Helen Cooper

Helen Cooper is the Holcombe T. Green Curator Emeritus of American Painting and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery. During her thirty-nine-year tenure at the Gallery, she demonstrated an impressive range and depth of knowledge of American art history. The remarkable scope of Ms. Cooper’s expertise, from colonial portraiture to modern American painting, helped form what is now considered one of the preeminent museum collections of American art in the country.

During her term as curator, Ms. Cooper enriched many areas of the collection and also moved it in new directions. She added selectively to the nineteenth-century holdings, among them landscapes by Thomas Cole, Jasper F. Cropsey, Sanford Gifford, George Inness, John Frederick Kensett, and Fitz Henry Lane, and still lifes by Joseph Decker and John F. Francis. In an underrepresented area of the collection—folk art—undisputed masterpieces were acquired, including John Brewster’s portrait of Comfort Starr Mygatt and his daughter, and Ammi Phillips’s portraits of the Wilbur Sherman family. The area of greatest growth during her term was in modernist paintings and sculpture of the first half of the twentieth century, with acquisitions of exceptional works by Thomas Hart Benton, Oscar Bluemner, Alexander Calder, Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, Henry Koerner, Walt Kuhn, Gerald Murphy, George L. K. Morris, and Charles Sheeler, among others.

In addition to growing the American art collection in significant ways, Ms. Cooper organized many important exhibitions that became landmarks in the field, including: John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter (1982), Winslow Homer: Watercolors (1986), Childe Hassam: An Island Garden Revisited (1990), Eva Hesse: A Retrospective (1992), and Thomas Eakins: The Rowing Pictures (1996), all of which were accompanied by important scholarly publications.

Ms. Cooper received her B.A. from Syracuse University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. She is the recipient of many outstanding honors, among them the Smithsonian Institution’s Award  for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art. In 2002 she was appointed by President Bush to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. 

Helen Cooper is the first museum curator at Yale to receive emeritus status.