Research in Progress: Helen Wessells

Carol Lowrey

With Veteran's Day approaching, I’d like to showcase a patriotic painting we have in the gallery. It’s entitled The Negro Troop, pictured here, and it depicts a group of African-American soldiers making their way along a street, the Stars and Stripes held aloft by one of the men. Some female admirers tag along, distracting several of the marchers. Where is the scene meant to take place? I’m at a loss to tell you because the ambiguous background makes it unclear as to whether the parade is in a rural town or a large city. The subject matter, however, is a reminder that during the first half of the twentieth century many African-American men proudly served their country, despite the discrimination that continued in American society and the armed forces; their involvement in both World War I and II led to future reforms within the U.S. military.

This striking genre piece (the medium is tempera on panel) was painted in 1936 by Helen Wessells, an artist whose career remains unstudied thus far. According to the archivist at the Art Students League of New York, she studied there from 1922 to 1927, working under influential painters such as George Bridgman, Allen Tucker, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Thomas Hart Benton. In The Negro Troop, she works in a painterly representational style that links her to the Fourteenth Street School in New York (of which Miller was the leader), who portrayed modern, everyday themes with techniques inspired by the Old Masters. What’s particularly impressive about The Negro Troop is the way in which Wessells employs a firm, almost caricaturist method in rendering the faces of several of the protagonists, her deft touch capturing the individual facial expressions and excited demeanor of several of the women.

Biographical accounts, exhibition records and newspaper reviews I’ve located thus far indicate that Wessells exhibited in New York City––at venues such as the G. R. D. Studio, the Midtown Galleries, Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art–– at various times during the late 1920s and 1930s. This elusive painter seems to have disappeared from the Manhattan art scene after about 1940, but it’s obvious, from The Negro Troop, that she was a figure specialist––skilled in translating the emotions, actions and energy of ordinary people into paint––and her work can be situated within the tradition of American Scene painting and Depression-era Realism. If anyone out there can enlighten me further on Wessells (her surname sometimes appears with one ‘l” or she’s referred to as “Helen E. Wessells”), please contact me at the gallery.