1000 Museums

Helen Torr was an early American modernist painter who worked with nature abstraction. She worked alongside the Stieglitz group to develop the characteristic Ameican modernist style in the 1920s. However, her husband, Arthur Dove, overshadowed her career. She won a scholarship to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under William Merritt Chase in 1906 then later would study at Drexel University. She only exhibited twice in her lifetime, one of them at the Stieglitz\’s gallery, and she was reluctant to show her work outside of the support of her peers. She requested to destroy her work, yet her sister donated much of it to the Heckscher Museum and in 1980 exhibited in a solo exhibition. Throughout her career, she focused on oil paintings and charcoal-based drawings to display elements of landscape and natural objects in semi-abstract works of art.