Winograd, Helen (1910-2010)

Born in New York City, Winograd’s parents Sigmund and Sadie Winograd both were immigrants—from Poland and Russia, respectively. Their daughter seems to have been born an artist. She was first recognized at the age of 10, winning a gold medal in the Wanamaker competition for an oil painting of a New York City street scene. Winograd attended the Art Students League of New York, where she was taught by George Bridgman and Guy Pène du Bois. She pursued further education at the National Academy of Design and City College of New York after graduation, becoming an art teacher in the New York City Public Schools. During the 1930s Winograd worked in the WPA Easel division and, throughout World War II, in the USO’s Hospital Sketching Program: she drew portraits of wounded soldiers recovering in military hospitals. In 1951 Winograd married physicist Felix E. Geigner, who had worked on the Manhattan Project and would go on to research for NASA's Mercury and Apollo projects. Winograd later earned her BFA and MFA from the George Washington University. According to her family she spent the last 25 years of her life “chang[ing] the paradigm of aging” by challenging the stereotype of the elderly’s inability to be active in different forms. Winograd died peacefully in her sleep at the age of one hundred.

Source Consulted: “Helen Winograd Geiger,” Ancestry.com. U.S. Cemetery and Funeral Home Collection [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2011. 

Works in the New Deal Collection at GVCA by Helen Winograd:

Featured
Flowers and Fruits
Flowers and Fruits

Winograd uses a post-impressionist framework to depict household objects and the geometry of their surrounding space. Shapes are disrupted by vertical lines (like the pears and pitchers) or become radically abstracted (like green leaves as diagonals). The painting’s vivid colors and casual domesticity keep it from appearing clinical; rather, like the title of a magazine partially visible at lower left, it manifests the “Art” of everyday vision.

Mexican Bric-a-Brac
Mexican Bric-a-Brac

The range of bric-a-brac depicted here is quite broad: a blue glass bottle, a painted ceramic plate, a napkin and cloth, a pair of blue shoes, a flower, a magazine, and what appears to be an avocado. Attempting to chart an underlying symbolism, in the manner of traditional still lifes, is perhaps less important than its Mexican location. Assembled with seeming informality, each object has an American counterpart that would be less unfamiliar.

Mexican Still Life
Mexican Still Life

We look at what appears to be a table, many different items rest on its surface. Towards the bottom right corner there is half of a block of cheese that is hidden through the strokes of the table. Moving further up into the middle ground, there is a pear standing on a blue piece of cloth and towards it right side there is clay pot resting on a red piece of cloth with strips. The pot has a dove resting on an olive branch. Behind these two objects, there is an orange hidden behind the pear and a flower pot with numerous Canna Lilies. The plant seems fatigued by the lack of space in the frame. Most of the objects presented in this piece are juxtaposed by its surrounding as these natural objects are constrained by their surroundings.

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