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John Heliker
Self Portrait (original signed drawing)

1991

About the Item

John Heliker Self Portrait, 1991 Charcoal Pencil on Paper (with original Kraushaar Galleries label verso) Signed on the front bears the original KRAUSHAAR GALLERIES label on the verso on the frame Vintage metal frame included Self portrait done in charcoal pencil by distinguished American artist John Heliker. Hand signed on the front This work is framed - bears the label of the renowned KRAUSHAAR GALLERIES on the verso. Image size: 13 inches by 10 inches; Framed: 18 1/2 inches by 14 1/2 inches About John Heliker from The New York Times Obituary, 2000 (Roberta Smith) John Heliker, a painter and teacher who was a fixture of the New York art world for nearly seven decades, died on Tuesday at the Sonojee Estate, a health center in Bar Harbor, Me. He was 91 and had lived in New York during most of his career, spending summers on Cranberry Island, Me. Mr. Heliker's art moved from representation to near abstraction and back again with an ease that seemed more European than American. Born in Yonkers in 1909, he grew up on a farm. In 1923 he dropped of high school and began visiting Manhattan to copy the old masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There he met Arshile Gorky, who was doing the same thing and who introduced him to the work of Manet, Cezanne and Gauguin. From 1927 to 1929 he attended the Art Students League, studying with Kenneth Hayes Miller, Boardman Robinson and Thomas Hart Benton. In the 1930's Mr. Heliker concentrated on landscapes that had some of the stony, Cezannesque density of Marsden Hartley's, but he also painted portraits and interiors. He moved to Greenwich Village from his parents' farm in 1938, and through his neighbor, the composer Lou Harrison, he became good friends with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. His first solo exhibitions were at the Maynard Walker Gallery in New York in 1936, '38 and '40. After it closed he became affiliated with the Kraushaar Galleries, where he had 18 shows from 1945 to 1995. His 19th show, a survey of drawings that has been planned for some time, will open at Kraushaar on March 18. In 1948 a Prix de Rome enabled Mr. Heliker to go to Italy, which made a lasting impression on his work and where he began a long friendship with the painter Philip Guston, who had received the same award. As with Guston, he was liberated by Italy's light, landscape and history and, paradoxically, moved his work toward abstraction. By 1951, the year he received a Guggenheim fellowship that enabled him to spend an additional two summers in Italy, he was making nearly abstract paintings, works whose layered, transparent geometries suggested the fusions of landscapes and architecture accomplished in real life by the hill towns of Italy. Beginning in the mid-1950's his work became progressively softer, more painterly and more representational, although it always retained a clarity of light and structure that tended to transcend his imagery. He worked in a seemingly improvisational style, defining landscapes, figures and still lifes in quick, stabbing brush works and bits of drawn line. This carefully structured yet notational style may have been its best in his spare, light-filled drawings. Mr. Heliker was a professor of art at Columbia University for 27 years, beginning in 1950. His students there included the artists Charles Cajori, Sally Hazelet Drummond, Jonathan Silver, Robert La Hotan and Angelo Ippolito, as well as the historian Karen Wilkin and the critic Jed Perl. In 1965 he was a founding member of the New York Studio School with Guston, Leland Bell, Alex Katz, Nicholas Carone and Mercedes Matter. He taught there for a number of years and frequently returned as visiting artist. He also taught at the Art Students League and Parsons-New School. Mr. Heliker's work can be found in 75 public institutions throughout the United States and was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1968.
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