HELEN BREGER, a Californian artist known for her prints and drawings, was also a teacher for many years at the California College of Arts. She was born in Vienna, Austria, and was studying art at the Weiner Gymnasium and Kunstgewerbe Schule when she and her family were forced to flee to Trinidad to escape the Nazis. There she met her husband, an artist as well. Together they moved to New York City in 1945 where she continued her art education at the Arts Student League. In 1950, Breger and her family moved to California where she studied printmaking at San Francisco State University and San Francisco Art Institute. She completed her MFA degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1970.

While pursuing her art education, Breger worked as an illustrator and designer. In her words, "I was wearing two hats. I was a fine artist exhibiting in galleries, and I was an illustrator/designer who did fashion advertising primarily for Joseph Magnin. Ads were very good then. They were full page, attention-getting and very dramatic. There were no photographs.

Her teaching career began at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1959 where she taught drawing and was a tenured professor until 1987, She also taught at other art schools in the bay area. At the University of California, Berkeley, in the Environmental Design Department she developed a course for freshmen in sketching and visual communication. She taught drawing and design at San Francisco Art Institute, printmaking at Lone Mountain College in San Francisco and Sonoma State University. And she taught parttime at the Santa Rosa Junior College.

Breger's work is varied — from watercolors, drawings, monotypes to sculpture. Recently she has studied bronze casting in Italy. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibits, private collections and some museum collections. Her website address is: http://home.earthlink.net/~hbreger/About.html.

With respect to the present drawings, in the fifties and early sixties, Helen worked for the San Francisco Chronicle as an artist doing all kinds of illustrations. She says that her favorite assignments were for the book page which was edited by Hogan, and that her drawings were to accompany book reviews, interviews with authors and poets in the news, and other literary events, such as occurred at the SF State College Poetry Center.