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    Artist

  • Kramer, Edith, 1916-2014

    • Title

  • Portrait of Helen Ek Heller

  • Physical Description

    1 painting : oil on canvas ; 28" x 26", 71.1 cm x 66 cm

  • Date

    1946

  • Notes

    Signed and dated by the artist in the lower right hand corner

  • Summary

    Portrait shows the sitter as a young woman with blond hair pulled back, and she wears a striped jacket and lace blouse. The sitter sits at a three-quarter angle facing away from the viewer, with her hands crossed in her lap. A ring is visible on one finger.

  • Depicted

    Heller, Helen, 1919-1974

  • Subject

    Women, Portraits

  • Genre

    Portraits

  • Medium

    Paintings

  • Part Of

    Hans Heller Collection, AR 25858

  • Accession Number

  • URL

Biographical/Historical Information

Edith Kramer was born in Vienna on August 29, 1916, a niece of the writer Theodor Kramer and the actress Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel. From 1929 to 1934 she attended the reform-pedagogical Schwarzwald school. From 1934 to 1938 she was an art student of Friedl Dicker. Among her parents' friends were many artists and psychoanalysts, such as Siegfried Bernfeld, and Wilhelm and Annie Reich. There she got inspirations for pedagogy inspired by psychoanalysis. Kramer was a close friend and neighbor of the Heller Family in Grundlsee in Styria, Austria. After the Nazis gained power, Edith Kramer fled to New York where she could establish art therapy in children's homes and hospitals. Later, she published the book "Childhood and art therapy" and taught about art therapy at George Washington University and New York University. She also painted and had many exhibitions. Kramer eventually returned to Austria, settling in Grundlsee Lake, where she died in 2014.

Helen Heller (1919-1974) was born as Helen Olive Ek in Pearl River, NY, the fourth child of Swedish immigrants who came to America in the early 1900s. Helen married Hans Heller in 1946. She studied photography, dance, and sculpture, often combining the disciplines in her creative efforts. She studied sculpture in the United States and at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. The subjects of her art works included portrait busts of emigre colleagues and friends, modern dancers, Austrian famers, mothers with their children, and victims of the Vietnam War. Heller exhibited sculpture and dance photography in several shows in New York City and in West Chester, NY. She also published two children's books and taught interpretive dance to poor and underserved children at the Ossining Children’s Center. Her art and life reflected her commitment to multiculturalism, racial equality, acceptance of people with different sexual preferences, early feminism, and anti-war imagery. She died of cancer in 1974. Helen Ek Heller is not the same artist as Helen West Heller. For more information about the artist: helenekheller.com

Related Works in the LBI Catalog

Depicted:

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Citation

Kramer, Edith: Portrait of Helen Ek Heller, Leo Baeck Institute, 2023.77.