Helen West Heller

Helen West Heller (1872 – November 19, 1955) was an American painter, printmaker, poet, and illustrator.

Heller was born Helen Barnhart in Rushville, Illinois, the daughter of a farmer, boat builder, and decoy maker. Plagued by poor health throughout her life, she suffered consequently in school. In 1892 she moved to Chicago, becoming a model to support her self-training in art. In 1902 she moved to New York City, doing factory conduct yourself and embroidery to preserve herself while taking lessons at the Art Students League of New York; she next had lessons, at some narrowing in life, at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts in Missouri. She afterward studied in imitation of Robert Henri and George Bellows at the Ferrer Center Modern School. In 1921 she returned to Chicago, bringing considering her fifty paintings that in flames no inclusion in the local artistic community; consequently, she became a founding supporter of the Chicago No-Jury Society. She cut her first woodcut two years later. Heller's poetry, meanwhile, attracted the attention of Jane Heap, and between 1926 and 1928 she published a large number of works in journals and in the weekly Art Magazine of the Chicago Evening Post under the name "Tanka". She attempted to Make a woodcut magazine, and her expertise in poetry led her to illustrate a folder of poems, Migratory Urge, with her own woodcuts.

Heller returned to New York City in 1932. During this phase of her career she produced paintings, prints, and murals for the Works Progress Administration. Heller became a good friend of Onya La Tour, an art collector and broadminded art enthusiast, who directed the Federal Art Gallery of the Federal Arts Project of the Work Projects Administration, 225 W 57th St, New York NY. A 1940 catalog of La Tour's deposit lists 76 works by Heller.

During the 1930s, Heller became active in Marxist causes; she attended the First American Artists' Congress Against War and Fascism in 1936, and in December of that year was beaten unconscious by police and arrested with higher than 200 others though leading an Artists Union protest neighboring layoffs in the WPA. Heller died in New York in 1955, nearly forgotten; her body was unclaimed for ten days while relatives were sought.

Heller married twice, but lived independently for much of her life. In 1948 she was named an join of the National Academy of Design, and in 1944 and 1949 she standard awards for her prints from the Library of Congress. A large increase of Heller's perform is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eight works are in the graphic arts deposit at the National Museum of American History, donated by the player herself after a 1949 take action of 35 of her prints. Other examples of her art may be found at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. A self-portrait of 1948, The Seasons, is held by the National Academy of Design.