Rosy’s Helix (State II)
June Wayne, Burning Helix Series
25 1/2 x 39 1/2 in. (64,8 x 100,3 cm)
Lithograph printed by Serge Lozingot on Rives with Tamarind watermark.
Two editions of 30.
1970
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Rubicon Gallery, 1977; Cypress College Fine Arts Gallery, 1977; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 1973; Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer, 1972; Phone Associates and Grunwald Foundation, 1970-1.
COLLECTIONS
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Brodsky Center, Grunwald Center.
COMMENTS
“The title ‘Rosy’s Helix’ refers to Rosalind Franklin (see last picture), the crystallographer whose remarkable X-ray diffraction film proved the double helical structure of the DNA molecule. Her work, mostly ignored by other scientists on the team at Cambridge (James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins), enabled them to receive the Nobel Prize, which she would had shared had she not died very young.”
June Wayne (1918-2011) made “Rosy’s Helix” as a tribute to Rosalind Franklin “because I read the Watson book, and was deeply offended by his sexist references to her. Five years later, when I read Anne Sayre's ‘Rosalind Franklin and DNA’ (New York, 1975), I discovered that she hated being called Rosy. The lithos were already signed and I couldn’t undo the offense I committed while intending to praise her…
I derived the shapes from diagrams in Scientific American, as well as from a paper model of DNA published by a medical supply company. I pored over the data looking for meaning, without learning so much that I would, in effect, be making a medical illustration. There had to be an aesthetic beyond the data.” (from “June Wayne—The Art of Everything” by Robert P. Conway).
