Helen Frankenthaler 1928-2011
My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates. They're not nature per se, but a feeling.
Persistently experimental over some sixty years, Helen Frankenthaler produced an impressive oeuvre and has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. A second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter, Helen Frankenthaler became active in the New York School of the 1950s, initially influenced by artists like Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock.
She gained fame with her invention of the color-stain technique—applying thin washes of paint to unprimed canvas—in her iconic Mountains and Sea (1952), a motivating work for Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and other Color Field painters who emerged in the ’60s. Her own canvases, however, often evoked elements of landscape or figuration in the shaping of their forms.
From 1958 to 1971, she was married to fellow Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell, who, like Frankenthaler, worked in symbolic painted gestures—only her paintings were almost always visibly improvised from start to finish. As poet and critic Frank O’Hara wrote in 1960, “she is willing to risk everything on inspiration.”
In addition to painting, Frankenthaler also made ceramics, welded steel sculptures, and set designs, but the related medium that most attracted her, and in which her achievement came the closest painting, was printmaking—especially the creation of woodcuts, hers counting among the greatest of contemporary works in that medium.
Helen Frankenthaler is regarded as one of the major painters of Post-War American Abstract Expressionism. Born into a Jewish family in New York City, Frankenthaler studied art, first at the Dalton School in New York, and then at Bennington College in Vermont. In the 1950s, Frankenthaler was inspired by American Abstract Expressionism, especially by the work of Jacskon Pollock. She began to experiment with pouring paint directly onto canvas, but, unlike Pollock, Frankenthaler used thinned paint on untreated canvases, creating the effect of a large watercolor; this revolutionary technique launched the second generation of the Color Field school of painting.
Even though her poured works appear non-representational, they are often based on real or imaginary landscapes. In addition to her two-dimensional work, Frankenthaler produced welded steel sculptures and explored ceramics, prints, and illustrated books. From the mid-1980s on, she also worked as a set and costume designer for productions by England’s Royal Ballet. Frankenthaler participated in the documenta II in Kassel, and has held numerous international exhibitions, including important retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Frankenthaler taught at New York University, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and was married to American painter Robert Motherwell until 1971.
