Women Artists – Page 2

Claire Van Scoy

1885-1968

Theme/Style – Figurative art

Media – Oils

Artistic Focus – Little is known of this enigmatic artist. She worked for the Federal Art Project and created stunning figurative works. But as her work is rare, it is not readily categorized.

Career Highlights –

Claire Van Scoy was born in Iowa in 1885.
In 1926 Van Scoy settled in Los Angeles, where she studied at the Chouinard School of Art.
Van Scoy exhibited in Southern California, including a 1939 show at the Progressive Art Center in Laguna Beach.
She was employed by the Federal Art Project by at least 1936.
Van Scoy passed away in Los Angeles in 1968.

Helen Lundeberg

1908-1999

Theme/Style – Post-Surrealism, figurative art, landscapes, still lifes

Media – Oils, murals, lithographs

Artistic Focus – A leader with husband and fellow artist Lorser Feitelson of the Post-Surrealist movement in America, whose ideology emphasized the subjective through introspection and contemplation, Helen Lundeberg created works that offered both “an inner calm and a cerebral puzzlement…calmly assertive canvases that seem direct almost to the point of simplicity despite their truly intricate structural considerations and their finely honed balance of color.” Her years of experimentation with color and structure resulted in works that earned her accolades from Henry J. Seldis as a “poetess among painters.”

Career Highlights –

Born in Chicago, Helen Lundeberg moved with her family to Pasadena when she was four.
She studied art in 1930 at the Stickney School of Art, where her training was influenced by Lorser Feitelson, one of the instructors.
Her eventual marriage to Feitelson was a partnership both personal and professional, best symbolized when the pair published New Classicism, a 1934 brochure that presented the American Surrealist manifesto.
Through a lifelong career, Lundeberg’s work became “increasingly more evocative and mystical. Nearly all her work is about the opening of one space into another, the juxtaposition of internal and cosmic arenas.”
Following her husband’s death, a double-retrospective of the couple’s works was held in 1980.
Lundeberg remained in Los Angeles, continued painting and was widely exhibited for the rest of her life.

Selection of Works by this Artist

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Caroline Lloyd

1875-1945

Theme/Style – Figurative art, portraits

Media – Sculptures

Artistic Focus – Caroline Lloyd’s innate abilities and artistic sense as a sculptor would be impressive in any case, but even more so because they lay dormant until relatively late in her life. Her handsome sculptures exude grace, confidence, and quiet strength.

Career Highlights –

Born Caroline Alma Goodman in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1875, Caroline Lloyd was educated at the Convent of Notre Dame in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
She married attorney Warren E. Lloyd in 1898, and settled in Los Angeles.
It was not until Caroline Lloyd was in her fifties and had raised a family, that she became interested in sculpting, and in the late 1920s she traveled to Paris to study under Robert Wlerick.
Lloyd exhibited and received a medal at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques in Paris in 1937.
Upon returning to Los Angeles Caroline Lloyd was active in the local art scene, exhibiting at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939 with the bronze Negro Head, the New York World’s Fair in 1939 with the bronze Man With Ball, and at the Stendahl Galleries in Los Angeles in 1941.
In 1943 Lloyd was selected to cast a bronze of the “Mother of Los Angeles”, Mrs. Willoughby Rodman, a well-known and respected civic leader. The bronze was presented to the City of Los Angeles where it was to be displayed in City Hall.
Lloyd’s work consisted mainly of portrait busts and statues, and in 1946 her daughter donated two of her figural sculptures, Repose and Poise, to the City of Los Angeles. They were placed in the Exposition Park Rose Garden.
Caroline Lloyd passed away in Los Angeles in 1945.

Anita Hellman

1891-1972

Theme/Style – Modernism, figurative art

Media – Sculpture

Artistic Focus – Little is known of this enigmatic artist. Her known work, which is rare, is bold and stylistically Modern.

Career Highlights –

Anita St. Marie Champagne Hellman was born of Canadian parents in Massachusetts in 1891.
Hellman moved to California in about 1912.
During the 1930s, Hellman made her home in Alameda and exhibited at the Oakland Art Gallery.
Her works are rare, and little else is known of this early woman Modernist.
Anita Hellman later moved to Redwood City, where she remained until her demise in 1972.

Selection of Works by this Artist

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Sophie Harpe

1895-1981

Theme/Style – Modernism, Abstraction, figurative art, landscapes

Media – Oils, watercolors

Artistic Focus – Sophie Harpe produced vibrant paintings whose sophisticated color palette and confident execution bespoke the originality of her artistic vision. Her subjects ranged from purely abstract forms to Modernist landscapes which themselves were often explorations of pure shape, line, and color.

Career Highlights –

Sophie Elaine Harpe was born in Quebec, Canada in 1895. She studied music early in her life, before turning to the visual arts as her means of self-expression.
Harpe studied at the National Academy of Design in New York, as well as the Ecole des Beaux Arts and Academie Julian in Paris, and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in architecture.
In about 1918, Harpe moved to California and obtained her Master of Arts degree from Stanford University.
Sophie Harpe subsequently began a career as an art teacher, both in arts and crafts at Stanford, and at Monterey Union High School.
Harpe’s work was exhibited at the Grand Central Gallery in New York, as well as at Stanford University, the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, and elsewhere on the Pacific Coast.
Upon her retirement from teaching in 1960, Harpe continued painting and exhibiting locally on the Monterey Peninsula, and was an active member of the Carmel Art Association.
Harpe’s work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and was included in the museum’s 2004 exhibition, A Vision of Her Own: California Modernists at LACMA, alongside the work of other progressive California women artists such as Henrietta Shore and Elise Seeds.
Sophie Harpe passed away in Carmel, California in 1981.

Leah Rinne Hamilton

1906-1960

Theme/Style – Modernism, Surrealism, Abstraction, figurative art, landscapes

Media – Oils, watercolors

Artistic Focus – Hamilton began as a purely representational painter. Her early oils and watercolors reflected both the times in which she lived and, perhaps more importantly, the locations in which she painted – the areas in and around San Francisco. Later, however, her work would become more abstract, and sometimes surreal. Hamilton was equally skilled at oil and watercolor painting.

Career Highlights –

Leah Hamilton was born Leah I. Rinne in Finland in 1906, and immigrated to California in 1921. She earned an M.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
After traveling and studying in Europe, she was a teacher at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, during which time she married and became Leah Rinne Hamilton.
Hamilton subsequently spent most of her career in San Francisco, where she made her home on the northern slope of Russian Hill. She was president of San Francisco Women Artists, and also was active in the California Watercolor Society and the San Francisco Art Association.
In 1939, Hamilton was included in the “Fourteen Bay Area Watercolorists” show at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Between 1935 and 1958, Leah Hamilton’s work won prizes in numerous other exhibitions at both the San Francisco Museum of Art and the San Francisco Art Association.
Leah Rinne Hamilton passed away in Oakland in 1960.