Helen F. Price (1893 – 1960)

Highway Derelict, May, 1939, oil on canvas board, signed upper right, 18 x 20 inches, exhibited 1) Society of Independent Artists, American Society of Fine Arts (Art Students League), New York, NY, April 19 – May 12, 1940, no. 535 (noted verso, listed in catalog, and see Kantner, Dorothy, Palette Palaver, Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph, April 19, 1940 – “Helen F. Price and Ethel M. Dean, the former of Johnstown, the latter of this city, are two members of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh who are represented in the Independent Artist’s Exhibition which opens today in New York. Miss Price is represented by . . . ‘Highway Derelict’ . . . .”), 2) Solo Exhibition of Log Cabin Paintings, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, PA, May 28 – June 11, 1940 (noted verso and see Author ‘Convert’ To Art To Show Paintings Here, The Pittsburgh Press, May 19, 1940, and Kantner, Dorothy, Palette Palaver, Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph, May 24, 1940), 3) Solo Exhibition from the Log Cabin Series, Green Gables Tavern, Jennerstown, PA, August, 1940 (noted verso and see One Man Show of Miss Price Paintings of Log Cabins Being Exhibited at Green Gables Tavern, The Daily American, August 22, 1940 – “Her paintings range from oils done with the broad palette knife technique as is shown in the Horner cabin, through the whimsy in her imaginative ‘The Highway Derelict’, taken from the old Sinclair homestead and showing an eighteenth century cabin, left stranded high and dry, by the road cuts of a twentieth century highway.”), 4) Nineth Annual Exhibition, Allied Artists of Johnstown, PA, Cambria County Fair, Ebensburg, PA, September 1 – 6, 1941, no. 150, (noted verso and listed in brochure), 5) Solo Exhibition, Mountain Playhouse, Jennerstown, PA, August, 1941 (noted verso and see The Whole Town is Talking, The Daily American, August 16, 1941), perhaps exhibited a) Unknown Exhibition, Allied Artists of Johnstown, Ebensburg, PA, 1939 (noted verso), b) 51st Annual Exhibition, National Association of Women Artists, American Fine Arts Gallery, April 5 – 24, 1943 (noted verso), and c) Unknown Exhibition, Indiana State Teacher’s College, Indiana, PA, 1946; verso reads: “The home of General St. Clair of Revolutionary War fame – and one of the oldest log cabins in America – / ‘A Highway Derelict’ by Helen F. Price / painted May, 1939 / (On Lincoln Highway near the [illegible] between [illegible] and Greensburg) / now remodeled into a modern home / (Pennsylvania Log Cabin Series) / 1 – Hung Allied Artists Exhibition – Ebensberg – 1939 / 2 – Hung Independent Artists of America Show – Fine Arts Building – 59th St. New York City – 1940 / 3 – Hung Western Pennsylvania Historic Society – Pittsburgh, PA – 1940 (special one man show) / 4 – Hung in One Man Show, Green Gable Tavern – 1940 / 5 – Hung in One Man Show, Mountain Playhouse – Jennerstown, PA – 1941 / 6 – Hung in National Association of Woman Artists Show – 57th St. Argent Galleries, 1943 / 7 Hung in Indiana State Teacher College Exhibition – 1946 - / Miss Price is a member of / The National Association of Women Artists NY City / The Associated Artists of Pittsburgh / The Allied Artists of Johnstown / Associate, Member of the Allied Artists of America N. Y. City –“; partial exhibition label verso

$4250

Helen F. Price was a prize-winning Pennsylvania-based artist, writer, and lecturer. She was born and lived most of her life in Johnstown. Price had no intention of becoming an artist. She attended Briarcliff Manor, a New York private school, which included weekly art classes during which she produced countless charcoal sketches of plaster busts, a task which did not excite her. Later as a young author, she went on a picnic with an artist and discovered the joy of “splashing paint on a virgin surface and seeing the semblance of reality emerge.” Little is known about her training as a painter, but by the early 1930s, she began exhibiting professionally in New York at the Brooklyn Museum, the Salons of America, and the Society of Independent Artists. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Price consistently showed with the Allied Artists of Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Museum of Art and with the Allied Artists of Johnstown, where she served as a director and in various executive positions. She was a member of the National Association of Women Artists and was honored with solo exhibitions at the Mountain Playhouse in Johnstown and the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society in Pittsburgh. Price also participated in group exhibitions at the University of Pittsburgh, the Butler Art Institute, the Studio Guild of New York, Argent Gallery (New York), and the New York World’s Fair. During the 1930s and 1940s, she was well regarded for her portraits and a series of paintings depicting historic log cabins across Pennsylvania, such as Highway Derelict, and how those structures survived and changed through the Great Depression. The President of New York’s Studio Guild noted that Price’s “log cabin paintings are so different in subject matter from the general run of pictures submitted . . .  that they always attract a great deal of interest.” Although unique in execution, Price’s log cabin paintings demonstrate the interest of American artists of the period to draw on a useable past from the nation’s history.  In addition to her fine art practice, Price was a writer for her local newspaper and authored the 1927 novel On the Hill Top, which explored the lives of Johnstown residents. Price is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.