Helen Frankenthaler

"Frankenthaler" redirects here. For the French wine grape that is also known as Frankenthaler, see Gouais blanc.

For the German/Italian wine grape that is also known as Frankenthaler, see Trollinger.

Clifford Ross.

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. She was later married to fellow artist Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), from 1958 until they divorced in 1971. She has two stepdaughters, Jeannie Motherwell and Lise Motherwell. Both born of wealthy parents, the pair was known as "the golden couple" and noted for their lavish entertaining. She married Stephen M. DuBrul, Jr., an investment banker who served the Ford administration, in 1994.

Frankenthaler had been on the faculty of Hunter College.

Style and technique

Mountains and Sea, 1952, 86 5/8 x 117 1/4 inches, (220 x 297.8 cm., oil and charcoal on canvas, on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Initially associated with abstract expressionism her career was launched in 1952 with the exhibition of Mountains and Sea. 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. 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.

Frankenthaler preferred to paint in privacy. If assistants were present she preferred them to be inconspicuous when not needed.

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. 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. 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.

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

She received the National Medal of Arts in 2001. She served on the National Council on the Arts of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1985 to 1992.

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." "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."

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." On the other hand some critics called her work "merely beautiful." 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."

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?"

See also

• Post-painterly abstraction
• Lyrical abstraction
• Wash (painting)
• Color Field

Additional reading

• Elderfield, John. Helen Frankenthaler, 1989, Harry N. Abrams ISBN 0-8109-0916-2
• Helen Frankenthaler, After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956-1959 (New York : Guggenheim Museum, ©1998.) ISBN 0-8109-6911-4, ISBN 978-0-8109-6911-7 0892071974 9780892071975
• Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6. p. 16; p. 37; pp. 142–145, York 1986. ISBN 0-87099-477-8
• Pollock, Griselda, "Killing Men and Dying Women". In: Orton, Fred and Pollock, Griselda (eds), Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed. London: Redwood Books, 1996. ISBN 0-7190-4398-0
• Wilkin, Karen. Frankenthaler: Works on Paper 1949-1984, George Braziller (February 1985), ISBN 978-0-8076-1103-6

Bibliography

• Alison Rowley, Helen Frankenthaler: Painting History, Writing painting. I.B.Tauris Publishers, 2007.
• Helen Frankenthaler in Interview with Henry Geldzahler, in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Kristine Stiles and peter Selz, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 28–30. ISBN 0-520-20253-8
• Malvarez, Javier, UNED, Madrid, Spain (In Spanish) "Helen Frankenthaler:Explorando la Fluidez", Master Thesis, 2011, http://issuu.com/doctorandoenartecontemporan/docs/helen_frankenthaler-_explorando_la_fluidez

External links

• Grace Glueck, Helen Frankenthaler, Abstract Painter Who Shaped a Movement, Dies at 83, NY Times, obituary
• Roberta Smith, Two Artists Who Embraced Freedom NY Times, 12/29/11
• Biography from the Jewish Women's Archive
• Jacob's Ladder at MoMA
• Helen Frankenthaler Artwork Examples on AskART.
• Frankenthaler's New Way of Making Art, The Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2008
• Helen Frankenthaler represented by Knoedler & Company
• Lush Spring (1975) Phoenix Art Museum
• Helen Frankenthaler in the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler Collection
• Helen Frankenthaler "Contemporary Experience Lecture" The Baltimore Museum of Art: Baltimore, Maryland, 1970 Accessed June 26, 2012