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American sculptor, Helen Phillips, was born in Fresno (California, U.S.A). She studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco with Ralph Stackpole (1932-1936). In 1936 she was awarded a Phelan Travelling Fellowship to travel and study in Paris. She subscribed to ideas and practices of surrealist movement. She studied engraving at American sculptor, Helen Phillips, was born in Fresno (California, U.S.A). She studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco with Ralph Stackpole (1932-1936). In 1936 she was awarded a Phelan Travelling Fellowship to travel and study in Paris. She subscribed to ideas and practices of surrealist movement. She studied engraving at Atelier 17, an experimental intaglio workshop founded by the painter-engraver Stanley William Hayter, which was, at that time, very important for numerous surrealist artists. She got married with Stanley in 1940. During the World War II, they settled down in New-York. Helen Phillips Hayter had her first solo exhibition in 1942 at the New School for Social Research and the first of several joint exhibitions with Hayter at the Sidney Janis Gallery began in 1949.Then they went back to Paris in 1950. They separated twenty years later, in 1970. Concerning sculpture, Helen Phillips worked essentially polished bronze, developing a semi-abstract figuration influenced by Brancusi, surrealists and pre-Columbian statuary. In the forties and fifties, the artist created bronzes with anthropomorphic forms. She made some beautiful engravings, but her experience with gravure was even more crucial for her sculptural development, as it forced her to become conscious of negative space. In a completely different vein, Phillips produced an extensive series of geometric constructions in wire which explored ideas of modular growth proposed by the American architectural theorist Buckminster Fuller.
Biography of Helen Phillips
In the sixties, Helen Phillips works began to enter important collections, including those of Peggy Guggenheim, Roland Penrose, and various American museums (Museum of Modern Art New York, Bank America World Headquarters, De Young Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art, Albright-Knox Museum,...). Helen Phillips had a growing international fame. In 1967, an accident had stopped her to work for eight long years. When she finally got back to work, the talent and determination were still there, but somehow the creative impetus could not be regained. Helen Phillips died in her house in GreenwichVillage (New York) in 1995 ; she was 81 years old. Her artworks gather more than 500 sculptures (wood, bronze and stone), 150 etchings (on copper, zinc and linoleum) and many drawings.
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Catalogue(s) raisonné(s)
Catalogue(s) raisonné(s)
Not realised. All the "catalogues raisonnés"Bibliographic track & more
To read from or about the artist :
* « New-York six », André Chamson, catalogue d'exposition collective, Petit Palais, Paris, 1950* « Contemporary Sculpture, An evolution in volume and space », Carola Giedion-Welcker, Ed. George Wittenborn, New York, 1955 (plusieurs rééd.)
* « 4 artistes américains de Paris », catalogue d'exposition collective, Centre culturel américain, Paris, 1958
* « Artists in California, 1786-1940 », Edan Milton Hughes, Ed. Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento (Californie, USA), 2002
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Art movements
- + MODERN SCULPTURE / 1930-1970 / William Kenneth Armiage, Constantin Brancusi, Anthony Caro, Naum Gabo, Pablo Gargallo, Isamu Noguchi, etc.
- + ATELIER 17 / 1927-1965 / Anton Prinner, Mauricio Lasansky, Jacques Lipchitz, Mark Rothko, etc.
- + NEW REALITIES / 1946-1956 / Etienne Béothy, Marcelle Cahn, etc.
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Artists on display
The art and the artists display: proclamations, galleries, museums, personal or collective exhibitions. On walls or in shop windows, wise or rebels, posters warn, argue, show. Some were specially conceived by an artist for such or such event, other, colder, have only the letter.
Some were created in lithographic technic, most are simple offset reproductions. They are many those who like collecting these rectangles of paper, monochrome or in games of colours, in matt paper or brilliant, with many words or almost dumb.
We are happy also to be able to greet, by this pages, mythical galleries as those of Denise René, Louis Carré, Claude Bernard, Berheim Jeune, Maeght, Pierre Loeb and others.