THE FLAMBOYANT LOUISE HELLSTROM & THE WOODSTOCK ART COLONY

 By Bruce Weber

In anticipation of the opening on Saturday July 12th from 3-5 p.m. of the exhibition “Making Her Mark: 50 Women Artists of the Historic Woodstock Art Colony” at the Historical Society of Woodstock, and in the autumn of “Art and Artistry of the Plowshare” at the new Woodstock Library, Learning Woodstock Art Colony is publishing the following post on legendary Woodstocker Louise Hellstrom. Mention of the article and exhibition will appear in Hudson Valley One. "Making Her Mark" is accompanied by a catalog featuring a short essay and entries on all the artists in the exhibition, many of whom have been little written about in recent years.

I wll be giving a gallery talk on Making Her Mark

at the

Historical Society

of Woodstock

on Sunday July 20th at 2 p.m.

Unknown Photographer

Louise Hellstrom, c. 1920

Striebel-Gaede Archives, Center for Photography at Woodstock

Louise Hellstrom was a sight to behold with a head of closely cropped bright red hair, green eyes framed with purple shadow, a complexion of pea-green, and thick lips painted magenta. She had a voice that could shatter the room with what her Woodstock friend Fritzi Striebel called “its old, raucous, ear-splitting vehemence . . . .”(1) Longtime Byrdcliffe resident Benjamin L. Webster recalled learning about the minor gymnastics that Louise performed in front of a group of paintings at a New York City opening “when she threw herself on the floor, kicked in the air, and bellowed for minutes with appreciation.”(2) Behind this flamboyant and often wild exterior was a person who was an important early supporter of the artists of the Woodstock art colony, and had immense connections with people in the arts in America and abroad. While there remain many things to know about Hellstrom’s life, career, and interests (including her efforts as a dress designer, philanthropist, art collector and painter) her story cries out to be told in the context of the historic Woodstock art colony.(3)

Born in 1882 in Pedricktown, New Jersey (located about thirty miles southeast of Philadelphia), Laurenna S. Shoemaker (known as Louise) was the daughter of Isaac Pedrick Shoemaker and Mary Amelia Leaming Shoemaker. Her father was from Quaker Dutch farming stock. An early Burbank experimenter, he was known to be adept in art and invention. On his death he left behind “paintings of school days of much promise in that line.”(4) Louise’s mother Mary was a descendent of Thomas Leaming, a member of the Provincial Congress of New Jersey, and author of New Jersey's first state constitution. She traced her ancestry in America back to the Mayflower.

After attending a Quaker school in Philadelphia, Louise enrolled in the Pennsylvania School of Applied Art. The school had been established in 1876 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in response to increased interest in art and art education stirred by the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Around 1903, she attended a matinee in the city of the “Chinese” musical comedy San Toy, which enjoyed international success, and became so enamored of the production that she took a job in the chorus and toured around the country with the company.(5)

Miss Louise Shoemaker, 1904

“Music and Drama,” The Sun: Sunday

Edition, Sydney, August 28, 1904, p. 2

Louise fell in love with San Francisco and remained there for a year, working in the chorus of the American Travesty Stars. According to Fritzi Striebel, her “spontaneous dancing at the late-night parties [in California] made her famous.”(6) Louise toured with the company to Australia, where she was singled out as “one of the front rank of American showgirls now appearing at the Palace [in Sydney] . . . . Miss Shoemaker is prepossessing in looks and a good specimen of an American show girl.”(7) The company returned to San Francisco in early January 1905.(8)

Lydia Locke, 1912

Paul Poiret Fashion Page in

Woman’s Home Companion, c. 1918

Louise lived in San Francisco at the time of the earthquake of 1906. She then moved to New York City for four years. In around 1910, she accompanied her friend the mezzo soprano Lydia Locke to Paris. Over the course of the next few years she studied with the innovative fashion designers Paul Poiret and Jeanne Paguin, and studied painting with Othon Friesz and Charles Guerin at the Académie Moderne.(9) Louise took up fashion design as a vocation. Her early fashion designs were influenced by Poiret, who promoted styles that eliminated corsets and enabled freedom of movement for the modern, elegant, and sophisticated woman. Louise also designed her own clothes, which a reporter for the New York Daily News remarked in 1925 were “always more French than Paris and more daring than [Coco Chanel].”(10)

Gustaf Hellström, 1915

National Library of Sweden

”Gustaf Hellström is getting married. A somewhat delayed letter from Paris,”

Dagens Nyheter, November 21 1915, p, 7

On returning to New York City around 1913, Hellstrom found a job designing dresses for Hickson’s, a high-class fashion retailer, designer, and department store, which had evolved into the most elegant and expensive specialty shop on Fifth Avenue.(11) She made regular trips to Paris for the firm. On one such trip she met her future husband the Swedish journalist and writer Gustaf Hellström.(12) Over the course of his career Hellström worked for several Scandinavian newspapers, and published more than 30 volumes of fiction and essays, and was also active as a playwright.(13) Hellström was instrumental in introducing writers of English and American fiction in Sweden, including the plays of Eugene O’Neill. The first play by O’Neill performed in Sweden was Anna Christie, given at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, in a translation by Hellström. In his home country he is best known for his novel Lacemaker Lekholm Has an Idea (1927), and auto fictional Stellan Petreus series (1921-1952).

Following graduation from the University of Lund and time in Stockholm and London, Hellström spent the period from 1911-1917 in France as a foreign correspondent for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. After a period in Paris he wrote reports from the town of Senlis, a small Medieval town north of the city, and fled back to the capital after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. In France he began to portray Germans as barbaric and cruel, contrary to the prevalent attitude at the time in Sweden. His strong support for the allied forces would be valued on the Maverick art colony, located near Woodstock in West Hurley, where Hervey White was a vocal advocate for the war. For many years Hellström wrote three articles a month for prominent Scandinavian papers on subjects dealing with social, political and literary conditions in England, France and America.

Arvid Fougstedt (1888-1949)

Lyre et Palette, 1916

Ink on paper

Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

Hellström met many artists in Paris, among them Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani. He appears in a drawing by his countryman Arvid Fougstedt, which illustrates the opening of an exhibition at the end of 1916 by the society “Lyre et Palette,” held in a house in Montparnasse. Among the people featured in the drawing are Picasso (with the stick), poet Max Jacob (to his left and leaning on his shoulder), Fougstedt (in bowler hat), and the Chilean painter Manuel Ortiz de Zarate (behind and to the right of Picasso). The tall man in the trench coat is Hellström, and to his right we see Modigliani, the Polish-born French painter Moise Kisling and Kisling’s girlfriend Renée Jeanne. On the wall are paintings by Modigliani, Picasso and Matisse.

Louise and Gustaf married in October 1915. After a year of marriage, Louise was anxious to go home. She returned alone to New York in 1916. She was joined in early 1918 by Gustaf. The couple resided near Stuyvesant Square Park at the Penington Friend's House (then known as The Penington) at 214 East 15th Street in lower Manhattan, and at the end of the year Louise created the set for Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook’s playTickless Time at the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village, which starred poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay and her sister, singer and actress Norma Millay.

Louise and Gustaf made regular trips to the Maverick art colony in West Hurley, where they lived at what would later become the home of ceramic sculptor Carl Walters and artist Philip Guston.(14) In the summer of 1928 they attended the Maverick Festival where it was later reported by the actor Lawrence Langer that Louise was dressed up as a “red haired maenad.”(15) Gustaf enjoyed the Maverick where he became friends with founder Hervey White and his Swedish compatriot the painter Carl Eric Lindin.  By May of 1919, Gustaf chose to spend longer periods of time upstate to further the progress on his novel Letter of Introduction, which was published in Sweden in December 1920. Louise came upstate for visits, and Gustaf began a new role as managing editor of Hervey White’s illustrated magazine The Plowshare.

Man Ray (1890-1976)

Cover Design for The Plowshare, March 1920

Woodstock Library District

George Hoyningen-Huene (1900-1968)

Elsa Schiaparelli in her Own Design, 1932

Louise introduced Hellström to her extraordinary circle of friends and associates. “For to Louise,” her writer friend Clemence Randolph wrote, “came everyone of note in New York . . . permanent or passing through. Luminaries of the literary, theatrical, artistic and musical worlds.”(16) Among the artists, writers and musicians in the couple’s circle were Eugene O’Neill, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Augustus John, Djuana Barnes, and George and Ira Gershwin. Their connection with Man Ray likely led to his creation of the cover of the March 1920 issue of The Plowshare. Among their visitors to the Maverick were Elsa Schiaparelli, who following her divorce from Wilhelm Frederick Wendt de Kerlor pursued a career in fashion to support herself and her daughter, and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap who moved their Little Review to New York City from Chicago in 1917 in hope of getting greater support.

The closing of The Plowshare in November of 1920 ensued in the wake of the falling apart of Gustaf and Louise Hellström’s marriage. The couple attended a dinner party that year at the Woodstock home of artists Hunt and Mary Diederich that included Robert Winthrop Chanler, a pal of Louise’s and one of the most original artists and colorful personalities to frequent the American art world in the early years of the 20th century. During the evening Louise became visibly aggravated with the men monopolizing the conversation. Gustaf then “put down his glass in desperation, declaring ‘You can’t talk with that woman around,’ and stalked out, with Louise making faces and with mincing steps, following.”(17)

“[Advertisement for Harry Collins],” New York Tribune, September 25, 1921, p. 5

Following the dinner party in Woodstock, Hellström spent an evening at Chanler’s house in the city in the company of Eugene O’Neill, Hunt Diederich and the artist Andrew Dasburg, as well as a small group of others. Gustaf explained to the group that Louise upset him so much that he couldn’t write, and that when he informed her of this, she put up the defense that he “needed stimulation.” He further explained to the group that he “must work. And I can’t write, she diverts me. I must get away.’”(18) The evening culminated with Hellström deciding to return alone to Sweden. Following Gustaf’s departure for Europe in December 1920, Louise took a job at a huge salary designing clothes for the dressmaker Harry Collins, and continued to come to the Maverick for visits.(19) Clemence Randolph reported that after a “prolonged and a fruitless negotiation [the couple] divorced.”(20) The dissolution of their marriage was finalized on June 2, 1926.(21)

Following Gustaf ‘s return to Sweden, Louise moved into the Maverick house known as The Salamander, which had been built for Pierre Henrotte, concert master for the Metropolitan Opera. The house had a long row of windows facing north, a sleeping gallery with a fireplace, and side walls that were free and open to display pictures. White explained in his unpublished autobiography that Louise “was painting there in summers as well as entertaining. . . . She was the mistress of other arts also, the culinary and decoration. Her studio was a work of art as were her parties. Silk hangings, modern day pottery and rare works of art.”(22) Unfortunately, none of Louise’s paintings have surfaced.

Unknown Photographer

Nita Naldi, 1924

University of Washington: Special Collections

Hellstrom counted among her friends the playwright Mary Desti and her husband Randolph, who brought land and built a house on the Maverick extension between the houses of musicians Henrotte, Paul Kefer and Gerald Kunz. Among other luminaries in Hellstrom’s circle to come to the Maverick over the course of the 1920s were the American stage performer and silent film actress Nita Naldi (who was often paired in movies with Rudolph Valentino); the French operatic soprano, actress and author Georgette LeBlanc; and  the Belgian actress, singer, writer and feminist Yvonne George, for whom White provided a house for a summer. In addition to Naldi and George, she counted among her friends in the theatre world the actors and actresses Jimmy Watts, Elizabeth Murray, Charlotte Granville and Frank Fay, and the producers John Murray Anderson and John D. Williams.

Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872-1930)

Portrait of Louise Hellstrom, c. 1924

Mrs. Hellstrom at Home in a

Rare Moment Of Repose

The New York Woman, March 10, 1937, p. 11

Peggy Bacon (1895-1987)

Louise Hellstrom, 1929

Pastel on paper

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Peggy Bacon (1895-1987)

“The Tornado of Minetta Street,”

The Hue and Cry 6 (August 31, 1928): 2

Louise was painted at least twice by Robert Winthrop Chanler, her “partner in weird escapades.”(23) Following Gustaf’s return abroad she regularly presided at the fantastic parties Chanler held at his twin town houses on East 19th Street in Manhattan. She compared her friendship to him with that of the English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whig politician Horace Walpole and the French literary hostess Mme. du Deffand.(24) On one occasion she implored Chanler to paint a more sober portrait of her in repose, and he painted a beautiful likeness (pictured in photograph above)-- reportedly no one recognized her. Louise was the inspiration for satirical portraits by Peggy Bacon in pastel as well as pen and ink for the Woodstock satical magazine The Hue and Cry, where she was referred to as “The Tornado of Minetta Street.”(25)

Also appearing in an issue of The Hue and Cry was the hilarious article “Louise Hellstrom, Her Life and Quirks,” purported to be written by Norman de Plume. It pretends to be a review of a two volume publication titled Louise Hellstrom Her Life and Quirks, that includes 17 color and 88 half tone plates, published by Smaltz and Smily, and purchasable for 22 cents fifteen pins. Norman de Plume reported that Hellstrom had been living on the Maverick for 62 years, and that on his visit in 1864 her hair “was deep magenta with a tinge of gray at the roots which set off to exceeding good advantage her clear clover pink lips,” and he informed the reader that the book offers “lurid descriptions of . . . incidents of reckless living and late parties, furious driving and exchange of rare wit.”(26). It added that the “colored plates are inserted to give an accurate impression to the reader of the many tints of color that Mrs. Hellstrom has used on her hair for the past 83 years. . . . She was always the life and death of a party, parrying here and thrusting there but always fainting at the right moment. She once remarked that she was ‘only interested in sex and intellect’ a statement that started the short skirt movement back in 1923.”(27)

Peggy Bacon (1895-1987)

A Few Ideas, 1927

Drypoint on paper

Peggy Bacon (1895-1987)

Clams and Clodhoppers, 1933

Drypoint on paper

Woodstock Artists

Association and Museum

Unknown Artist

Hand Puppet of Louise Hellstrom, n.d.

Historical Society of Woodstock

Hellstrom is also featured in Bacon’s drypoint A Few Ideas, which pictures a scene in the artist George Biddle’s house in Croton-on-Hudson in Westchester, New York. From left to right, the artists around the table are Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jane Belo (Biddle’s wife), John Carroll, Biddle, Jules Pascin, and Katherine Schmidt. Peggy Bacon is seated at the back of the room, fourth from the left. Hellstrom is pictured with her right elbow held high at the back center of the front table, with a cigarette and holder in her mouth, seated at John Carroll’s right. In Bacon’s drypoint Clams and Clodhoppers, Hellstrom sits third from left in the back row of the table in the foreground, two seats to the right of Bacon and her husband Alexander Brook. Hellstrom reportedly once steamed 1200 clams for a Woodstock clambake.(28) In the archives of the Historical Society of Woodstock is a hand puppet of Hellstrom by an unknown maker complete with skewed mouth, blue-green eyes and red hair.

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964)

Louise Hellstrom, 1931

Gelatin silver print

Philadelphia Museum of Art

George Ault (1891-1948)

January Full Moon, 1941

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

An overindulgence in liquor led to many memorable episodes in Woodstock. Clemence Randolph recalled the times Louise’s car went off the Bearsville bridge, and into a little brook at the house of J. P. McEvoy.(29) Beginning in the late 1930s, Louise became one of the painter George Ault’s local drinking partners. Not unlike Hellstrom, Ault could be argumentative in drinking situations. The two enjoyed reminiscing about Woodstock parties and bohemian good times in Greenwich Village in the 1920s.(30) Ault’s wife Louise (who generally wrote under her birth name Louise Jonas) later noted that by the late 1930s Hellstrom’s “flamboyance had diminished,” and she was “no longer likely to arrive at [the Woodstock writer] J. P. McEvoy’s party after first falling in the [Olympic-sized] swimming pool [and] making an entrance in a gossamer gown wet and clinging.”(31) During one of Louise Hellstrom’s visits to his house Ault showed her the canvas January Full Moon and she sprung to her feet, exclaiming “’It’s not just a barn; it’s all barns’.” Henceforth, whenever speaking about January Full Moon, Ault called the work "All Barns, Forever.”(32)

Louise Ault wrote about Hellstrom in a column for the Poughkeepsie Journal in 1933. She remarked that “From the early colony days to this, Woodstock’s Bohemian spirit has been crystalized in green-eyed, purple-shadowed, red-headed uninhibited Louise Hellstrom . . . . vividly made up to the point of grotesqueness on gala occasions, slight of figure but dynamic, strips the shams from social intercourse, rebels against the conventions with refreshing willfulness, makes fierce denouncements eloquent with gestures and colorful as to language. It is said that funny, fancy women tremble in fear of her tongue if they have reason to suppose she finds them displeasing. Her hauteur is fascinating. . . . Early Woodstockers, men like Alexander Brook, now a prominent figure in the art world, upon revisiting Woodstock usually seek out Louise first. They respect her judgement in art and literature, appreciate the integrity of her opinions. Women speak of her good taste in home decoration.”(33)

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964)

Louise Hellstrom, 1933

Gelatin silver print

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Among Louise’s other friends were the New York writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten who wrote about her in his novel of 1930, Parties: Scenes from Contemporary New York Life, where she was the basis for the flighty model Simon Fly. Van Vechten also photographed her in the early 1930s. She was the subject of articles by Irvin Drutman, J. P. McEvoy, Ben Hecht, and Charlie McCarthy, and poems by Samuel Hoffenstein and Maxwell Bodenheim. In Max Ewing’s novel Going Somewhere she is the basis for the character of the sculptor Lenore Lanside, whose models are poisoned by her lethal gin.

The composer, song writer and author Vernon Duke wrote about Louise at length in his book Passport to Paris. He referred to her as “one who possessed the rare knock of raising Cain imaginatively and at all times.”(34) He remarked that she “talked in a hoarse baritone, pausing just long enough to inhale the smoke of her cigarette or gulp down her highball . . . her speech was extremely difficult to follow, as she was fond of interspersing her narrative with unintelligible mumbling. . . . This accompanied by violent grimaces and much shoulder shrugging. [She] collected people of talent-literary, theatrical, painting or musical-preferably, but not necessarily, touched by recognition and accompanying publicity. To her great credit she helped and mothered many so-called ‘struggling’ artists.”(35) Hellstrom was known to easily brush off hard feelings with “’Kiddie. Kiddie dear.’”(36)

On a Sunday morning in the mid-1920s Louise woke up to discover her house on the Maverick was on fire. White related that she “lost all her treasures and ready money . . . . Luckily, she had been too indisposed to ascend to the gallery and had sunk down to sleep near a door, for when she woke the whole house [was] burning.”(37) There is no known list of Hellstrom’s art collection.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

Wanted/$2000 Reward, 1923

Altered “Wanted” poster

rectified ready made

Andrew Dasburg (1887-1979)

Untitled (Still Life with Artist’s Portfolio and Bowl of Fruit), c. 1914-1918

The Jan T. and Marica Vilcek Collection, Promised gift to The Vilcek Foundation

• 

  Albert Gleizes (1881-1953)

Toul, 1915

Watercolor, gouache and pen ink on paper

Example of a work by Gleizes

created at Toul, France in 1915

Hellstrom had a close relationship with Marcel Duchamp, and owned his readymade “Wanted/$2000 Reward” (1923), a photocollage which consists of two photographs of Duchamp pasted on a joke "Wanted” poster (presumed destroyed).(38) The Hellströms are known to have owned Andrew Dasburg’s Cubist still life Untitled (Still Life with Artists Portfolio and Bowl of Fruit), which descended in a private collection in Woodstock and was sold by the Gerald Peters Gallery in Sante Fe, New Mexico. In 1927. Hellstrom participated in the bidding for the sale of the John Quinn art collection and acquired Albert Gleizes’ small cubistic watercolors A Byway in Toul and Sunrise, both created in the northeastern French town of Toul in 1915.(39)

Hervey White reported that Hellstrom “bought pictures along with her gin which was more than the landed gentry ever dared to do. . . . The fact that Louise bought pictures, and modern ones, endeared her to the young painters of the colony. Also they enjoyed her brutal frankness, not yet having erected pedestals of respectability for themselves, a jeer did not disturb their distant future.”(40)

Following the burning down of her home on the Maverick, Hellstrom built a modern house with surrounding gardens in the hamlet of Wittenberg just west of Woodstock and gained the nickname the “Duchess of Wittenberg.” The interior of the house (where she resided till about 1940) had red carpets, zebra-striped chairs, and an assorted group of odd pets (including jungle cats and skunks), where she held court to a hail of luminaries. Helen Walters, wife of the Maverick ceramic sculptor Carl Walters, with whom she previously lived in Portland, Oregon, remarked that Hellstrom “could be very mean and catty, but she could also be sweet . . . I remember when I first met her. . . . she looked at the dress I was wearing and said, ‘Is that a little Portland model?’ I was terrified of her. She used to give Ken-L Ration to skunks. She had a pet mama skunk and the babies.”(41) On the other hand, Hellstrom was also locally known as an excellent gardener. A writer for the Kingston Daily Freeman felt that “no one on earth can do more to make flowers behave than Louise”(42)

From the mid-1920s through the early 1930s, Louise split her time between her home in Wittenberg, and an apartment at the Brevoort Hotel, followed by a house at 10 Minetta Street in Greenwich Village. The Kingston Daily Freeman reported that “many of the elite of Woodstock . . . recall what spiffy cocktail parties Louise gave in her house up Wittenberg way. They would practically swim to her place to get a snack. The rooms upstairs were decorated handsomely, and each one had its own motif in color.”(43) The bar owner and singer Joan Alden mentioned that Hellstrom would often wear “a gown with thin straps and at some point in the evening she would draw in her breath or something and the whole thing would just drop.”(44)

Unknown Photographer

Robert Winthrop Chanler, n.d.

Chanler Family Archives, Rokeby

Luncheon in Woodstock at Home of Clemence Randolph, 1920s

Louis Bouché Papers,

Archives of American Art

Louise Hellstrom is at the far left next to artists Louis Bouché and Charles Bateman. At the far right at end of the table are writer Clemence Randolph and artist Robert Winthrop Chanler. Bouché’s wife Marian is seated to the left of Clemence Randolph.

A letter has recently surfaced written by Louise in July of 1931 to her former husband Gustaf Hellstrôm. Louise touches on several subjects, including her move to Wittenberg and recent return to painting. She reports that there “are a lot of new well-known artists and writers up [in Woodstock] – all the old ones remember you and Hervey White wants to be remembered and [Henry Lee McFee] who has finally admitted modernity enough to buy a car. . . . Carl Walters – probably the finest ceramic artist in this country . . . . has our old cottage . . . . Hervey is just the same – never changes . . . . Robert Chanler . . . died last year – he was my most devoted friend . . . “(45)

Site of Former French Restaurant

of Louise Hellstrom,

29 Millstream Road, 1968

By the late 1930s, Hellstrom had spent the considerable income she had earned designing dresses. Irving Drutman felt that by this time she was “definitely a symbol, a hangover from the prohibition, or mad era.”(46) The following decade she briefly opened a dress shop next door to The Nook on Tinker Street (the shop is now Woodstock Wine & Liquor and The Nook is Happy Life Productions), and then operated a restaurant and bar called Louise’s French Restaurant at 29 Millstream Road, located approximately 1/3 of a mile west of the intersection with 375. The building was painted fire-cracker red. Two black musicians played regularly at the bar, one on the washtub and the other on guitar. The establishment opened with a big opening night affair and did great business for a while. According to the writer and musician Tad Wise, Louise hired “Freddie Ziegler as a bartender who was a great personality. She got too tight herself and couldn’t keep track of anything. She wouldn’t know who was stealing from her. She’d get stoned, pass out, and then everybody helped themselves to booze.”(47) In the late 1960s the building was home to Jerry and Rosemary Jerominick’s Tatra Print Workshop, and the Woodstock School of Art.

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964)

Dotts Johnson, 1948

Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library

Painting by Louise Hellstrom

on wall behind Johnson.

In the 1950s, Louise became a cook for a family of two in a luxurious apartment in the East 60s in Manhattan, where she had her own room with a bath, and spent afternoons in the company of the actresses Nita Naldi and Gloria Swanson.(48) Upon resigning the job she returned to Woodstock and lived on her social security, played bridge, gave small dinner parties, read a great deal, and continued her interest in painting. A large canvas covered by a dynamic, almost turbulent, pattern of curving diagonally-oriented lines is visible in the background of a photograph by Carl Van Vechten of the actor Dot Johnson. Hellstrom also frequented the town bars where she imbibed daiquiris and enjoyed insulting people. She believed insulting people was the “the way to get them interested . . . weakened . . . on the defensive. Then they’ll argue and we’ll see if they have a brain or not.”(49)

Ralph Mosely (b. 1941)

Louise Hellstrom at Bar at S.S. Seahorse,

late 1950s

Historical Society of Woodstock

Pamela Vinton Ravenel (1983-1955)

The Irvington Inn, c. 1945

Collection of Kathy Longyear

Postcard of Another Ravenel Watercolor

of Bar with Crowd at Irvington Inn with Identifications by Bill Dixon

Collection of Kathy Longyear

Later in life Hellstrom often frequented the S. S. Seahorse on Rock City Road (now the restaurant Good Night), which was a popular bar among the artists in the colony, and had regular exhibition’s on its walls. As a teenager in the late 1950s the artist Ralph Mosely encountered the elderly Hellstrom at the bar, and created a startling painting of her in an inebriated state with a cigarette dangling from her hand. Hellstrom also appears at far right in a watercolor by Pamela Vinton Ravenel dating from about 1945 of a scene at the bar at the Irvington Inn in Woodstock (now the bar of The Pub). An image of another Ravenal watercolor appears on a postcard produced  by the inn. Bill Dixon, the bartender pictured in the work, pointed out some of the crowd in the copy of the postcard reproduced here, including Hellstrom, who is identified at lower left.

[A Portrait of Louise Hellstrom],”

Ulster County Townsman, July 26, 1961, p. 2

Grave of Louise Hellstrom,

Pedrick Friends Cemetery,

Pedricktown, New Jersey

Louise Hellstrom died in May of 1961 at the age of 79 at the Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, New York of a fibrous heart and liquid on the lungs. She was buried in the Shoemaker family plot in the Pedrick Friends Cemetery in Pedricktown, New Jersey -- her original first name, Laurrena, is written on the headstone. Hellstrom was remembered in the Ulster County Townsman as one of Woodstock’s best-known persons, and as first residing in Woodstock as a patron of the arts and “subsidizing many . . . struggling and talented artists and writers.”(50)

********************************************************

I would like to thank several people for their assistance: Kim Apolant, Librarian, Woodstock Library; Adam Ryan, Curator, Center for Photography at Woodstock; JoAnn Margolis; Deborah Heppner; Lennart Leopold; Patricia Godvin; Emily Jones, Archivist, Woodstock Artists Association and Museum; and Kathy Longyear.

(1) “Interview with Fritzi Streibel,” Striebel-Gaede Archives, Center for Photography at Woodstock, n.p. Hereafter referred to as Striebel-Gaede Archives. Much of our knowledge of Louise’s life comes from a series of articles written by the writer Clemence Randolph in the Ulster County Townsman from May through July 1961, which are cited below. According to Tad Wise, Randolph referred to Louise as “La Hellstrom.” Tad Wise, “Comprehensively Eloquent, Kiki Continues,” Woodstock Times, November 14,1991, section 2, p. 10. Randolph graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, after which she organized her own theatre group that toured Canada. Following this she met Jack Colton, author of the play Shanghai Gesture. They collaborated on writing the play Rain, which was a great success on Broadway in New York, and was made into a silent film starring Gloria Swanson and later a talkie starring the young Joan Crawford. Randolph was romantically involved with the artist Robert Winthrop Chanler, who in 1920 bought her property in Woodstock on Route 212 just outside the village, and in 1929 deeded the red barns that he had bought from the sculptor Myra Carr across the road from the Zena Mill to Randolph as a birthday present for her daughter Kiki. Following his death in 1930, Chanler left Clemmie’s two children Kiki and Donny a shared trust, interest of which supported her for life. I would like to thank Patricia Godvin, granddaughter of Clemence Randolph, for reading an earlier version of this text prior to publication, and offering comments.

(2) “Interview with Benjamin L. Webster,” Striebel-Gaede Archives, n.p. Webster, who had a long career in theatre, television and industrial design and was deeply involved with the planning and development of Woodstock, learned about the incident from reading an article about Hellstrom in the magazine New York Woman. See Irving Drutman, “Professional Horror,” New York Woman (March 10,1937), pp. 11-13.

(3) Drutman (page 11) considered Hellstrom’s histrionics to be above all else “a carefully built-up act.”

(4) Hubert Bastian Shoemaker, A Genealogical and Biographical Record of the Shoemaker Family of Gloucester and Salem Counties, 1765-1935 (Philadelphia: Hubert Bastian Shoemaker, 1935), p. 19. Information on Hellstrom’s early life was also found in Jean Gaede, “The Fantasticks!,” Striebel-Gaede Archives. Gaede’s text is followed by personal accounts of Louise drawn from interviews with Webster, Striebel, Joan Alden, and Flo Odell, as well as a typescript of Clemence Randolph’s memoir of Louise Hellstrom, which she utilized for her articles on Hellstrom in the Ulster County Townsman.

(5) Drutman, p. 11. Soon Hellstrom was moved to the chorus’ first line where she became one of the Six Little Wives.

(6) Striebel, n.p.

(7) “Music and Drama,” The Sun: Sunday Edition, Sydney, August 28, 1904, p. 2.

(8) “Farewell to the Stars,” The Evening News, Sydney, January 3, 1905, p. 8.

(9) Drutman, p. 12. It is possible that in 1910 Hellstrom also studied in Paris at the Academie Matisse (by this time Henri Matisse was no longer an instructor there). Hervey White notes her study at the school in his unpublished autobiography (p. 243), but no direct evidence of her studying at the school has been located.

(10) “About Town,” New York Daily News, May 24, 1925, p. 66.

(11) Drutman, p. 12.

(12) Ibid., p. 12.

(13) I would like to thank Lennart Leopold of the Gustaf Hellström Society in Sweden, who has been extremely helpful in providing material pertaining to the Swedish author’s life and career, the photographs of Gustaf and the article announcing Gustaf and Louise’s marriage.

(14) Letter from Louise Hellstrom to Gustaf Hellström in the Gustaf Hellström Collection, National Library of Sweden (Kungliga biblioteket), Stockholm: July 1931, filed in the category ”Letters from unidentified writers.” I would like to thank Lennart Leopold for sharing this illuminating letter.

(15) Lawrence Langer, The Magic Curtain (New York: Dutton, 1951), p. 108

(16) Clemence Randolph, “Louise,” Ulster County Townsman, July 6, 1961, p. 2.

(17) Clemence Randolph, “Louise,” Ulster County Townsman, June 22, 1961, p. 7.

(18) Ibid., p. 7.

(19) Drutman, p. 12.

(20) Ibid., p. 7. Prior to returning to Sweden, Hellström suggested to White that he give up The Plowshare. In his autobiography (p. 243), Hervey White recalled him telling him that he was drudging his “life away with it [and] not getting substantial return.’ I thought his argument good and closed the volume and started to print my last novel instead.” Hervey White, “Autobiography,” manuscript in the Papers of Hervey White, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, p. 243. A photocopy of this unpublished autobiography is the collection of the Woodstock Public Library.

(21) The date of the dissolution of the Hellströms marriage was related in an email from Lennart Leopold to the author of November 17, 2024.

(22) White, p. 266.

(23) Drutman, p. 12.

(24) Louise Jonas, “Woodstock: The Indians Thought it ‘Queer,’” Poughkeepsie Journal, March 14, 1943, p. 3A.

(25) Drutman, p. 12.

(26) Norman de Plume, “Louise Hellstrom: Her Life and Quirks,” The Hue and Cry 6 (August 31, 1928), p. 2.

(27)Ibid., p. 2.

(28) Drutman, p. 11.

(29) Tad Wise remarked on Randolph’s recollections in his article “Comprehensively Elegant Kiki Continues,” p. 11.

(30) Louise Ault, George Ault: Artist in Woodstock, The Independent Years (Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1978), p. 9.

(31) Ibid. p. 10.

(32) Ibid, p. 11.

(33) Louise Jonas, “Woodstock: The Indians Thought It Queer,” Poughkeepsie Journal, March 14, 1943, p. 3A.

(34) Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), pp. 97-98.

(35) Ibid, pp. 97-98.

(36) Clemence Randolph, “Louise Hellstrom,” Ulster County Townsman, May 25, 1961, p. 5.

(37) White, p. 268.

(38) For a reference to Duchamp’s readymade and its ownership by Hellstrom see

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/hart?bbdbid=268053685;size=100;start=1;type=bbaglist;view=bbthumbnail;xc=1. During the course of researching his article on Louise Hellstrom for New York Woman, Irving Drutman reached out to Marcel Duchamp, who provided various anecdotes about her. Their initial contact is referred to in correspondence from Brutman to Duchamp of February 27, 1963 (see

https://www.duchamparchives.org/pma/archive/component/MDR_B011_F005_001/), and from Duchamp to Brutman of March 1, 1963 (see https://www.duchamparchives.org/pma/archive/component/MDR_B011_F005_002/). Duchamp is reminded of his earlier contact with Brutman, and wonders if Brutman knows Hellstrom’s current whereabouts because she owned an amusing poster of his that he hoped to locate. In an email to the author of October 18, 2024, the scholar, art historian, curator and former art dealer Francis Nauman remarked that Hellstrom “almost certainly had an affair with Marcel Duchamp, who gave her his ‘Wanted’ poster, but it seems to have disappeared when she died.  I went to Woodstock several times after her death trying to find out what happened to her belongings.  I was told by a neighbor that . . . everything she owned was placed in a  dumpster in front of her house and thrown away.”

(39) Judith Zilcher, “The Dispersal of the John Quinn Collection,” Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 19 no. 3 (1979), p. 18. Also see Judith Zilcher, “The Nobel Buyer:” John Quinn, Patron of the Avant-Garde (Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1978), p. 193. The works are listed as number 42 and 297 in Paintings and sculptures : the renowned collection of modern and ultra-modern art formed by the late John Quinn. Sold by Order of National Bank of Commerce in New York & Maurice Léon (New York: American Art Association, 1927), pp. 25, 121.

(40) White, p. 266.

(41) “Interview with Helen Walters,” Striebel-Gaede Archives.

(42) “Gaston Bell is Writing Plays,” Kingston Daily Freeman, June 20, 1940, p. 5.

(43) Marguerite Hunter, “Woodstock,” Kingston Daily Freeman, May 14, 1940, p. 7.

(44) “Interview with Joan Alden,” Striebel-Gaede Archives.

(45) Letter of Louise Hellstrom to Gustaf Hellstrôm, July 1931.

(46) Drutman, p. 12.

(47) Wise, p. 10.

(48) Clemence Randolph, “Louise,” July 27, 1961, p. 8.

(49) Ibid., p. 8.

(50) “Louise Hellstrom Dies in Hospital,” Ulster County Townsman, May 18, 1961, p. 8.

Following Hellstrom’s death pictures by her were included in an exhibition of works by recently deceased local artists at the Woodstock Post Office. “Exhibition Held at Post Office,” August 10, 1961, otherswise unidentified newspaper article, Louise Hellstrom Files, Woodstock Artist Artists Association Archives.