French independent figurative artist who developed his own artistic style. His output includes at least 1,600 paintings, approximately 800 works on paper and around fifteen wall decorations. He invented a new pictorial language, the beginning of his neo-cubist research, which he called “Hieroglyphs”. Harburger recorded his pictorial conceptions in his signature 1963 book Le Langage de la peinture (The Language of Painting).
His father Jules Harburger was a lawyer and his mother Célestine Aboulker was a painter. He entered the School of Fine Arts in Oran in 1920 and moved to Paris in 1921 to continue his training. A student of the National School of Decorative Arts and then, in 1923, of the National School of Fine Arts, he was, in 1928, the first resident artist of the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid. In 1933, he enrolled at the Atelier de la Fresque de la Ville de Paris. This classical course allowed him, throughout his career, to experiment and develop pictures in various media including oil painting, fresco, watercolour, gouache, pastel, collage, terracotta, mosaic, and ceramics.
During World War II the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy regime forced the artist to take refuge with his family in Algeria. When he returned to Paris in 1945, he had been robbed of everything he left behind in his studio and his art collection.
In 1933, Harburger married Jeannine Halff, then a librarian at L’Heure Joyeux. He died on 27 December 1998 in Paris at age 93. His artworks have been the subject of several publications, in particular, a 2015 Catalog raisonné of his paintings and a 2018 book dedicated to his graphic works.
Link to Wikipedia biography (French)