Helen Gerardia’s Nocturne of a Rural Church
Helen Gerardia’s nocturne of a rural church represents an edifice inherited from an earlier time rendered with the vigor of the modern age. An angular steeple thrusts skyward, paired against a mountainous terrain in the distance just beneath a crescent moon and a single star. Below, the architectural structures that ground the composition are shown from multiple angles simultaneously—an artistic convention associated with early Cubism. Shading and patterning the irregular shapes formed by converging lines, the artist employed her signature counterchange method. Dynamic in both form and content, Gerardia’s fractured landscape conjures the tensions and excitement inherent within the merging of tradition and modernity.
Gerardia immigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine (known at the time of her birth as Ekaterinoslav, Russia), to the United States as a child, initially pursuing a career as a first-grade teacher in the New York public school system. She began her formal art training in 1947 at the Art Students League of New York and later at the Brooklyn Museum. While studying under the celebrated abstractionist Hans Hofmann, Gerardia developed her prismatic technique of fragmenting recognizable objects using active lines and contrasting colors.
Saint Vincent was first introduced to Gerardia’s work in September 1958 when the College hosted a traveling two-person exhibition of lithographs, paintings, and drawings created on behalf of Gerardia and Eliza Erlanger (1889-1975). Over the course of her four-decade career, Gerardia’s hard-edged abstractions have been exhibited in all fifty states and in over a dozen countries.
Gerardia's papers are now preserved at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
Helen Gerardia American, born in Ekaterinoslav, Russia (now Dnipro, Ukraine), 1903–1988 Country Church, 1956 Lithograph 17 7/8 × 14 in. inches Artist’s Proof Saint Vincent College Collection Gift of Samuel Sumner Goldberg
