September 29, 2018 – March 31, 2019

In 2005 Spencer Jon Helfen Fine Arts was proud to present our first exhibition devoted to women artists, entitled California Women Modernists: At the Forefront of American Modernism.
Over thirteen years later we now are proud to present California Women Artists of the Modern Period, a survey of art created from 1915 to 1954, featuring many artists never before exhibited by our Gallery.
A large number of these recently acquired artworks are illustrated in Maurine St. Gaudens’s four-volume book, Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California, 1860-1960 (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 2015).
This exhibition coincides with, and includes many of the same artists as, the Pasadena Museum of History’s major exhibition Something Revealed; California Women Artists Emerge, 1860 – 1960.
Isabel Hunter’s masterful pastel, The Court of Abundance, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915, created during the Exposition, captures the design and beauty of this unique sculptural edifice. Born in 1865, Hunter primarily was a Bay Area artist who studied with William Keith and at the Art Students League in New York, among other schools. Hunter was equally facile with oil paint, winning awards in that medium, as she was with pastel and graphite.