Every year at summer’s end the famed 369th Infantry closed out the National Guard training camp at Camp Smith, their ceremonial departure from the West 143rd Street armory in Harlem for their two-weeks in Upstate Peekskill bringing out Harlemites in the thousands to see them off. Mothers, wives, and sweethearts lavished fond good-byes upon their men—in 1935 the Guardsmen numbered more than 1,100. The great, boisterous display of community and patriotism regularly drew photographers for the photo pages of the Daily News. The 369th was the pride of Harlem—the pride of all New York. Their annual encampment always drew tens of thousands to the closing Visitor’s Day at Camp Smith, when the Governor bestowed honors upon the legendary Black regiment. [1] The company had an illustrious history as fighting men. A regiment of Black infantrymen had been formed in Harlem in 1917. Constituted as the 369th, it was designated a combat unit and was among the first sent to France. Assigned by General John J. Pershing to French divisions, the troops fought in the deadliest campaigns of the Great War. It was the Germans who dubbed them “Hellfighters.” The French awarded them the

Croix de Guerre. [2]

It is not hard to see why a painter might have been attracted to the rousing parade of the proud Harlem Hellfighters. But Helen Wessells took a point of view on her subject that is unconventional among illustrators of such military displays and that owes much, it seems fair to say, to her sex. Wessells has focused not on the troops but on the women on the sidelines—the mothers, wives, sweethearts, and daughters, and the joy and pride and affection on their faces and in their spirited embrace of their men.

This work provides evidence of what Wessells learned at New York’s Art Students League under her teachers Kenneth Hayes Miller and Thomas Hart Benton: a command of old master painting techniques, like tempera, and a focus, as in Miller’s art, on New York street life, especially on the milieu of women. Wessells was Miller’s assistant at the Art Students League in 1925 and 1926, and she participated, too, in Benton’s class as a scholarship recipient, both distinctions that are indications of the promise that the school’s luminaries saw in her. [3]

Yet, this is a rare extant painting by Wessells. The question is, why? In 1924 she married a fellow student of Miller, Lynn Fausett, who went on to be president of the League from 1932 to 1936. Fausett was a muralist, the studio assistant to the renowned Art Deco designer Hildreth Meière, and possibly Wessells’s career was overwhelmed by her husband’s—they divorced in 1936. [4] Moreover, her choice to absent herself from Manhattan for Westchester County, where she lived her entire life, limited her associations with the city’s art elite, though reportedly she had friendships with Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop, whose dusky paintings of the city’s street life this tempera recalls. [5] She had but a brief moment on the New York art scene, exhibiting at the Whitney Studio Club in 1926 and 1927, and occasionally in the 1930s at the Art Students League, at the

non-profit G. R. D. Studio, and at Midtown Galleries, where she was represented. [6] Her obituary tells us that Wessells developed a strong local reputation in her hometown of Mamaroneck, New York, even as she supported herself in various occupations outside of art. She was president of the Mamaroneck Artist Guild and a director of the New Rochelle Art Association. [7]

— Patricia Junker

[1] See, for example, “25,000 Watch Review at Camp by Lehman: Governor Is Guest of Harlem Guard Regiment at Record Turnout of Visitors,” The New York Times, September 14, 1936, 2.

[2] See “The Harlem Hellfighters: The Full Story,” military.com/history/harlem-hellfighters-full-story.

[3] The only extensive research done on Wessells to date is that of art historian Tom Parker, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, who has generously shared with me his extensive notes.

[4] See “Lynn Fausett,” an informative piece on the artist published at the International Hildreth Meière Association, hildrethmeière.org/lynn-fausett.

[5] Fausett and Wessells collaborated on a copy of Emanuel Leutze’s group portrait of the signers of the Alaska Treaty for the Alaska Historical Library and Museum, Juneau, photograph in Frick Art Research Library photo archive.

[6] The Annual and Biennial Exhibition Record of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1918–1989 (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1991), 415. For a review of G. R. D. Studio show which calls out Wessells’ submission; see Ruth Green Harrah, “Further News of the Week,” The New York Times, March 8, 1931, 118. Edwin Alden Jewell, “Art in Review,” The New York Times, January 14, 1933, 11; and “A Reviewer’s Busy Week: In the Local Galleries,” The New York Times, December 16, 1934, X8. Notes on Wessells at the Art Students League; see “A Reviewer’s Notebook: Among New Exhibitions,” The New York Times, November 1, 1936, X9. Wessells participated in an unusual group show of two dozen women artists at Contemporary Arts Gallery wherein the exhibitors, all wives of artists, were identified, for shock value, by their married names; see Edwin Alden Jewell, “Wives Without Husbands,” The New York Times, September 24, 1933, XX6.

7. “Helen Wessells,” obit., in Daily Item (Port Chester, N.Y.), December 7, 1985, 4. The 1940 U.S. Federal Census records Wessells living with her parents in Rye, New York, and her occupation as “sales clerk,” having no other sources of income; and the 1950 census lists Helen Fausett Richmond now as a newspaper advertising salesperson in Mamaroneck; see 1940 and 1950 United States Federal Census, ancestry.com. Yet, her death certificate identifies Wessells as “artist,” certificate of death, 11-30-1985, Seattle, State of Washington, U.S. Death Records, 1907–2017, ancestry.com.