HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928–2011)
Helen Frankenthaler, the “lyrically abstract painter whose technique of staining pigment into raw canvas helped shape an influential art movement in the mid-twentieth century, and who became one of the most admired artists of her generation,” died today in her Connecticut home, reports Grace Glueck of the New York Times. Frankenthaler’s longtime assistant announced the death, noting she passed after a long illness. The artist was eighty-three.
Frankenthaler was born in Manhattan in 1928 to a prosperous New York family. She graduated from Dalton School, where she studied art with the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, and then entered Bennington College in 1946. In 1950, she famously began a five-year relationship with Clement Greenberg, quickly becoming part of the artistic sect that included David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Franz Kline. She joined the Tibor de Nagy gallery in 1951, where, that year, she had her first solo show. In 1958, Frankenthaler married Robert Motherwell, a leading member of the first-generation AbEx group; the couple divorced in 1971.
“Despite the early acknowledgment of Frankenthaler’s achievement by Greenberg and by her fellow artists, wider recognition took some time,” notes Glueck. “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. But she became better known to the public after a major retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969.”
Frankenthaler is considered a second-generation Abstract Expressionist and her work refined color field painting, a method initially developed by Jackson Pollock. Frankenthaler’s “staining method emphasized the flat surface over illusory depth, and it called attention to the very nature of paint on canvas, a concern of artists and critics at the time. It also brought a new open airiness to the painted surface and was credited with releasing color from the gestural approach and romantic rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism,” notes Glueck. Though Frankenthaler is perhaps one of the most significant female painters of the twentieth century, she never aligned herself with feminist movements. “For me, being a ‘lady painter’ was never an issue,” she said. “I don’t resent being a female painter. I don’t exploit it. I paint.”
Among Frankenthaler’s most recognized works is Mountains and Sea_, 1952, which art historian E. A. Carmean Jr. suggested “established many of the traits that informed her art from the beginning,” including her “color washes, the dialogue between drawing and painting, the seemingly raw, unfinished look, and the ‘general theme of place’ as characteristic of her work.” Besides paintings, Frankenthaler also worked with woodcuts and sculpture.
The artist rarely discussed the sources of her imagery, but her work is thought to “reflect impressions of landscapes, meditations on personal experience, and the pleasures of dealing with paint,” notes Glueck. The critic Barbara Rose wrote in 1972 that Frankenthaler’s practice expressed “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.”
Or, as Frankenthaler said in 2003, there is “no formula. There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.”
