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Women Artists
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Collection Info
Art by American women constitutes eight percent of the Terra's collection and includes oil and watercolor paintings, pastels, and various types of prints. (updated 2/2019, following deaccessions)
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Helen Torr
Date: 1927
Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection
Object number: 1999.142
Text Entries: Women should keep voices and color (in painting) lower. - Helen Torr, diary entry, 1938
What one critic has referred to as Helen Torr's "idiosyncratic, almost naïve sense of reality" infused her small paintings of shells, leaves and feathers with a luminous presence, but it also interfered with her efforts to sell and exhibit her work. When in 1927 the influential New York photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz refused to show her paintings alongside those of her husband, Arthur Dove (Stieglitz maintained Torr's work was "too frail for the room"), his wife Georgia O'Keeffe displayed them in a separate gallery of works by women. Despite some favorable critical response and Dove's hearty encouragement, Torr struggled with an acute awareness of her own flaws. Having nursed her husband throughout a debilitating illness during the 1940s, she gave up painting completely upon his death.