French farmers who had fled to Canada during World War I. She grew up speaking only French, and first discovered art when she visited a museum in Chicago, Illinois on her first journey to the United States in 1938. She attended the University of Chicago, where she met and eventually married Dr. Irving Israel Lasky in 1942 after their graduation. She and Lasky moved to San Francisco, California and had a son, eventually divorcing in 1945. She remarried in 1947 to Robert Hartman, who traveled frequently for his work and brought her with him around the world. She began to paint and draw on these trips, and took private lessons throughout her life with artists wherever they were staying for extended periods of time. She never publicly exhibited, but often donated her work to charities and fundraisers, particularly for Jewish causes and for scholarships to the University of California, Los Angeles. She died at her home in Los Angeles in 2017, leaving behind a legacy of post-Impressionist figural and landscape works in private collections around the country.