Helen Torr

Helen Torr’s sensitive, unobtrusive pictures have been neglected in comparison to the attention awarded the expansive floral paintings by her friend and fellow artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Both artists set out to infuse the minutiae of natural objects with concentrated personal feeling. O’Keeffe supported Torr, who was sometimes hesitant to pursue recognition, and arranged for her work to be exhibited at New York’s Opportunity Gallery in 1927 with that of other women artists. Public showings of Torr’s work were rare in her lifetime; in fact, her first solo exhibition did not occur until 1972, five years after her death.

In 1906, Helen Torr won a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she studied under William Merritt Chase. Later, through her marriage to artist Arthur Dove and their friendship with avant-garde artists such as Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and Marsden Hartley, Torr participated in the development of a uniquely American brand of modernism during the 1920s. Torr’s paintings demonstrate an intense awareness of her natural environment: her flattened, luminous still lifes of shells, plant parts, and rocks can be read as landscapes. Some of her most successful paintings combine the patterns and shorthand characteristic of folk art, with carefully painted details observed from a motif. Other works suggest an affinity with collage and with surrealism’s illogical special construction and poetic juxtapositions of unrelated objects.