Helen Frankenthaler was an American
abstract expressionist
painter died he was 83.. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American
painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades (early 1950s
until 2011), she spanned several generations of abstract painters while
continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work.
[1]
(December 12, 1928 – December 27, 2011)
Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist
paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She
was included in the 1964
Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by
Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as
Color Field. Born in
Manhattan, she was influenced by
Hans Hofmann,
Jackson Pollock's
paintings and by Clement Greenberg. Her work has been the subject of
several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art in
New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the
National Medal of Arts.
Frankenthaler had a home and studio in
Darien, Connecticut.
[2]
Early life and education
Helen Frankenthaler was a New Yorker.
[3] She was born in Manhattan on December 12, 1928. Her father was
Alfred Frankenthaler, a respected
New York State Supreme Court judge. Her mother, Martha (Lowenstein), had emigrated with her family from
Germany to the United States shortly after she was born.
[4] Her two sisters, Marjorie and Gloria, were six and five years older, respectively. Growing up on Manhattan’s
Upper East Side,
Frankenthaler absorbed the privileged background of a cultured and
progressive intellectual family that encouraged all three daughters to
prepare themselves for professional careers. Her nephew is the
artist/photographer
Clifford Ross.
[5]
Frankenthaler studied at the
Dalton School under
Rufino Tamayo and also at
Bennington College in Vermont. She met
Clement Greenberg in 1950 and had a five-year relationship with him.
[4] She was later married to fellow artist
Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), from 1958 until they divorced in 1971.
[3] She has two stepdaughters, Jeannie Motherwell and Lise Motherwell.
[4] Both born of wealthy parents, the pair was known as "the golden couple" and noted for their lavish entertaining.
[4] She married Stephen M. DuBrul, Jr., an investment banker who served the
Ford administration, in 1994.
[4]
Frankenthaler had been on the faculty of
Hunter College.
Style and technique
Initially associated with
abstract expressionism[6] her career was launched in 1952 with the exhibition of
Mountains and Sea.
[7] This painting is large - measuring seven feet by ten feet - and has the effect of a
watercolor,
though it is painted in oils. In it, she introduced the technique of
painting directly onto an unprepared canvas so that the material absorbs
the colors. She heavily diluted the oil paint with turpentine so that
the color would soak into the canvas. This technique, known as "soak
stain" was used by
Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), and others; and was adopted by other artists notably
Morris Louis (1912–1962), and
Kenneth Noland (1924–2010), and launched the second generation of the
Color Field school of painting.
[8][9]
This method would sometimes leave the canvas with a halo effect around
each area to which the paint was applied but has a disadvantage in that
the oil in the paints will eventually cause the canvas to discolor and
rot away.
[10][11]
Frankenthaler preferred to paint in privacy. If assistants were present she preferred them to be inconspicuous when not needed.
[12]
Influences
One of her most important influences was
Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), an influential art and literary critic with whom she had a personal friendship and who included her in the
Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition that he curated in 1964.
[3][13] Through Greenberg she was introduced to the New York art scene. Under his guidance she spent the summer of 1950 studying with
Hans Hofmann (1880–1966), catalyst of the
Abstract Expressionist movement.
The first Jackson Pollock show Frankenthaler saw was at the
Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950. She had this to say about seeing Pollock's paintings
Autumn Rhythm, Number 30, 1950 (1950),
Number One,1950 (Lavender Mist) (1950):
"It was all there. I wanted to live in this land. I had to live there, and master the language."
In 1960 the term
Color Field painting was used to describe the work of Frankenthaler.
[14]
This style was characterized by large areas of a more or less flat
single color. The Color Field artists set themselves apart from the
Abstract Expressionists because they eliminated the emotional, mythic or
the religious content and the highly personal and gestural and
painterly application.
[15]
Some of her thoughts on painting:
"A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an
immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and
overworked, and you can read in it—well, she did this and then she did
that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to
do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I
think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce
one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head
and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in
a minute." In Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1975, p. 85)
Awards and legacy
Frankenthaler received the
National Medal of Arts in 2001.
[16] She served on the National Council on the Arts of the
National Endowment for the Arts from 1985 to 1992.
[17]
Her other awards include First Prize for Painting at the first Paris
Biennial (1959); Joseph E. Temple Gold Medal, Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1968); New York City Mayor's Award of Honor for
Arts and Culture (1986); and Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime
Achievement,
College Art Association (1994).
[18]
Frankenthaler did not consider herself a feminist: she said "For me,
being a 'lady painter' was never an issue. I don’t resent being a female
painter. I don’t exploit it. I paint."
[19] "Art was an extremely macho business," Anne Temkin, chief curator at the
Museum of Modern Art, told
NPR. "For me, there's a great deal of admiration just in the courage and the vision that she brought to what she did."
[20]
In 1953,
Kenneth Noland and
Morris Louis saw her
Mountains and Sea which, Louis said later, was a "bridge between
Pollock and what was possible."
[21] On the other hand some critics called her work "merely beautiful."
[20] Grace Glueck's obituary in
The New York Times summed up Frankenthaler's career:
Critics have not unanimously praised Ms. Frankenthaler’s art. Some
have seen it as thin in substance, uncontrolled in method, too sweet in
color and too “poetic.” But it has been far more apt to garner admirers
like the critic Barbara Rose, who wrote in 1972 of Ms. Frankenthaler’s
gift for “the freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image,
not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but explicitly and
intimately tied to nature and human emotions."[4]
Exhibitions
Frankenthaler's first solo exhibition took place at the
Tibor de Nagy Gallery,
New York, in the fall of 1951. Her first major museum show, a
retrospective of her 1950s work with a catalog by the critic and poet
Frank O’Hara, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was at the
Jewish Museum in 1960. Subsequent solo exhibitions include “Helen Frankenthaler,”
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1969; traveled to
Whitechapel Gallery, London;
Orangerie Herrenhausen, Hanover; and
Kongresshalle, Berlin), and “Helen Frankenthaler: a Painting Retrospective,” The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (1989–90; traveled to the
Museum of Modern Art, New York;
Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and
Detroit Institute of Arts).
[22]
Collections
Frankenthaler's work is represented in institutional collections worldwide, including the
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto;
Art Institute of Chicago;
Los Angeles County Museum of Art;
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
Centre Pompidou, Paris;
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
Museum of Modern Art, New York;
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra;
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC;
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
[23]
Controversy
At her death in 2011 it became widely known through social media that Frankenthaler tried to stop the support of the
National Endowment for the Arts
to artists and was one of those responsible for the NEA dropping
individual grants to artists. According to LA Times, "Frankenthaler did
take a highly public stance during the late 1980s "culture wars" that
eventually led to deep budget cuts for the National Endowment for the
Arts and a ban on grants to individual artists that still persists. At
the time, she was a presidential appointee to the National Council on
the Arts, which advises the NEA's chairman. In a 1989 commentary for the
New York Times, she wrote that, while "censorship and government
interference in the directions and standards of art are dangerous and
not part of the democratic process," controversial grants to
Andres Serrano,
Robert Mapplethorpe
and others reflected a trend in which the NEA was supporting work "of
increasingly dubious quality. Is the council, once a helping hand, now
beginning to spawn an art monster? Do we lose art ... in the guise of
endorsing experimentation?"
[24]
To see more of who died in 2011
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