Upon his death, Knute Heldner was remembered as a member of the “old guard” of local artists, “a fast-vanishing band that worked, and played; that obtained glamor from and cast glamor on the French Quarter.” Having adopted New Orleans as his seasonal home nearly thirty years earlier, the genial Swede was a popular figure in the city’s art circles, known for his charming, if eccentric, appearance: blond-bearded, wearing red velveteen trousers, a blue shirt, and carrying a cane to look “jaunty,” rather than out of necessity.
Sven August Knute Heldner was born in Verderslöv, in the southern province of Småland, Sweden, where he grew up on a small farm. He was educated at the Karlskrona Technical School and the National Royal Academy in Stockholm. At the age of twelve, he became a naval cadet and served in the North Sea. He eventually abandoned the military, however, and emigrated to America in 1902. After arriving in Boston, he made his way to Wyoming and then Minnesota, working various jobs—sheepherder, Northwoods guide, lumber camp cook, and cobbler. Heldner later noted that “as a general rule, all artists are poor sometime in their career, but I can safely say that I was poorer than most of them when I first reached the States.” He studied art at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design), the Art Institute of Chicago, and ultimately at the Art Students League in New York. His first entries in a juried exhibition—the 1915 Minnesota State Fair—resulted in honors for two paintings.
Heldner became a teacher at the Rachel McFadden Art Studio in Duluth, and it was there that he met his future wife, Colette Pope, a student twenty-five years his junior. They eloped in 1923 and spent their honeymoon in New Orleans, which they made their seasonal home for the remainder of their lives. The Heldners immersed themselves in the bohemian cultural community during their winter residencies, and Knute was a member of the Southern States Art League and the all-male New Orleans Art League. Summers were spent in Duluth. In 1926, he had a one-artist exhibition at the Isaac Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art). Three years later, Heldner was awarded first place at the Chicago Art Show; he combined those winnings with grant funds from the City of Duluth to underwrite a European sojourn, beginning in 1929 and lasting until 1932. The Heldners spent time in Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Paris, where Knute’s studio was located next to Pablo Picasso’s. French art critics described Heldner’s paintings as “savage grandeur.” Knute acknowledged the forthright quality of his work, saying “the pictures are not pretty. I have painted to express something inside. Something must be sacrificed, either the expression from within or the incidentals from without, and I chose to sacrifice the incidentals.”
During the Depression, Heldner completed a series of fifty drypoint etchings depicting the architecture and people of the French Quarter, from civic leaders to indigent individuals. As an employee of the Federal Art Project, he helped research and collect numerous documents on Louisiana artists which resulted in a fifteen-volume fine arts and design encyclopedia, a project supervised by Ellsworth Woodward. He also executed three murals about agrarian life in the South —The Cotton Industry, The Sugar Industry, and The Turpentine Gatherers—which are housed at the Louisiana State University Art Museum. He continued to paint dreamy, colorful bayou landscapes enriched with impasto, as well as memorable “toil and soil” scenes and religious subjects, reflections of his deep Christian faith. Over the course of his career, Heldner’s paintings were included in regional and national exhibitions and regularly singled out for particular praise. An accomplished woodcarver, he was also an author of several unpublished plays and short stories, as well as art criticism.
Heldner had little aptitude for business and, as a result, was often in financial straits. He admitted this shortcoming, but insisted that “it is the intrinsic value, the art quality I strive for. If I get money after that, OK.” Following a year of declining health and the breakdown of his marriage to Colette, Knute Heldner died in New Orleans. His work is held by a number of American museums—including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art—as well European institutions.