Gifted in nearly all of the pictorial arts - fresco, oil and watercolor painting, mosaic, lithography - Helen West Heller's greatest artistic achievement lies in the medium of woodcut and wood engraving. She once said of her prints, "I begin thinking in terms of the wood; only this way can original creation take place. I am a forerunner in the development of composition into a phase of psychology, by discovering ways of conveying emotions through abstractions. My product is completely creative; entirely divorced from the motive of conveying authors' images."

HELEN BARNHART
aka
HELEN WEST HELLER
1872-1955

orn in 1872 on a small farm in Rushville, a western county of Illinois, Helen West Heller (also known as Helen Barnhart) may have developed her interest in nature motifs and her love for wood as an artistic material from her father, a wagon maker and later a self-sustaining farmer.... She had little formal schooling; she was needed to help on the farm and had poor health, which she suffered from throughout her life. Two attempts to study art failed.

In 1892, after a brief and abusive marriage to a neighboring farmer, the twenty year old Helen ran away to Chicago. To support her artistic self-training in sculpture and painting, she became a professional model and took many menial jobs. She lived an extremely isolated and destitute life and late in life spoke to Dr. Ernest Harms bitterly of the pains and suffering as a disregarded model - her only concrete relationship to the social world of art. Every cent she could spare during these early years was spent to hear operas and to mail the poetry she wrote to magazines. Her first success came when "Criterion" accepted a little sketch.

Around 1902, Helen West Heller moved to New York City where she attended the Art Student League. She attempted to make a living with embroidery and factory work, while concentrating on painting, but with little artistic or financial success. She left New York and for a number of years wandered over much of the east and mid-west. Just before the Depression she found her first professional acknowledgment in St. Louis. However, according to Dr. Ernest Harms, "She felt herself an artistic and social rebel, unable to cope with life, and after a struggle with suicidal tendencies she retired for years to an Illinois farm." It is most likely that during this period she married her second husband, Roger Heller, who is remembered as a "genius recluse."

In 1921, bringing with her fifty canvases, Helen West Heller returned to Chicago to start a new career as a painter. The Walen Bookshop gave her a one-person show which established her in the artists' world. At this time the editor of the Art Magazine of the Chicago Evening Post admired her poems and invited her to contribute weekly, which she continued for two years under her title "Tanka."

In 1923, during a period of great poverty, Helen West Heller turned to the more affordable materials of wood and linoleum to cut her first relief prints. Her prints were not well received; the public felt her art was too abstract and her woodcuts unrealistic. Undaunted, Miss Heller felt this was simply the nature of her art. Her innovative sense of composition, often bringing figures and settings together in a mosaic of patterns, demonstrated "a considerable knowledge and appreciation of the Eastern and Western traditions of the block print through the centuries." [NYPL: Prints With/Out Pressure]

Encouraged by her poetic success and with her new interest in printmaking, Miss Heller cut a whole set of wood blocks to illustrate her poems which was published in two editions under the title Migratory Urge by Franklin J. Meine, Chicago, 1928. She remained in Chicago for ten years where she sold many of her prints and was a frequent contributor to the "Golden Book Magazine."

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