Colette Pope Heldner

Note: Wisconsin-born, Dorothy Colette Pope Helder was raised in Duluth, Minnesota. A strong-willed, independent child and adolescent, Colette once ran away from home and cut off her hair, securing a job as a delivery boy for Western Union. Her deception was revealed when her mother recognized and apprehended her on one of her deliveries and dragged her home. Later she had a job as the secretary at Rachel McFadden Art Studio. It was there, while taking classes, that she eventually met her future husband in her instructor, Swedish artist Knute Heldner. Knute was twenty-five years older than Colette.

The couple eloped in 1923 and, to find reprieve from the Minnesota winters, travelled to New Orleans. That fateful trip would alter the trajectory of their lives, and they spent a large part of their life together alternating between New Orleans winters and Minnesota summers. They also spent time from 1929-1932 travelling throughout Europe. As Sara Saward points out, “Colette’s images of Paris are filled with abundant and humorous anecdotal detail: boisterous café clientele, fashionable women walking poodles, and sailors ogling brazen streetwalkers, all drawn as caricatures.” This same style in which she documented the Quartier Latin was later transposed to her French Quarter scenes as she considered the two neighborhoods similar. Her sensitive portrayals of quaint French Quarter courtyards captured the romantic beauty of the city.

The Heldners, upon their return to New Orleans, applied their impressionist, loose brushstrokes and unique visual language to the surrounding landscapes, reviving the more strictly rendered, Barbizon-like bayous of their predecessors such as Richard Clague, William Henry Buck and Joseph Rusling Meeker. Their fresh interpretations breathed new life into the genre, and she and Knute became integral fixtures of the New Orleans art scene.

Following Knute’s death in 1952, Colette’s style became more expressionistic and her palette free, more brash and vibrant. She began executing her “Swamp Idylls” with improvised flourish as if to capture on canvas the wild forms of the bayous. While married, she was a devoted wife. While widowed, she was able to focus on her craft, reputedly then saying, “I am the only artist in the family!”

Ref.: Saward, Susan. “Colette Pope Heldner.” 64 Parishes. Sept. 12, 2012. www.64parishes.org. Accessed Mar. 4, 2023.