FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
INEZ HELEN SEIBERT (1914-1987)
October 22 - November 22, 2005
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 22, 6-8 PM
417 North San Vicente Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90048
T: 310-360-9360
E: <gallery@denenbergfinearts.com>
W: <http://www.artnet.com/ag/galleryhomepage.asp?gid=193202>
Open by appointment or by chance
(upper l.) Arnold Genthe, Portrait of Inez Helen Seibert Brooks, circa 1935, platinum print. Not for sale
Inez Helen Seibert Brooks:
(upper r.) Crows and Suns,1941, watercolor on paper, 19 1/2 x 25 1/2”. Estate-stamped.
(lower l.) Italian Vase and French Scarf, 1945, oil on canvas, 20 x 16". Signed & dated November, ll., recto & verso.
(lower r.) Marin County, California, 1941, oil on canvas, 25 x 27 1/2 “. Estate-stamped.
An Individual Artist’s Personal Response to Picasso, Mondrian & Dove
An exemplary American modernist, Helen Inez Seibert (Brooks) was initially tutored in George and Eloise Oberteuffer's New York City academy in the early 1930’s, inspired by the rich surfaces and architectonic structures of Cezanne. For one incredibly fruitful year, 1936-1937, she nestled under the wing of Arthur Dove--his only student—benefiting as well from the presence (and occasional absence) of the other Helen, Helen Torr (Mrs. Dove.) Her fortunate position in society derived from her husband, Charles Van Wyck Brooks, son of the distinguished literary lion of New England, Van Wyck Brooks, Duncan Phillips’s good friend. Through these connections, and with ample funds, the attractive young couple headily explored the European expatriate scene, at a moment perilously close to the outbreak of war.
In France from 1937 to 1939, Seibert was to meet some of the most brilliant literary and artistic personalities in Europe, including Picasso, Braque, Leger, Gertrude Stein and her circle, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Cocteau. Moreover, once they returned to the United States, there would often be lunch in Westport, Connecticut, with Sinclair Lewis, Randolph Bourne, and many other distinguished creative artists.
Seibert readily associated in New York with An American Place, Alfred Steiglitz's nexus of American modernism. Her work clearly registers the presence of Mondrian on the scene in two paintings from 1944, Composition and Rock by the Shore. Although we have no record of her meeting with Mondrian personally, Dudensing Gallery had been selling his pictures before the artist’s first visit to New York in 1938, and his final move from London to New York in October of 1940.
In 1940 the Brooks family decided to move to California, staying en route at Mabel Dodge's Taos “Salon.” They eventually settled in Marin County in Northern California in 1941, where Helen was to create a body of modernist pictures uniquely her own. She was becoming a successful and recognized painter; two neoplasticist* masterpieces, Composition, 1944, and French Vase and Italian Scarf, 1945, are shown here for sale for the first time since their exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, in a Spring, 1946 group exhibition.
Her career was full of promise. Sadly, these productive years in California were cut short in 1949 by a tragic diagnosis of schizophrenia, untreatable at the time. Helen was 35 years of age, and had just given birth to her son Peter. Charles institutionalized his wife in a New England hospital where she remained until her death almost 40 years later.
Arnold Genthe, the renowned society photographer of San Francisco and New York, took two photographs of the radiantly beautiful young woman around the time of her marriage. These are on view here for the first time, one with her eyes open, and one, in a tender prefiguring of her eventual mental decline, with her eyes closed.
Seibert’s work from 1932 to 1949 is a bright discovery in the history of arts and letters in the United States by virtue of her sophisticated aesthetic achievement. Hers is a fresh voice of exploration and synthesis of abstraction and figuration at the dawn of post-war America.
* Neo-Plasticism, also called “De Stijl,” was a Dutch movement in painting and sculpture founded by Theo van Doesburg, characterized by a reversion to the basic fundamentals of art: color, form, the plane, and the line. Artists used mostly straight horizontal and vertical lines in black, white, gray, and primary colors completely devoid of realism and the artist’s emotion. In 1917, the magazine "De Stijl" was published. Another leading figure of the movement was Piet Mondriaan who published the manifesto, Neo-Plasticism in 1920. The Neo-Plasticism movement ended formally in 1931, but was very influential in the development of the Bauhaus and International Style.
