Louise Hellstrom was the rural 1920s Woodstock churchgoer’s bad dream, a sight to behold. Often portrayed in local art works with a cigarette between her lips and a drink in one hand, she had a voice that could shatter the room with what her Woodstock friend Fritzi Striebel called “its old, raucous, ear-splitting vehemence ….”
Woodstocker Louise Ault, a friend of Hellstrom, wrote about her in the Poughkeepsie Journal in 1933. “From the early colony days to this, Woodstock’s Bohemian spirit has been crystallized in green-eyed, purple-shadowed, red-headed uninhibited Louise Hellstrom … vividly made up to the point of grotesqueness on gala occasions, slight of figure but dynamic, strips the shams from social intercourse, rebels against the conventions with refreshing willfulness, makes fierce denouncements eloquent with gestures and colorful as to language,” wrote Ault. “It is said that funny, fancy women tremble in fear of her tongue if they have reason to suppose she finds them displeasing. Her hauteur is fascinating.”
Artist Peggy Bacon’s caricatures convey the personality that sums up the way both the farm community and the arts community saw this brash partygoer.
Behind this flamboyant and often wild exterior, according to eminent art historian Dr. Bruce Weber, author of an excellent just-published article on Hellstrom on his website Learning Woodstock Art Colony, “was a person who was an important early supporter of the artists of the Woodstock art colony, and had immense connections with people in the arts in America and abroad.”
Again according to Fritzi Striebel, while touring to California “her spontaneous dancing at the late-night parties made her famous.”
A life in the arts
Louise Hellstrom was an early resident of the Maverick offshoot of the Byrdcliffe crafts colony. She lived first in a residence later occupied by ceramist Carl Walters and painter Philip Guston, and then in 1921 moved into the house built for Pierre Henrotte, concertmaster for the Metropolitan Opera.
Born in 1882 in New Jersey of Quaker descent, Louise could trace her ancestry in America back to the Mayflower. Her last name was a gift from an unsuccessful early marriage to a Swedish journalist, novelist and art scholar.
In 1929, Peggy Bacon did several satirical portraits of Hellstrom in pastel as well as in pen and ink. A score or so of Bacon’s pieces are in the Smithsonian national collection.
The Woodstock magazine the Hue and Cry referred to Louise as “The Tornado of Minetta Street.” The Greenwich Village locale containing Minetta Street and Minetta Lane was in the 1920s a hotbed of the arts community in America. It’s noteworthy how many of those folks came to, summered in, or moved to or near Woodstock.
What is even more remarkable is how much this exact same Greenwich Village-Woodstock combination was the hotbed of the 1960s-1970s popular music universe (even before the 1969 Bethel Festival). Woodstock historian Alf Evers liked to refer to the phenomenon as “lightning striking twice in the same place.”
The Duchess of Wittenberg
After her Maverick home burned down in the mid-1920s, Louise Hellstrom moved to a newly built modern home in the southwestern Woodstock hamlet of Wittenberg. She split her time between there and first the Brevoort Hotel on the northeast corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue in the heart of Greenwich Village and then on Minetta Street. In the 1950s, Weber’s research found, Louise became a cook for a family of two in a luxurious apartment in the East Sixties in Manhattan, where she had her own room with a bath.
Returning to Woodstock, Hellstrom completed her evolution from being The Tornado of Minetta Street to becoming The Duchess of Wittenberg. She ran a dress shop in Woodstock for a while and tried the restaurant and bar businesses. Finally, according to Bruce Weber, “She lived on her Social Security, played bridge, gave small dinner parties, read a great deal, and continued her interest in painting.”
Hellstrom died at the age of 79 at Benedictine Hospital in Kingston in May 1961 of a fibrous heart and liquid in the lungs.
Peaceful coexistence
The churchgoing farm population of Woodstock, a total of 1488 souls in 1920 and 1652 in 1930, didn’t know what to make of Louise Hellstrom and her friends. Retired SUNY New Paltz art history professor William Rhoads’s new book, A History of the Woodstock Reformed Church, Worship and Community Service in an Architectural Landmark on the Village Green, provides insights into how this small rural township strove to come to terms with an alien invasion.
Rhoads, a member of the church he writes about, refers to the observations of Clinton Clough, pastor in 1912 and 1913. Reformed Church pastors were usually the best-educated people in the farm communities in which they served, and the population looked to them for guidance in adjusting to change.
Church attendance among rural congregants was a widely expected activity – though not among many Woodstockers. The congregants of this particular church in the very center of the village parked their horse carts Sunday mornings on Old Forge Road, where water from the stream was readily available to the horses.
Clough attributed the resistance of many Woodstockers to the four churches then in town (plus the Catholic one in West Hurley) to “a suspicion that worship therein falls far short of a daily worship of nature.” No problem. He proclaimed peaceful coexistence: “Those who would may worship while … those who would not may not.”
Ascendancy and descent
The Dutch Reformed flock was subject to the church’s standards of self-reflection and social behavior. Other flocks and isolated others were not similarly constrained. Clergymen like Clough didn’t expect the same morality from the arts community as they demanded of their own congregants.
According to Rhoads, Clough said that the common altar was Woodstock: “To the mountains, the flowers, the brooks, or the sunshine, each one takes his homage.”
Later clergy, in particular pastor Harvey Todd, who served the church and the town with zeal and energy for 34 years from 1924 through 1958, campaigned for the same religion-oriented morality from all Woodstockers.
Perhaps more successful from a long-term community-building perspective were the commercial relationships between the ex-farm community and the arts-minded newcomers.
The Woodstock winter played a constructive role. It was the time when the two Woodstock populations learned to trust (and mistrust) each other as individuals, to like (and dislike) each other as individuals.
As early as 1932, Christmas on the village green became the holiday all could celebrate. It being Woodstock, there was frequent argument as to what should be permitted and not permitted at the green in front of the church.
In the past half-century, the role of the churches in the community has markedly diminished. Cari Patterson, who served in Woodstock for a decade and was the local church’s first female pastor from 2020 to this year, recently presented her unvarnished view. Even in the recent past, she wrote in Rhoads’ book, the Woodstock church “was still a respected institution, and what it had to say still held some power. But that is no longer the case.”
The Northeast part of the country, Pattison felt, was “on the frontier of a strange new world, … surrounded by a culture that doesn’t much care what the church has to say.”
Unfinished business
One of the criticisms the Rhoads book makes of the main author’s own church is the slowness that it has shown in accepting women into its decision-making circles. Women in the Dutch Reformed farm community weren’t powerless, but — organized in an auxiliary called the Lydian
Society — they were relegated to focus their church activities not on governance but on fundraising through yard sales, baked goods and missionary crocheting.
It was not until 1973 that the first women were admitted into membership in the consistory of the Woodstock Dutch Reformed church.
Not to say that women artists outside the church weren’t subject to unrelenting sexual discrimination, but they benefited from going to the same schools as the men did to learn how to do art – summer classes at the Art Students League in Woodstock from 1906 through 1922 and again from 1947 through 1979. And when they were judged to have done art well, the women got recognition not dissimilar to what the men got. Thanks in part to their pioneering efforts, the art world today is less sexually discriminatory than it was a century ago.
Initiated as a New Deal program to stimulate the economy – Eleanor Roosevelt came to Woodstock to see it — the federal National Youth Administration (NYA) built structures in Woodstock in 1939 to provide instruction to rural youth in applied arts such as woodworking, masonry, blacksmithing and pottery.
This summer’s art exhibition
The opening reception of “Making Her Mark: 50 Women Artists of the Historic Woodstock Art Colony,” will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. on Saturday, July 12, at 20 Comeau Drive (the Eames House on the right way up to the town offices) in Woodstock. Curated by Bruce Weber, the Historical Society of Woodstock exhibition will run through September 14 and will be open on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.
Making Her Mark celebrates the work of 50 women artists who were active in the historic Woodstock art colony. The paintings, drawings and prints are drawn from the permanent collection of the historical society. Twelve women artists represented in this exhibition arrived in the first two decades of the twentieth century, 24 in the 1920s and 1930s, and the remaining 14 in the 1940s through the 1970s.
Exhibition curator Weber’s exhibition catalogue features a brief essay on the subjects and biographies of all the artists. He will be giving gallery talks on the exhibition at 2 p.m. on Sunday July 20 and Saturday August 30. On Saturday, August 9 at 2 p.m. a panel discussion moderated by Deborah Heppner called “Women Speaking About Women Artists of the Historic Woodstock Art Colony,” will take place at the society.
The work of Woodstock women artists seems significant enough to have generated considerable scholarly interest. A decade ago this fall, co-curators Elizabeth Broad and Carol Davis presented a show at the Woodstock School of Art titled “Overlooked: Woodstock Women Artists.” Two years later, the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum hosted a show celebrating the centenary of women’s suffrage in New York State.’
Bruce Weber’s ever-expanding website website Learning Woodstock Art Colony contains the most complete record currently available of the work of Woodstock women artists.
Join the family! 
