Many top artists use their work to make political or social statements.
Illinois native Helen West Heller was among them, and her radical political beliefs sometimes got her in trouble.
Heller was one of the nation’s top woodcut artists — she excelled in many mediums — despite a chronic need for money. But she never quieted down, leading several protests with her controversial political views.
Born Helena Barnhart in 1872 on a small farm near Rushville, she was of German and English ancestry. A census indicates that she was the oldest of four children.
Helen may have acquired her artistic talents in wood from her father, who is variously described as a “wagon-maker,” “self-sustaining farmer,” “wheelright” and “furniture maker.” Whatever the profession, he also apparently loved to build boats and duck decoys.
Similarly, Helen had a continuing love of nature scenes, possibly developed from her years on the farm.
The Barnhart family left the area in 1876, when they purchased 10 acres of land on the edge of Canton. There, they created a fruit orchard.
Helen wrote in 1943 that during her public school days, her “happiest memories (were) of summer suppers in our country home …when my mother served fried chicken and strawberry shortcake to our teachers, mine and my sisters’” as well as “in the high school era, literary evenings in my principal’s home,” where she studied Latin and Greek.
Her lifelong outcast ways were apparent when she added that “the literary parties were my only social life” and that she was “apart” from the other boys and girls in town. However, she chuckled that she “found no thrill in sitting on a dusty bank under a hedge and being kissed.”
In 1888, Helen studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts before settling four years later in Chicago, where she supported herself by working as an artist’s model and other odd jobs. She landed in New York in 1900, where she married the following year to Herbert Warren West. But her finances never improved, and one account states that “she lived a life of destitution.”
Helen and Herbert moved back to the Canton area before she went back to New York. One writer said that they “scrimped to buy art materials and stamps to send her poems to magazines.”
In the Big Apple, she became connected to the Ferrer Center and Modern School, an anarchy-themed art and literary center. Around 1912, Helen met Roger Paul Heller, a Pennsylvania native whose mother owned a newspaper in Bethlehem.
They later lived together in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where the Washington Post reported they “advocated socialism and preached free love.” They married in 1914 “following brief incarcerations.”
Accused of stealing a gold watch from their boarding house, Helen was sent to jail, while Roger was ordered to the local asylum. Cleared of charges, the couple married. She wrote “Adultery!” to describe the reason for the breakup of her first marriage.
From 1914 to 1921, the Hellers were back on the farm in Canton, where she did chores while writing poems and creating some paid illustrations. She headed back to Chicago in 1921 with 50 paintings, which one critic said should have been “dropped down an unused well.”
After a rejection from an exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago, Heller became a founder of the Chicago No-Jury Society, described by the Smithsonian as “for artists outside the establishment.” That society held a major exhibition at department store giant Marshall Field in 1922.
Heller associated with other “bohemians” like Edna St. Vincent Millay and continued her artwork, focusing on wood in 1923 for a simple reason – she could not afford higher-priced art materials. Meanwhile, her poetry was published in several national journals as well as the Chicago Evening Post. In 1928, she released a work of her poetry and prints in The Migratory Urge.
In 1932, Heller returned to New York, where she remained until her death. There, she produced paintings, prints, and murals for the Works Progress Administration’s art programs, which gave her needed exposure. By the end of the decade, she was featured in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the famed Whitney Museum of American Art.
However, she also became known for her politics. A devout Marxist, she belonged to several left-wing groups and attended the first American Artists Congress Against War and Facism in 1936. That group chose one of her woodcuts, “Reforestation,” as one of a hundred prints shown in a society publication, America Today.
That December, she led a sit-down protest of the Artists Union against Works Progress Administration job layoffs. During the exchange, Heller was beaten unconscious by police, who arrested her and some 200 of her fellow protesters.
In addition to her myriad works on nature, she created “Baseball: A Close Decision,” showing everything in motion but the ball. The baseball work demonstrated her love of symmetry, as well as the diversity of topics that she addressed.
In 1947, Oxford University Press released “Woodcuts U.S.A.,” a collection of 20 of her prints and quotes from American authors. The next year, Heller was recognized with associate member status in the National Academy of Design.
The Smithsonian displayed 35 of her works in a solo exhibition in 1949, during which she wrote that “composition is a science” and “next in importance is powerful line.”
Today, Heller’s works are held at the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Library of Congress.
Virtually forgotten, she died in New York City in 1955.
Varying accounts state she died in her apartment, or in a hospital as “a ward of the state.” Her body was not claimed for at least 10 days during attempts to locate relatives.