Helmreich, Anne

(Anne L. Helmreich)

PERSONAL:

Education: Attended Institute of European Studies, 1983-84; Dickinson College, B.A., 1985; University of Pittsburgh, M.A., 1989; Northwestern University, Ph.D., 1994.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Art History and Art, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44106-7110. E-mail—anne.helmreich@case.edu.

CAREER:

University of Pittsburgh Art Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA, assistant director, 1988-89; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, intern, 1990-91; Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, research assistant, 1993-96; Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, associate professor of art history, 1996-2003; Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, associate professor of art history, 2004—.

MEMBER:

College Art Association, Association of Historians of Nineteenth Century Art, Historians of British Art, Association of Art Historians, Midwest Victorian Studies Association, Midwest Art History Organization.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Graham Foundation fellow, 1997; Dumbarton Oaks fellow, 1998; Huntington Library fellow, 1999; Mortar Board Preferred Professor, 2000; Paul Mellon Centre fellow, 2001; Yale Center for British Art fellow, 2002; Dean's Excellence in Teaching Award nomination, 2002; National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 2003; Harry Ransom Center fellow, 2003-04; Best Book on Post-1800 Topic, Historians of British Art, 2004; American Philosophical Society fellow.

WRITINGS:

(With Malcolm Warner and Charles Brock) The Victorians: British Painting, 1837-1901, National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), 1996.

The English Garden and National Identity: The Competing Styles of Garden Design, 1870-1914, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to books, including Victorian Urban Settings, Garland Press (New York, NY), 1996; Nature and Ideology: Natural Gardens in the 20th Century, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Washington, DC), 1997; Gendering the Landscape, Manchester University Press (Manchester, England), 2000; John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2001; Art, Nation, and Gender: Ethnic Landscapes, Myths, and Mother-Figures, Ashgate Press (Burlington, VT), 2003; and Art, Culture and National Identity in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2003. Contributor to Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists and Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era.

Contributor to periodicals, including Victorian Studies, Graphic Arts Council Newsletter, British Art Journal, Frederick Watson Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Journal of Garden History, and Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

SIDELIGHTS:

Anne Helmreich, a graduate of Dickinson College, also attended the Institute of European Studies. She later earned an M.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Helmreich has served as assistant director at the University of Pittsburgh Art Gallery, worked as an intern at the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as an associate professor at Texas Christian University. Since 2004 she has been an associate professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Her primary research area is England's Victorian era. Helmreich has been awarded fellowships from the Yale Center for British Art, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Historians of British Art, and the American Philosophical Society. With Malcolm Warner and Charles Brock, Helmreich wrote The Victorians: British Painting, 1837-1901. She has also written The English Garden and National Identity: The Competing Styles of Garden Design, 1870-1914.

The Victorians is a companion catalog for an exhibition that was held at the National Gallery of Art in 1997. It documents the paintings displayed, gives biographical summaries of the artists involved, and explains the textual sources which served as inspiration for the paintings. "To their credit," wrote James A. Butler in Arthuriana, "the organizers opted not for ‘representative examples’ nor for ‘diversity,’ choosing instead the best sixty-eight paintings they could assemble." Ted Loos in the New York Times also praised this approach: "The paintings were selected for their quality rather than for how accurately they represent the period, and this admirable strategy has yielded some lesser-known gems." Leslie Williams in Victorian Studies called Helmreich, Warner, and Brock "very thorough and professional scholars," adding that Helmreich "does balance nicely on the tightrope between social history and art when writing about Hubert van Herkomer and the Social Realists." Butler concluded: "This beautifully produced catalogue is a model of its kind."

In The English Garden and National Identity, Helmreich examines how garden design in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to be seen as something distinctly English. Helmreich compares and contrasts the competing styles in garden design of the time. She also documents how English artists and writers portrayed these gardens and helped to transform formal gardens into something identified with the English national character. As she states in the introduction: "During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and opening decades of the twentieth century, fiery debates about styles and forms of English gardens intersected with notions of national identity. The leading styles of garden design sought validity through recourse to the label English, and the garden was adopted as a symbol of national identity. This study is grounded in the premise that gardenscapes do not communicate universal values irrespective of time or place, but that each culture endows garden forms with particular sets of meanings and, within that culture, those meanings, and therefore vehicles that express them, are contested and not fixed." "This is a book about garden history, by an art historian, revolving around a topic (national identity) formerly the province of sociologists, currently the obsession of mainstream historians," Peter Mandler stated on H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online: "Such a book illustrates the typical multidisciplinary range and ambition of cultural history nowadays—much to be celebrated." "This study …," John Dixon Hunt wrote in Albion, "should become a standard narrative of this particular chapter in landscape architectural history."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Albion, winter, 2004, John Dixon Hunt, review of The English Garden and National Identity: The Competing Styles of Garden Design, 1870-1914, p. 695.

Art Bulletin, December, 1998, Susan P. Casteras, review of The Victorians: British Painting, 1837-1901.

Arthuriana, Volume 8, issue 3, 1998, James A. Butler, review of The Victorians.

New York Times, May 4, 1997, Ted Loos, review of The Victorians.

Victorian Studies, spring, 1998, Leslie Williams, review of The Victorians, p. 514.

ONLINE

Case Western Reserve University Web site,http://www.case.edu/ (May 1, 2008), faculty profile.

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online,http://www.h-net.org/ (April, 2004), Peter Mandler, review of The English Garden and National Identity.