John Heliker: The Order of Things

John Heliker

The Order of Things 60 years of paintings & drawings

This catalogue was published in conjunction with:

John Heliker The Order of Things: 60 Years of Paintings and Drawings January 31- May 2, 2015 Asheville Art Museum 2 South Pack Square Asheville, NC 28802

Our thanks to Frank Thomson for photography of artwork (p. 12, 14, 19), and to John Goodrich for artwork photography and catalogue design.

Special thanks to Rosanna Warren for permitting the reprinting of her essay.

All works in this catalogue are from the artist’s estate, and are available directly from the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, www.heliker-lahotan.org, unless otherwise cited.

Opposite:

Self Portrait 1932 pen and ink 11 x 8½ in.

Front cover:

From the Island (detail) 1984 oil on linen 50 x 60 in.

John Heliker The Order of Things: 60 Years of Paintings and Drawings January 31- May 2, 2015

2 South Pack Square, Asheville, North Carolina 28801

Photo: Charlotte Brooks, ca. 1948

The Asheville Art Museum’s mission is to engage, enlighten

and inspire individuals and enrich community through dynamic experiences in American Art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Presenting the exhibition John Heliker: The Order of Things, 60 Years of Paintings and Drawings to audiences from the beautiful Western North Carolina mountain region and to visitors from around the world creates just such an opportunity.

Heliker’s drawing from the 1930’s and 1940’s give us a glimpse of his particular view of Depression Era America with its turmoil, conflicts and hardships. His paintings show an exploration of new aesthetic directions that emerged in the post war years as well as his acute understanding of light and composition and his ultimate focus on friends, landscapes and the interiors that he surrounded himself with. As Rosanna Warren so beautifully describes in her recollection of Heliker, included here, his work distills his vision of an “intimate world” and “life’s subtlety”.

This exhibition has been made possible through the generosity of the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation which is dedicated to making Heliker’s work available and to supporting artists through residencies on Cranberry Island, Maine, where John and his life partner Robert LaHotan painted in the summers from the 1950’s on. Patricia Bailey has worked diligently and freely shared her expertise, passion and knowledge of Heliker the man and of his work over six decades. Without her this project would not have been realized. Julio Torres provided essential assistance at the Heliker-LaHotan archives. Assistant Curator Cole Hendrix curated the exhibition and coordinated the many details of the project. The entire Museum staff including Candace Reilly, Jen Swanson, Jay Milner and Ali Whitman brought it to fruition. John Heliker’s work rewards close examination and focused viewing and we are delighted to invite you to be inspired by his life and vision.

Pamela L. Myers Executive Director, Asheville Art Museum

Self Portrait in White Shirt 1975 oil on linen 25 x 21 in.

John Heliker “There is a very real sense of despair in the world,” John Heliker has said, but “a painter does not always reflect his times in an obvious manner.”1 When I met Jack Heliker in the early 1960’s, I was about twelve years old, and he was certainly not reflecting the public life of that tumultuous time in any obvious way in his paintings. We met on Great Cranberry Island, Maine, in the dignified old sea captain’s house he had bought in 1958. My parents had brought me and my younger brother along on their visit to their old friends, the writer John McDonald and his wife the painter Dorothy Eisner, who spirited us on a walk further down the island to visit Jack and Bob: the painters John Heliker and Robert LaHotan.

Jack had his studio on the second floor of one of the captain’s boatsheds, a high, vaulted, airy space filled with light. What was that light? Partly sunlight, let in by the generous windows. But more truthfully, it was the light emanating from Jack’s paintings. Seascapes, scenes of the tidal inlet by the house,

Above:

Still Life with Mushrooms 1979 oil on linen 20 x 24 in.

still lifes, large compositions of the studio with human figures in it—they all seemed to vibrate, to glow, to be made of air. Jack was already using a good deal of his beloved turquoise blue at that time. I had been drawing with pencil and ink pen, and painting in watercolors, for as long as I could remember— since before I could read. I was mesmerized by Jack’s paintings, by the way the lines and sensuous patches of color played off against each other: objects and figures in these paintings seemed half called into being by spectral drawing, half substantiated by the fleshy density of pigment. Rather than outlining objects, the drawing seemed to record lines of force, a web of connections, a set of dynamic relations. Atomic particles zinged around the canvas. I examined the surfaces, the glossy dabs and strokes, the liquid phrasings; I sniffed the large glass palette with its festival of smeared hues; I stared at the jars of medium.

Left:

Kitchen Still Life with a Salad n.d. charcoal 19 x 23 ½ in.

Seeing that I was spellbound, Jack began telling me how he worked. His medium: one third turpentine, one third linseed oil, one third Damar var-

The Salad Maker 1972 oil on linen 17 x 14 in.

Right:

Conversation in the Boatshed 1972 oil on linen 60 x 50 in.

nish—so that was how he kept the paint workable and lush, drying neither too fast nor too slowly. His brushes, all different sizes, battle-worn with spattered handles, stood at attention from cans where he’d left them to dry, their bristles clean. Jack’s manner was gentle, open, natural, serious, utterly unpatronizing. I was in love. With Jack? No, with painting. Jack was the way to painting. Maybe he was painting.

Over the years, I would return often to Cranberry Island, and to Jack and Bob, as a college student, then as a young, aspiring writer and painter, renting houses off and on for months at a time with my artist friends, setting up our hopeful, giddy, provisional art communes. Still later I returned with my husband and young children. I was drawn by the strict beauty of the island, its pink granite and black basalt shore line, its pine forests and meadows, but also by the presence there of inspiring painters: not only Jack and Bob, but my mother’s old friend Dorothy Eisner, and Bill Kienbusch,

Untitled (Merce Cunningham, Posing in Dance Costume) 1944 pen and ink 17 x 13⅞ in.

Left:

Portrait of Merce Cunningham 1946 oil on Masonite 24 x 18 in.

and my painting teacher from Yale, Gretna Campbell. All off these people influenced me, but Jack played an almost mystical rôle. When I was about sixteen, far from Cranberry Island, I had a dream I remember today as intensely as if I’d dreamed it last night. Jack and I were standing in the Roman Forum on a sunlit day. He led me up a Piranesi-like ruined stone staircase that emerged onto a marble architrave above columns, all that remained of an ancient temple. Jack gestured with a sweep of the arm: before us stretched the Forum, with its intricate shapes and busted stones, it mounds and hollows, its play of light and shade. This is what it is to see, Jack seemed to be saying. This is the world: ancient, modern, timeless, ruined, corrupt, beautiful.

The paintings of Jack’s I know from the 1960’s and on until his death in 2000 distill his vision of an intimate world: the Maine coast he adopted, studio interiors with figures, still lifes and domestic scenes steeped in the

Left

Moonlight 1942 oil on linen 25 x 30 in.

Right

Slave Market Simpson Street 1937 pen and ink 9 ⅞ x 7 in.

Vuillard-like patterns and flower arrangements one recognized from the rooms he lived in. His early drawings from the late 1930’s and the ‘40’s represent a very different world. In them, the young Heliker reflects his sense of what it was like to live during the Depression, what it was like to have very little money and to live among people who had desperately less while others had cruelly more. His cartoons in The New Masses and other drawings from the period respond “in an obvious manner” to their times, but never unintelligently. I’m struck by the several forces at work in these drawings: the great variety in the kinds of lines, some nervous and delicate, others harsh and emphatic, often combined with marvelous liveliness in the same piece, as in the Seated Man (pg. 692 in the sketch book). I’m

struck, too, in sketch after sketch, by Heliker’s search for the underlying planar structure of faces; you can see him hitting on the essential simplification that will be key to the caricature, but the stylization never loses touch with the idiosyncratic humanity of the subject.

What emerges is a stylized realism, often grotesque and polemical, but always alert to life’s subtlety.

The drawings from the New Deal recall a political era Jack had shared with Dorothy Eisner, John McDonald, and Walker Evans, a world I glimpsed in my youth from the conversations of these old radicals. John, Dorothy, and my mother Eleanor Clark were Trotskyites, and had gone down to Coyoacán, Mexico, on 1937 to assist in the Commission of Inquiry John Dewey was chairing to clear Trotsky of Stalin’s charge of treason. My mother worked as a translator for Trotsky in that busy household where “the Old Man,” as Trotsky was called, produced

Above:

Untitled (Study for The Literary) ca. 1938 pen and ink 5½ x 5¾ in.

Left:

The Laborers 1941 pen and ink

Right:

Male Portrait 1945 oil on Masonite 20 x 16 in.

essay after essay that needed to be translated and disseminated in various languages (my mother didn’t know Russian: she translated texts from Spanish and Italian into English). John McDonald worked with Trotsky preparing materials for the trial, and Dorothy painted memorable portraits of the exiled revolutionary and of the Commission itself.2 Above:

Jack Heliker was not a Trotskyite and didn’t participate in the Coyoacán adventure, but back in New York he was drawing for The New Masses and recording injustice in his own way. With his deft pen he created a whole cast of characters: bullnecked, battering ram-headed capitalists; witches in evening gowns; hobos; unemployed men and women hanging about street corners; a melancholy Trotskyite intellectual at his desk. Until its dissolution in 1937, Heliker was friends

Man Sawing Wood 1941 oil on linen 16 x 20 in.

Right:

The Funeral 1941 oil on linen 30 x 25 in.

with members of the Yonkers Art Group, a partly liberal, partly radical group “Dedicated to the Struggle Against War and Fascism by the Art of the Theatre.”3 In 1938 and 1939, Heliker was employed by the WPA doing drawings and watercolors. But even in this period of overt political engagement, Heliker maintained his intellectual and spiritual independence. He depicted suffering, cruelty, and desperation, but on his own terms. He makes this clear in a letter to his friend Ted Andrus

in 1937 when he was still involved with the Yonkers Art Group and had been under pressure to join, not the Trotskyites, but their arch-enemies, the Stalinist Communist Party. He wrote: I fear you have been sadly misled by our mutual friend into thinking I have any great interest in Militant Communism, I fear I have been sadly misrepresented to you…

I have read and at first with avidity, the Manifesto of Marx and Engels.

You have probably been sadly disillusioned—having lost so much—spending years in academic preparation for work, and then not being fortunate enough to obtain it.

You see I have lost nothing, for I had nothing to lose. I have had no academic education, I never sat at the “receipts of custom,” nor fortune, no stocks, no bonds, nothing but a talent I have misused, and I do not lay blame, if I am unhappy, at Capitalism’s door but to my own stupidity and slothfulness…

Those communists with whom I had contact repelled me by their gross materialism and stupidity— Above:

Untitled (Peter Pan Sleeper —Study for The Isolationist)

I am not an orthodox believer, but have nevertheless a profound believe [sic] in what Kant terms “the incorporeal world.” I am fully con[s]cious of this—and in my opinion he who denies the existence of the supernatural world is naieve [sic].4

1937 pen/brush and ink 6 x 9 ⅞ in.

Left:

The Artist’s Studio 1940 oil on linen 20 x 16 in.

An autodidact, Heliker had taught himself well, and was well defended against group-think of Right or Left. As David Lewis shows in his catalogue essay in John Heliker: Drawing on the New Deal, Heliker had vigorous

intellectual curiosity and read widely, taking as one of his guides the English novelist John Cowper Powys’ speculative and philosophical works In Defense of Sensuality, A Philosophy of Solitude, and The Meaning of Culture. From Powys, Heliker learned to value the contemplative life to which his own nature inclined him. As a young artist, Heliker already had that power of intense insight, that quasi-mystical concentration that allowed him to internalize a scene in all of its particularity and recreate it on paper.

When I knew Jack, much later, he seemed to live in a state of glowing receptivity with a core of quiet at the heart of it. He was the least self-destructive person I’d ever met: he had no need to charge his turbines with drugs, booze, or turbulence in his personal life. His turbines were already charged. And the paintings seemed an extension of that rich inner life. The jaunty cosmos, pansies, poppies, and hollyhocks with their carnival color from the garden on Cranberry; the lavender and maroon 19th century floral wallpapers in the different rooms

Right:

Blue Sea & House 1945 oil on Masonite 30 x 24 in.

Below:

Buildings (Vermont) ca. 1937-39 pen and ink 7 x 11¾ in.

of the Cranberry house; the mudflats winking at low tide—they all found themselves transfigured in the enchanted rectangles of his canvases.

I remember Jack’s delight at listening to Bach on the newly-invented Walkman whose earphones sent the music straight to his brain, he thought.

I remember his rapture at Rilke’s poems, and his account of the trip he and Bob had taken to Ronda, in Spain, where Rilke stayed in 1913 and wrote “The Spanish Trilogy.” Jack showed me his drawings of the clustered, block houses and cliffs of Ronda; a copy of Rilke’s poems lay, carefully placed, on the bedside table in the upstairs guest room at Jack and Bob’s house on Cranberry. Everything in that harmonious life they shared was carefully placed, but nothing was fussy.

Reflecting on the arc of Jack’s development as a draftsman and painter, it seems to me that in one sense he shifted allegiance from George Grosz to Vuillard and Rilke. But that oversimplifies the matter. Vuillard and Rilke were already at work in Jack’s sensibility in 1936, and in the 1970’s and ‘80’s he hadn’t forgotten Grosz’s keen sense of human injury. He had translated the perception into a different idiom, and he painted the possibility of a liberating joy as a gift to anyone who could open his eyes.

Rosanna Warren

Karen Wilkin, John Heliker: A Celebration of Fifty Years (New York: Kraushaar Galleries, 1995).

2 Christie McDonald, Painting My World: The Art of Dorothy Eisner (Woodbridge, Suffolk: AAC Editions, 2009) 20-25.

3 David Lewis, John Heliker: Drawing on the New Deal (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2011) 18.

4 Lewis 18.

1

Metamorphosis 1945 pastel on paper 34½ x 23½ in.

“I find strong abstract elements and formal relationships in my earliest attempts in painting, no matter how representational they may appear. For even here a certain sense of order, by which I mean a unity, a microcosmos, in which each element of painting, including the subject, plays an equal and significant role, so that the painting contains a message of order beyond literal interpretation of objects.”

From Heliker’s notes for artist statements, ca. 1946-55

Above:

Untitled (Biomorphic Abstract Landscape) ca. 1947-48 pastel, pen and ink 8¼ x 12 in.

Right:

Grotto of the Sibyl, Cumae 1952 oil on Masonite 20 x 12 in.

Clockwise from left:

Landscape of the Bronx 1954 oil on Masonite 11 x 9 in.

Upper Manhattan Landscape 1966 oil on Masonite 12 x 21 in.

Study of the East River 1961 oil on Masonite 17½ x 30 in.

Upper Manhattan Landscape 1966 oil on Masonite 12 x 21 in.

“In more recent years I have been concerned in my painting with the quality of serenity…

I choose to give expression to those aspects of nature which contain an inner sense of harmony.”

From notes for artist statements, ca. 1946-55

Above:

From the Island 1984 oil on linen 50 x 60 in.

Top left:

Mountains of Acadia from Cranberry n.d. watercolor, pencil 12 x 9½ in.

Courtesy Heliker-LaHotan Foundation and Kraushaar Galleries, New York

Left:

Central Park 1982 oil on linen 25 x 30 in.

Left:

House on a Cliff, Maine 1987 oil on linen 60 x 40¾ in.

Above:

View of the Shore of the Pool, Toward Acadia n.d. watercolor, pencil 11½ x 15½ in.

Right:

View from the Bronx 1972 oil on linen 25 x 32 in.

Above:

Boy in Boathouse 1988 oil on linen 50¼ x 60¼ in.

Right:

Still Life with a Pomegranate 1960 oil on linen 40 x 34 in.

Above:

Drawing in Bed 1988 oil on linen 28 x 37 in.

Right:

Reading in Bed n.d. charcoal 19 x 25 in.

“There can be nothing exclusive about a substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of experience, of life, and thinking about life and living life.”

From Heliker’s undated notes, ca. 1950’s

Above:

Interior with Three Figures 1987 oil on linen 50 x 60 in.

Right:

Interior with Figure & Green Shutter 1985 oil on linen 50 x 40 in.

“I can’t account for the fact that often the final result seems to be far removed in spirit from the original impulse. The materials enter, as an influence, and create all kinds of things, unpredictable situations, as the picture progresses accidentals occur and are controlled. The relationship of form to form and the space created by their relationships react and are reacted upon by each other element.”

From draft of Heliker’s letter to a student, Nancy Robbins Naramore, April 21, 1946

Above:

Still Life with Bottle & a Plant n.d. charcoal 19 x 25 in.

Left:

Still Life with Jug 1985 oil on linen 50 x 40 in.

Above:

Studio Interior with Stove n.d. charcoal 19 x 25 in.

Right:

In the Potting Shed 1991 oil on linen 62½ x 60¼ in.

Photo: Charlotte Brooks, late 1960’s

John Heliker (1909 –2000) Born in Yonkers, New York in 1909, John Heliker, known as Jack to his friends, was descended from early Dutch settlers of Manhattan Island. His grandfather was a builder and stonemason in Yonkers, NY. He dropped out of high school to pursue his art at the age of 15. His brief formal training was at the Art Students League from 1927-29, where he studied with Boardman Robinson and Kimon Nicolaides. He had his first solo exhibition at the Maynard Walker Gallery in 1936 and showed at the Kraushaar Galleries for more than 50 years. During the New Deal era, he served on the easel division of the WPA Federal Art Project and contributed drawings for the leftist publication The New Masses. He was a Professor of Art at Columbia University for twenty-seven years. He also taught at the Art Students League, the New York Studio School (he was a founding faculty member), and in the MFA Painting Program at Parsons School of Design.

His work was exhibited nationally in the major survey exhibitions of the Carnegie Institute, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art’s ABSTRACT PAINTING IN AMERICA, and many others. The Whitney Museum of American Art honored Jack with a mid-career retrospective in 1968, and he has been included in numerous Whitney Museum annuals and biennials. He was represented at the Bicentennial Exhibition AMERICA: 1976 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC that traveled through the country, and his work toured Europe through USIA in the 1950’s and was featured at the World’s Fair in Brussels in 1958 and in Osaka in 1969. Among the artist’s many awards are the Prix de Rome (1948), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1951), three Ford Foundation Purchase awards, and numerous awards from the National Academy of Design.

The artist was awarded Honorary Doctorates of Fine Arts from Colby College, Maine and from Bard College, New York. His works are included in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Philadelphia Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.

Heliker made his first trip to Maine in the 1920’s. In the late 1950’s, he purchased the nineteenth century sea captain’s house and boat yard on Great Cranberry Island where for the balance of the 20th century, he and his life partner, the painter Robert LaHotan established summer painting headquarters. The two artists were an important part of a community of artists and writers on Great Cranberry during the second half of the twentieth century. The Foundation that bears their names now continues this tradition by sponsoring residencies for visual artists in the former home and studios of Heliker and LaHotan in Maine.

Portrait of Edwin Dickinson 1967 oil on linen 38 x 32 in.

All works in this catalogue are from the artist’s estate, and are available directly from the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, www.heliker-lahotan.org, unless otherwise cited.

Back cover:

The Boat Ride 1979 oil on linen 25 x 30 in Courtesy Heliker-LaHotan Foundation Courthouse Galleries Fine Art, Ellsworth, Maine