John Heliker, who died this Spring in his nineties, had his first show at Kraushaar Galleries in 1945. His last, “A State of Seeing,”[1] was the gallery’s first devoted exclusively to the artist’s drawings. While Heliker was of the same generation as de Kooning and Pollock, and formed close friendships with Philip Guston and Walker Evans, he was also, as Jed Perl notes in his catalogue essay, “not an easy artist to place.” Even so, the thirty-eight drawings on view at Kraushaar comprise a brew wafting with the scents of early eighteenth-century French influences mixed with a particularly mid-twentieth century American expressivity. His Don Giovanni, Two Figures has the on-the-spot immediacy of a Watteau sketch though without the older artist’s solidity and precisely rendered details; Heliker drew only the figures, providing no background and thus no context, nor has he included facial features. Ronda, oppositely, couples a craggy, romantic landscape with an aqueduct or railroad bridge to form a distinctly neoclassical vista.
Aside from the one drawing of actors, the works are portioned almost equally among interiors, still lifes, landscapes, and portraits. When he used pencil, Heliker pressed lightly, resulting in a jumpy and ebullient line. In charcoal, his line is fuzzier and darker, describing forms rather than particulars. Heliker seems to have been afflicted with deliquescent perceptions, which he then tried to fix on paper; the drawings have an evanescent quality, like tomb rubbings made on extremely worn stone. The title Vase of Flowers with