Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler (December 12, 1928 – December 27, 2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter. 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] 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 Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. 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" redirects here. For the French wine grape that is also known as Frankenthaler, see Gouais blanc.
Helen Frankenthaler
December 12, 1928
December 27, 2011 (aged 83)
Frankenthaler had a home and studio in Darien, Connecticut.[2]
Early life and education[edit]
Helen Frankenthaler was born on December 12, 1928, in New York City.[3] Her father was Alfred Frankenthaler, a New York State Supreme Court judge.[3] Her mother, Martha (Lowenstein), had emigrated with her family from Germany to the United States as an infant.[4] Helen's 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 Jewish 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 muralist Rufino Tamayo and also at Bennington College in Vermont.[3] While at Bennington, Frankenthaler studied under the direction of Paul Feeley, who is credited with helping her understand pictorial composition, as well as influencing her early cubist-derived style.[6] Upon her graduation in 1949, she studied privately with Australian-born painter Wallace Harrison,[7] and with Hans Hofmann in 1950.[8][9] She met Clement Greenberg in 1950 and had a five-year relationship with him.[4] She married the painter Robert Motherwell in 1958; the couple divorced in 1971.[10] Both born of wealthy parents, they were known as "the golden couple" and for their lavish entertaining.[4] She gained two stepdaughters from him, Jeannie Motherwell and Lise Motherwell.[4] Jeannie Motherwell studied painting at Bard College and the Art Students League in New York and had several exhibits.
In 1994, Frankenthaler married Stephen M. DuBrul, Jr., an investment banker who served the Gerald Ford administration.[4] Frankenthaler had been on the faculty of Hunter College.
Major works[edit]
Paintings[edit]
In Mountains and Sea, her first professionally exhibited work, Frankenthaler made use of the soak stain technique. The work itself was painted after a trip to Nova Scotia, which partly questions the extent of its non-representational status. Although Mountains and Sea is not a direct depiction of the Nova Scotia coastline, elements of the work suggest a kind of seascape or landscape, like the strokes of blue that join with areas of green. Much like Mountains and Sea, Frankenthaler's Basque Landscape (1958) seems to refer to a very specific, external environment, but it is also abstract.[11] The same can be said for Lorelei (1956), a work based on a boat ride Frankenthaler took down the Rhine.[25]
Swan Lake #2 (1961) depicts a large area of blue paint on the canvas, with breaks in the color that are left white. A rectilinear brown square encompasses the blue, balancing both the cool tones of the blue with the warmth of the brown, and the gestural handling of the paint with the strong linearity of the square.[11]
Eden, from 1956, is an interior landscape, meaning it depicts the images of the artist's imagination. Eden tells the story of an abstract, interior world, idealized in ways that a landscape never could be. The work is almost entirely gestural, save for the incorporation of the number "100" two times in the center of the image. When asked about the process of creating this work, Frankenthaler stated that she began by painting the numbers, and that a sort of symbolic, idealized garden grew out of that.[25]
Prints and woodcuts[edit]
Frankenthaler recognized a need to continually challenge herself to develop as an artist. For this reason, in 1961, she began to experiment with printmaking at the Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), a lithographic workshop in West Islip, Long Island. Frankenthaler collaborated with Tatyana Grosman in 1961 to create her first prints.[6]
In 1976, Frankenthaler began to work within the medium of woodcuts. She collaborated with Kenneth E. Tyler. The first piece they created together was Essence of Mulberry (1977), a woodcut that used eight different colors. Essence of Mulberry was inspired by two sources: the first was an exhibition of fifteenth century woodcuts that Frankenthaler saw on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the second being a mulberry tree that grew outside of Tyler's studio. In 1995, the pair collaborated again, creating The Tales of Genji, a series of six woodcut prints. To create woodcuts with a resonance similar to Frankenthaler's painterly style, she painted her plans onto the wood itself, making maquettes. The Tales of Genji took nearly three years to complete. Frankenthaler then went on to create Madame Butterfly, a print that employed one hundred and two different colors and forty-six woodblocks.[6]
Exhibitions[edit]
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).[39] Miles McEnery Gallery, a New York-based contemporary art gallery which exhibited Color-Field and Abstract Expressionist paintings, showcased a range of her work in 2009 "Helen Frankenthaler," December 10, 2009 – January 23, 2010).[40][41] In 2016 her work was included in the exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum.[42] On October 6, 2019, Frankenthaler was included in Sparkling Amazons: Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th St. Show at the Katonah Museum of Art in Westchester County, NY.[43] which ran until January 26, 2020; *2019: "Postwar Women: alumnae of the Art Students League of New York 1945-1965", Phyllis Harriman Gallery, Art Students League of NY; curated by Will Corwin.;[44] 2020: "9th Street Club", Gazelli Art House, London; curated by Will Corwin[45]
In 2021, a decade after her death the New Britain Museum of American Art mounted an exhibition of her works on paper from the final stages of her opus titled "Helen Frankenthaler; Late Works 1990 - 2003".[46]
In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.[47]
National Endowment for the Arts[edit]
She was a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts, which advises the NEA's chairman. In The New York Times in 1989, she argued government funding for the arts was "not part of the democratic process" and was "beginning to spawn an art monster".[49] According to the Los Angeles 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. 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?"[50][51]