Sleeping girl
Riva Helfond (1910–2002) was an American artist and printmaker best known for her social realist studies of working people's lives.
From 1936 to 1941, Helfond was an artist in the New York Works Progress Administration program's graphics division, creating work in a variety of media, including lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, aquatints, collograph, and silkscreens. Some of her work shows the impact that color had as it entered American printmaking during this period, and she was adventurous in exploring the possibilities opened up by screen printing. She printed all of her own work, which ranged from austere, often monochromatic social realist portraits of working people and cityscapes in the 1920s and 1930s to colorful, abstract, lyrical landscapes in later years. Some of her color abstractions originated as watercolors from nature during travels in Greece and France and were then turned into oil paintings.
Helfond was politically progressive, and along with contemporaries like Elizabeth Olds, Bea Mandelman, and Minna Citron, she is especially well known for works that "pointedly condemned the state of labor, and the relationship between big business and big government, in the 1930s. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riva_Helfond)
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Sleeping girl" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1939. digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8c9fe21c-bdc6-c2d2-e040...
Sleeping girl
Riva Helfond (1910–2002) was an American artist and printmaker best known for her social realist studies of working people's lives.
From 1936 to 1941, Helfond was an artist in the New York Works Progress Administration program's graphics division, creating work in a variety of media, including lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, aquatints, collograph, and silkscreens. Some of her work shows the impact that color had as it entered American printmaking during this period, and she was adventurous in exploring the possibilities opened up by screen printing. She printed all of her own work, which ranged from austere, often monochromatic social realist portraits of working people and cityscapes in the 1920s and 1930s to colorful, abstract, lyrical landscapes in later years. Some of her color abstractions originated as watercolors from nature during travels in Greece and France and were then turned into oil paintings.
Helfond was politically progressive, and along with contemporaries like Elizabeth Olds, Bea Mandelman, and Minna Citron, she is especially well known for works that "pointedly condemned the state of labor, and the relationship between big business and big government, in the 1930s. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riva_Helfond)
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Sleeping girl" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1939. digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8c9fe21c-bdc6-c2d2-e040...