Art-full lives: Show features art of four generations of women in one Lynchburg family

By Susan Pugh

Published: August 21, 2008

Helen McGehee, with the perfect posture of the dancer that she is and was, leads the way through the first-floor rooms of the red-brick house on Rivermont.

In the dining room stand life-size forged iron sculptures, many of people she has known. Miniature portraits of family and friends and carved marble heads grace the tops of chests and tables. Paintings and pictures in various media hang three, four or more to a wall.

“I refuse to move from here. I want to live with this,” McGehee says, her arm making a sweeping gesture around the living room.

“You grow up with all these things, and you love it,” she says.

From what the Lynchburg native says, there was art everywhere in the white clapboard house behind a hedge on Link Road where she grew up. In those days between world wars, most of it had been made by four generations of women in her family: herself, her mother, Helen Gray Mahood McGehee (1892 to 1980); her grandmother, Sallie Lee Blount Mahood (1864 to 1953); and her great-grandmother, Julia Anne Morrison Blount (1831 to 1877).

Together, she, her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother form a line of artists whose work is featured in an exhibition that opened Sunday at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. The show, “A Creative Dynasty: Four Generations of Virginia Women,” includes paintings, portraits, photographs, sculpture and film clips.

McGehee drew, too. But at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she fell in love with dance. After graduation, she moved to New York where she joined the Martha Graham Dance Co., eventually becoming the lead dancer and moving into roles originated by and for Martha Graham.

After 29 years with Martha Graham, McGehee formed her own company. And, always, she taught; she was one of the founding instructors at the dance division of the Julliard School.

McGehee’s great-grandmother, Julia Blount, made a living by her art. Around the time of the Civil War, her husband was shot accidentally, so she painted to support her family.

McGehee’s grandmother, Sallie Mahood, studied at the Corcoran Museum School in Washington, D.C., and, later after her children were grown, in Paris. She painted some of Lynchburg’s then-most notable citizens, such as Dr. Edward Christian Glass and George Morgan Jones. And, she helped found the Lynchburg Art Club. McGehee’s mother, for whom she was named, became an accomplished miniaturist. She, like her daughter, had other artistic interests, and was an orchestra musician, playing violin and viola.

“My favorite items in this exhibition are the portraits that family members painted of each other,” says Andrew Gladwell, the exhibition’s designer. Gladwell’s initial intent was to do a show about McGehee’s dance career until she told him about the artistic bent of the women in her family and asked if he’d be interested in their work as well.

The show also includes portraits of her as a dancer done by her husband, the late Umana.

Although the Colombian native had three other names — in sum, Rafael Alphonso Umana Mendez — he was simply called Umana. Works by the painter, sculptor and artist are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and other museums and collections.

It is mostly Umana’s art that McGehee lives with now, a reminder of their years together. He died in 1994, about 15 years after they moved to Lynchburg. They met when he walked her home from a dinner party in New York, where she and Umana lived for 37 years.

She kept her ties to Lynchburg and her beloved alma mater. In later years, she would travel weekly to Lynchburg — or send another professional dancer from her company — to teach classes at R-MWC. It was her wish that students at R-MWC have the best, that they learn the modern dance technique pioneered by Martha Graham from professionals.

At 87, McGehee remains a dancer. Five days a week, she dances for about an hour in a studio she created on the top floor of her home.

At 5 feet in height and maybe 100 pounds, she retains a dancer’s physique. She wears her silver hair swept back in a bun, and has clear blue eyes and skin that is remarkably smooth after nearly nine decades.

She is hard of hearing, though, so much so that even with hearing aids she cannot pick up all of the elements of the music she so loves, such as Philip Glass. The hearing loss actually stems from Meniere’s disease, which may have nothing to do with age since theories about its cause include viral infection and noise pollution.

McGehee still has art to see everywhere she looks.

“What an advantage it is to grow up surrounded by it and to be able to take it for granted,” she says, “and later, to grow up and appreciate it.”

Living in an art-infused environment “gave me an opportunity to develop a taste for beauty, and the ability to see it in unexpected places.”