Helen Hoffman Rousseau (1895 - 1992) American

Helen Hoffman Rousseau (1895 - 1992) American
Oil on Board
Measure 6 1/4"in H x 9 1/2"in W and 10"in H x 13 1/2"in W with frame

Known for: Modernist seascape, landscape, figure painting
Biography: Born in Rochester, Indiana on July 2,1895, Helen Rousseau could have hardly imagined how her eventual interest in art would affect art around the world. Helen married early to Otto Rousseau, and later studied painting at University of California, Pomona College, and California School of Fine Art. She was greatly influenced by Otis Oldfield, whose guidance and subject matter of modern seascapes and figures can be seen in her early works. Her works were of modernist style, and mimicking Oldfield she often painted scenes of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her later style developed soon after her return in 1951 to the CSFA. She was taken under the wing of David Park, and studied under his more experimental figurative style. He, as one art critic describes, was "re-asserting the primacy of the figure in his abstract paintings beginning in 1950." During this time, Helen Rousseau was swept in the wave led by David Park and which author Thomas Albright describes as an "attempt to forge a new figurative art from the slags of Abstract Expressionism. It opened up challenges enough to occupy artists in the Bay Area for years to come." Having studied under modernist Otis Oldfield, Rousseau was more open and able to grasp the concept and develop her own technique. Her artwork then branched off and took it's own figurative direction. The Women Painters of the West exhibit was instrumental in establishing woman painters, and thus helped even more to open the eyes and ears of art critics everywhere. Women Painters of the West was established for the purpose of reasserting the influential women artist who had been famous in their time but had been eventually overshadowed by their male counterparts. As Patricia Trenton, art director of the Los Angeles Athletic Club Collection and guest curator at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles said, it was for the great women artists who 'fell into the cracks of art obscurity'.

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