Trained as an art historian, Harry Rand has explored long-term patterns of human behavior as evidenced in the ways that art, science, folklore, and religion exchange ideas and shape each other. His publications in this pursuit include threescore museum catalogues, over a dozen books (author or co-author) and over fifty articles or published letters. Prominent among these are:

Books: Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols,1980; 1981; revised and expanded (& paperback) edition, University of California Press, 1991; Manet's Contemplation at the Gare St. Lazare 1987; paperback 1991; Paul Manship, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989; Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Taschen Verlag (Cologne, Germany, 1991) abridged edition 1993

Selected Recent Articles & Letters: "The Potential of Scripture's Images: From Genesis to Abstract Expressionism", Religion and the Arts, vol. 1, No. 3, Summer 1997; "What the Kitchen Maid Made: Vermeer's Kitchen Maid", Bulletin van Het Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Autumn 1999; "Apostolic Succession and Recent Art", in Les Cahiers du CICC, No. 8, July 1999: Culte et Culture: Studies in Cultural Meaning, Université de Cergy-Pontoise; "Woolley's Ur: Headdress of A Sumerian Queen", Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2000; "Who Was Rumpelstiltskin?", International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2000, No. 81, October 2000