Helene Herzbrun

Her mother was Lillian Smith Eichenbaum (born about 1891, died 1969), a housewife and officer of the South Shore Women's Club.

She had no brothers or sisters.

A transcription of her birth certificate gives her name as Helen Ruth Eichenbaum.

After graduating from Hirsch High School in Chicago, she briefly attended Beloit College and subsequently the University of Chicago where she studied art and from which she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.

She also took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her father was Edward Eichenbaum (1894–1982), an architect known for designing 1920s movie palaces and for his skill at dramatic readings.

Helene Herzbrun (1921–1984) was an American artist who lived and worked within the art community in Washington, D.C. A student and friend of Jack Tworkov, she was a second-generation abstract expressionist who developed a personal style that set her apart from the Color School movement of her time.

She was known for abstract landscapes having bold colors and employing gestural brushwork.

She was also said to possess an ability to create the illusion of depth without employing graphical perspective.

As well as painting, Herzbrun enjoyed a long career gallery administrator and professor of art at American University.

Herzbrun was born in Chicago on October 5, 1921.

Her birth name was recorded as Helen Eichenbaum.

In the late 1940s she worked as an advertising copy writer and designer.

In 1941 Herzbrun, then known as Helene Eichenbaum, was an artist and member of the Ida Noyes Council at the University of Chicago, an organization that staged the university's annual student art show.

In 1942 she married a fellow student, Robert James McKinsey, in a chapel on campus at the university of Chicago.

He was then studying for a law degree.

He later earned his living as a lawyer and raced sports cars as an avocation.

Gates and Summerford were year-round instructors at the school while Tworkov taught there during the summer months between 1948 and 1951.

In the early 1950s, now living in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, she studied at American University under Jack Tworkov, Robert Gates, and Joe Summerford, all of whom became colleagues and friends during her subsequent career.

In 1952, during the last year of her studies at American University, Herzbrun participated in a group a group exhibition at the Whyte Gallery in Washington.

The gallery's owner assembled the show by soliciting recommendations from local newspaper art critics.

At the time a critic for The Washington Post wrote that Herzbrun's painting, "Andante," was a well-composed abstraction.

Another critic said she showed "unusual competence and understanding of a difficult medium."

In 1953 she was the only Washingtonian to have work included in the 23rd Corcoran Biennial held that year.

Between 1953 and 1958 Herzbrun managed American University's Watkins Gallery Thereafter she joined the art faculty at the university, beginning a career that lasted until her death in 1984.

In 1954 she showed a small group of paintings in a suburban movie theater, an exhibition that was notable only in the review it drew from a local critic who called Herzbrun an outstanding artist.

Two years later she was featured in a two-artist exhibition at the Watkins Gallery.

In 1957 Herzbrun helped found an artists' cooperative called the Jefferson Place Gallery.

She and a fellow student at American University originally came up with the idea for what became the first gallery in Washington to be collectively owned and run by local artists.

Eight others joined with them, all of them abstract artists.

At the time, Herzbrun wrote Tworkov that the venture was an "honorable" place to exhibit: a gallery run by artists among the city's bookshops, espresso cafés, and jewelry stores.

In 1958 she was given a solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York.

In the summer of 1961 she divorced McKinsey and that fall married Philip Herzbrun, an English professor at Georgetown University.

Herzbrun wrote her friend Tworkov that when she provoked the divorce, McKinsey was nice about it and there were few recriminations.

The ceremony, which took place in Moorefield, West Virginia, drew attention as the first civil ceremony ever performed in that state.

Although Helen sometimes appeared in print as Herzbrun's given name, Helene was more common.

During her first marriage she was called Helene McKinsey.

During the second one she was called either Helene Herzbrun or Helene McKinsey Herzbrun.

Herzbrun participated in group and solo exhibitions in the gallery from the time it opened until 1974 when it closed.

If she had a middle name, it was either Ruth, as shown on the transcribed birth certificate, or Marie, as given in a legal notice from her estate in 1983 and on the West Virginia wedding registry.