Biographical/Historical Information

Hans Heller was born in Vienna on August 3, 1896, the son of Gustav Heller and his wife Mathilde (née Kreidl). In 1891, Gustav Heller and his brother Wilhelm had founded a candy factory in Vienna, “Gustav & Wilhelm Heller”. After graduating from high school, Hans was enlisted as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army and served during World War I on the Italian front. In 1919 he married Margarete (Gretl) Steiner, and in 1920, Hans and Gretl's son Peter was born. After studying economics and political theory at the University of Vienna, Hans became a junior partner in the family’s candy business. In 1934, Hans and Gretl had divorced, and Hans married his second wife, Inge.

In 1938, Hans made a deal to sell the candy factory. He sent his son Peter to live in England. He traveled to England via Switzerland, and his wife Inge followed later. In England, Hans contacted an English candy company in Liverpool, Barker & Dobson, on whose premises he started a new Heller candy factory in partnership with a cousin. When his son Peter was interned as an enemy alien and sent to Canada, Hans immigrated to the United States in 1940, while on a business trip for Barker & Dobson. After some difficulties finding suitable investors, Hans established a candy business called Heller Candy Company, Inc. During the early years of the Second World War, Hans and Inge separated, and in 1946, he married his third wife, the artist Helen Ek, with whom he had a son, Marc. He established yet another candy factory in Paterson, New Jersey and started to go by the name John instead of Hans.

Over the next few years, Helen Heller gained prominence as a sculptor, and John’s Heller Candy Company in New York flourished. John Heller also became involved in painting landscapes: in 1974, he and Helen had a joint exhibition of their work at a gallery in Soho, New York. Helen, who had fought cancer for years, died shortly before the opening of their exhibition. John had a difficult time adjusting to life without Helen, before getting married to the anesthesiologist Edith Kepes. He remained president of Heller Candy Company until his retirement in 1981. He wrote several memoirs and accounts of his life, and he died in 1987.

Helen Heller (1919-1974) was born as Helen Olive Ek in Pearl River, NY, the fourth child of Swedish immigrants who came to America in the early 1900s. Helen married Hans Heller in 1946. She studied photography, dance, and sculpture, often combining the disciplines in her creative efforts. She studied sculpture in the United States and at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. The subjects of her art works included portrait busts of emigre colleagues and friends, modern dancers, Austrian famers, mothers with their children, and victims of the Vietnam War. Heller exhibited sculpture and dance photography in several shows in New York City and in West Chester, NY. She also published two children's books and taught interpretive dance to poor and underserved children at the Ossining Children’s Center. Her art and life reflected her commitment to multiculturalism, racial equality, acceptance of people with different sexual preferences, early feminism, and anti-war imagery. She died of cancer in 1974. Helen Ek Heller is not the same artist as Helen West Heller. For more information about the artist: helenekheller.com

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Citation

Heller, Helen: Bust of Hans Heller and his son, Marc, Leo Baeck Institute, 2019.25.