Lot 37: HELEN TORR 1886-1967

MELODRAMA (THUNDERSTORM)

measurements
20 by 26 in.

alternate measurements
(50.8 by 66 cm)

oil on canvas

Painted in 1931.

PROVENANCE

Estate of the artist
James Graham & Sons, New York
Private Collection
Kraushaar Galleries, New York
Vivian O. and Meyer P. Potamkin, 1999 (acquired from the above)
By descent to the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, An American Place, Arthur Dove and Helen Torr, 1933
Huntington, New York, Hecksher Museum of Art; New York, James Graham & Sons, Helen Torr, June-July 1972, 1972, no. 22
New York, James Graham and Sons, Helen Torr, In Private Life, Mrs. Arthur Dove, March-May 1980, no. 16
Southampton, New York, Parrish Art Museum, An American Place, May-July 1981
Southampton, New York, Parrish Art Museum, The Long Island Landscape, 1914-1946, June-August 1992
Huntington, New York, Hecksher Museum of Art, Arthur Dove & Helen Torr, The Huntington Years, March-April 1989, no. 89, illustrated in color on the back cover
Huntington, New York, Hecksher Museum of Art; New York, James Graham & Sons; Chicago, Illinois, The Terra Museum of American Art; Annapolis, Maryland, The Mitchell Gallery, St. John's College, Out of the Shadows: Helen Torr, A Retrospective, February-October 2003, no. 32, p. 25, illustrated in color p. 24, illustrated in color as frontispiece

NOTE

Melodrama, painted in 1931, is one of few remaining paintings by the artist Helen Torr, best known as the wife of American modernist Arthur Dove. Torr stopped painting when her husband fell ill in the 1940s and after his death in 1946, she destroyed much of her body of work. Anne Cohen di Pietro writes, "Dating from September 1931, Melodrama, [Helen Torr's] largest and one of her most successful oils, was inspired by a storm approaching over Northport Harbor that she initially captured in charcoal and pencil... Torr's dramatic subject is dispersed across the canvas with characteristic evenness, the generalized forms of surrounding trees repeated in a curving bank of clouds above. The muted green and plum-gray tones of the trees are close in value to the gray-brown water, nearly still in the calm before a storm and revealing the crisp contours of white boats. Amid the vessels, which are rendered in a flat, almost naïve manner, is a black yawl with a striking resemblance to the Mona" (Helen Torr: Out of the Shadows, p. 25). An entry from Helen Torr's unpublished diary mentions Melodrama: "I worked on 'Thunderstorm' and although parts--water especially are nicer, it has lost much of its 'ominous' quality which I must recapture tomorrow... I made drawings of trees on bank, got 'too literal,' now it has a landscape-gardened look. I painted 'Thunderstorm' and got back the ominous quality--best its been...Alfy [Alfred Stieglitz] said my 'Before a Thunderstorm' beautiful, 'very much Ophelia, don't you think so?" and lovely color-I pleased" (Helen Torr Dove Papers, reel 38, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).