262:(1938), showing elderly women scavenging in a coal mine. After Helfond married Bill Barrett, whose Welsh relatives worked in the mines, she used these new connections to bring other artists interested in social justice together with the miners. Helfond ran into several obstacles while working in the coal districts of Pennsylvania. For one thing, she was irked that the gatherings of miners and her male artist friends in the local bars tended to exclude her and other women, making it harder for her to develop the relationships necessary to her work. Another obstacle sprang from cultural differences: Helfond recounted how in the mining town of Lansford, the local women became less friendly when she revealed that she was Jewish. Despite these challenges, Helfond's prints of coal miners are considered an important addition to the body of work documenting the lives of the working poor during the New Deal.
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American printmaking during this period, and she was adventurous in exploring the possibilities opened up by screen printing. She printed all of her own work, which ranged from austere, often monochromatic social realist portraits of working people and cityscapes in the 1920s and 1930s to colorful, abstract, lyrical landscapes in later years. Some of her color abstractions originated as watercolors from nature during travels in Greece and France and were then turned into oil paintings.
243:(1936-39) draws on those experiences. At first glance, this depiction of women sharing a crowded work space might appear to be impartial reportage, but Helfond’s iteration of the downward curves of each woman’s body expressively conveys the tiring nature of their repetitive tasks. The awkward angles of furniture, walls, and shelves clash against each other, further reinforcing the mode of anxiety and stress.”
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Helfond and fellow artists Hyman
Warsager, Lois Berghoff, Zelda Burdick, and Lila Ryan formed “Five Directions in Graphics", a group of printmakers that exhibited together. A flier printed by the group states: “Printmaking for them is a viable means of expression and though they work and print individually, they join together for the exchange of ideas and technical, exploratory information”.
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York), the
Brooklyn Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Springfield Museum of Fine Art, the Newark Museum of Fine Art, and the Library of Congress, among other institutions. In 2009, her work was featured in the exhibition "Industrial Strength: Precisionism and New Jersey" at the Jersey City Museum.
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In later life she lived in
Plainfield, New Jersey, where she owned and managed the Barrett Art Gallery on East Front Street, which she had started with her husband in the 1960s. In the early 1950s, she designed a rose window for the First Unitarian Society of Plainfield's All Souls Church. In 1972
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Helfond's work has been exhibited at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1960), the Newark Museum of Fine Arts (1964, 1967), and elsewhere. It is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (New
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From 1936 to 1941, Helfond was an artist in the New York Works
Progress Administration program's graphics division, creating work in a variety of media, including lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, aquatints, collograph, and silkscreens. Some of her work shows the impact that color had as it entered
132:, to a Jewish family. She spent some of her childhood in Russia and returned to New York at the age of eleven, living in New York or New Jersey for most of the rest of her life. Between 1928 and 1940, she studied at the School of Industrial Art and the Art Students League; her teachers included
208:, who would go on to found New York's Printmaking Workshop in the 1940s. Later on, Helfond taught printmaking at New York University (1964), and she was on the faculty of Union College in Cranford, New Jersey, from 1980 onwards.
228:, she is especially well known for works that "pointedly condemned the state of labor, and the relationship between big business and big government, in the 1930s." Examples of these include
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Art historian Helen Langa writes that
Helfond “took jobs in hat and textile factories while studying at the Art Students League in the early 1930’s, and her color lithograph
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Artists of the
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Doherty, Elizabeth M. "Viewing Work
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398:. "Toward an Iconography of American Labor: Work, Workers, and the Work Ethic in American Art, 1930-1945."
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Helfond began teaching in the
College Art Association Program (1933–36) and then taught printmaking at the
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Helfond counted as friends a wide circle of
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416:. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. pp. 96–97.
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Helfond was politically progressive, and along with contemporaries like Elizabeth Olds,
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358:. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. p. 250.
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232:(1940), a lithograph showing a woman slumped over her work in a WPA sewing room, and
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518:"National Serigraph Exhibition, January 15–February 15, 1947 [Checklist]"
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Greengard, Stephen. "Ten Crucial Years: A Panel Discussion by Six WPA Artists."
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There are also a number of prints about the grim lives of coal miners, such as
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and others before moving to the graphic arts division, where she worked with
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and her future husband, the sculptor William (Bill) Barrett (d. 1967).
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to the general public. Helfond was also included in the 1947 and 1951
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258:(1935), a double portrait of miners with blackened faces; and
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as founding members. Among her students at the Center was
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Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930's New York
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Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930's New York
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Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930's New York
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Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York
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Hillstrom, Laurie Collier; Hillstrom, Kevin (1999).
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236:(1933), showing men at work shoveling a street.
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671:2002 deaths
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396:Doss, Erika
302:Franz Kline
260:Coal Picker
250:(1937), an
230:Custom Made
74:Nationality
640:Categories
501:25 January
316:References
275:art prints
35:1910-03-08
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527:4 January
156:Teaching
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492:(PDF)
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