Helen Friend Langlais, 1929–2010

Helen Friend was born in Skowhegan, Maine, the daughter of long-serving state representative and senator, Francis H. Friend. She earned a degree in psychology from the University of Maine, and a graduate degree in music from Ohio University.

While visiting New York in 1952, she met Bernard Langlais through a mutual friend. They entered Langlais’s unheated loft through the fire escape. “I knew when she walked in the window, she was the one,” he said of the encounter. By the time Langlais left for Norway in 1954, he and Helen had been secretly living together. She traveled to Oslo a month later, and they were married in January 1955. “I thought very seriously about the future,” she said. “I thought it would be an interesting life…We had our health and education; I knew we could get along somehow.”

Helen worked full time to provide the couple with a consistent income, forfeiting her own professional prospects as a classical singer for a more reliable career in elementary education. When they made their permanent move to Cushing in 1966, she secured a teaching job at the Cushing Community School, a position she held until her retirement in the 1990s.

Less than a year after Bernard’s death, Helen was in a near-fatal car accident. Nearly unconscious in her overturned vehicle, her thoughts turned to Blackie. “If I get through this,” she told herself, “I am going to make it my business to keep his legacy alive.”

For the next three decades, Helen devoted her life to the care and management of her husband’s art. She lobbied the Maine legislature to enact a first-in-the-nation law allowing artists and their heirs to donate art to public museums in lieu of taxes. For these purposes, she undertook a major inventory of Langlais’s art, cataloging more than twenty-five hundred works. She established relationships with a rotating roster of galleries and museums. She hosted journalists and curators in her art-filled living room and storage barn. She was known for her martinis, her dry wit, and her private nature.

“I like to think of myself as a shepherd of his work.”

– Helen Langlais, 1987

Helen maintained Langlais’s outdoor pieces lovingly but pragmatically, with an awareness that she could not ensure their long-term preservation. She relocated many of the sculptures: some were sold or moved indoors, others she resited on the grounds. She hired caretakers to assist with repairs. She gave away the livestock, allowed the fields to grow in, then created paths and clearings around the sculptures. With limited resources, she invested in preserving the outdoor sculptures she felt were most important. Whereas Langlais had welcomed visitors to the farm, Helen put up signs that read “PRIVATE.”

In the early 1980s, Helen began conversations with Colby College about the long-term stewardship of Langlais’s art. Upon her death in 2010, she bequeathed her house, land, and all the remaining art in her possession to the College.

“On a nice day she would put on her hat and walk through her garden of sculptures by herself. She could walk among the memories not only of him but of the time that he built this…I think she could see Blackie there…she could still see him working.”

– Glenn Tremblay, caretaker, 1995–2010