Helen Phillips (artist)

Helen Elizabeth Phillips was born on March 3, 1913, in Fresno, California.[3]

From 1932 to 1936, she studied at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in San Francisco with Ralph Stackpole and Gottardo Piazzoni.[4] In 1936, Phillips won the school's Phelan Travelling Fellowship, a competitive scholarship with which she funded a year of study in Paris.[5] From 1936, Phillips associated with Atelier 17, an experimental and collaborative intaglio printmaking workshop operating in the heart of Montparnasse. During World War II, Phillips returned to the United States and began working within the emerging literary and artistic circles of the New York School.[6]

Phillips executed sculptures in bronze, stone and wood and produced intaglio prints. Her work is often non-figurative, however, she also worked with semi-abstract, anthropomorphic forms in both print and three-dimensional media.

Phillips met English printmaker Stanley William Hayter while studying engraving at Atelier 17 in Paris. The artists married in 1940 and divorced in 1972.[3][7] Phillips died on January 23, 1995, in New York City.[1][6]

• Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York[8]
• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California[9]
• Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York[10]
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California[11]
• Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.[12]
• Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts[13]
• Treasure Island Museum, San Francisco, California[14]