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. 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 had a home and studio in Darien, Connecticut.

Early life and education

Helen Frankenthaler was born on December 12, 1928, in New York City. Her father was Alfred Frankenthaler, a New York State Supreme Court judge. 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.

Frankenthaler studied at the Dalton School under muralist Rufino Tamayo and also at Bennington College in Vermont. While at Bennington, before her graduation in 1949, she studied privately with Australian-born painter Wallace Harrison, during the Non-resident term and with Hans Hofmann in 1950. She met Clement Greenberg in 1950 and had a five-year relationship with him. Both born of wealthy parents, they were known as "the golden couple" and for their lavish entertaining. Initially associated with abstract expressionism because of her focus on forms latent in nature, Frankenthaler is identified with the use of fluid shapes, abstract masses, and lyrical gestures. She made use of large formats on which she painted, generally, simplified abstract compositions. Her style is notable in its emphasis on spontaneity; as Frankenthaler herself stated, "A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once." The technique 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. Frankenthaler often worked by laying her canvas out on the floor, a technique inspired by Jackson Pollock.

Influences

One of her most important influences was Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), an 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):

<blockquote>It was all there. I wanted to live in this land. I had to live there, and master the language. </blockquote>

Some of her thoughts on painting:

John Elderfield wrote that the watercolors of Paul Cézanne and John Marin were important early influences:

Work

Paintings

thumb|left|200px|[[Mountains and Sea 1952 Oil and charcoal on unsized, unprimed canvas, on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC]]Frankenthaler's official artistic career as a painter was launched in 1952 with the exhibition of Mountains and Sea. Throughout the 1950s, her works tended to be centered compositions. In general, this term refers to the application of large areas, or fields, of color to the canvas. This style was characterized by the use of hues that were similar in tone or intensity, as well as large formats and simplified compositions, all of which are qualities descriptive of Frankenthaler's work from the 1960s onward. Beginning in 1963, Frankenthaler began to use acrylic paints rather than oil paints because they allowed for both opacity and sharpness when put on the canvas.

By the 1970s, she had done away with the soak stain technique entirely, preferring thicker paint that allowed her to employ bright colors almost reminiscent of Fauvism. Throughout the 1970s, Frankenthaler explored the joining of areas of the canvas through the use of modulated hues, and experimented with large, abstract forms.

Works on paper

While she is best known for her large-scale canvases, her works on paper constitute a significant and dynamic aspect of her oeuvre. These works, spanning drawings, watercolors, gouaches, and prints, reveal her innovative approach to color, form, and medium, offering intimate insights into her creative process. Frankenthaler's works on paper are not mere preparatory studies but stand as fully realized expressions of her artistic vision, showcasing her mastery of fluidity, transparency, and improvisation.

Frankenthaler's engagement with paper began in her youth and continued through her studies at Bennington College. Her early drawings from the 1940s, often executed in charcoal, ink, or pastel, display a lyrical abstraction with fluid lines and organic forms. These works reflect her exploration of automatism and her interest in artists like Arshile Gorky and Joan Miró.

By the 1950s, Frankenthaler began experimenting with watercolor and gouache, mediums that allowed her to explore the translucency and spontaneity that would define her mature style. Her invention of the soak-stain technique in 1952 had a profound impact on her works on paper. She adapted this method to paper, pouring diluted paint onto unprimed surfaces, allowing colors to bleed and merge.

During the 1960s, Frankenthaler's works on paper became increasingly ambitious, paralleling the scale and complexity of her canvases. She embraced a variety of techniques, including acrylic, watercolor, and ink, often combining them in single compositions. Her paper works from this period, exhibit bold color fields and gestural marks, with a balance of control and spontaneity.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Frankenthaler's works on paper grew more diverse and experimental, incorporating collage elements, stencils, and mixed media. These works highlight her willingness to push the boundaries of the medium, treating paper as a space for both delicate nuance and robust experimentation.

right |thumb |200px|Helen Frankenthaler, From the Turret IX, 1986, acrylic on paper, x 21 inches (39.4 x 53.3 cm)In the later 1980s, Frankenthaler's works on paper became more immediate. With this immediacy she allowed and welcomed the risk of imperfection more so than with her painting. This became a means of discovery that introduced new energy into all aspects of her art. Her From the Turret series of works on paper were inspired by the view from the turret of her Connecticut studio. The stormy landscape in From the Turret IX was painted with immediacy and evokes a blue sea with a cloudy and windy sky.

In her later years, Frankenthaler's works on paper retained their vitality while adopting a more introspective tone. Her watercolors and acrylics from the 1990s, feature color washes and subtle gradients, evoking landscapes or emotional states.

Frankenthaler's late works on paper often blur the line between drawing and painting, as seen in her use of colored pencils and crayons alongside fluid washes. These pieces convey a sense of intimacy and directness, reflecting her lifelong commitment to exploring the expressive potential of her materials.

Prints

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. She served on the National Council on the Arts of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1985 to 1992. Her other awards include First Prize for Painting at the first Paris Biennial (1959); Temple Gold Medal, Pennsylvania Academy of the 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). In 1990, she was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1994.thumb|left|upright|Receiving the [[National Medal of Arts in 2001]]

Frankenthaler did not consider herself a feminist: "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." Mary Beth Edelson's feminist piece Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper (1972) appropriated Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, with the heads of notable women artists including Frankenthaler collaged over the heads of Christ and his apostles. This image, addressing the role of religious and art historical iconography in the subordination of women, became "one of the most iconic images of the feminist art movement."

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:<blockquote>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. In 2021 the foundation created Frankenthaler Climate Initiative. In July 2021, the foundation award the first round of grants totaling $5.1 million. The recipients included the Museo de Arte de Ponce, the Santa Rosa Indian Museum and Cultural Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Yale University Arts Center.

In a 2023 lawsuit filed at the New York Supreme Court, Frankenthaler's nephew Frederick Iseman claimed that Clifford Ross and other family members on the board exploited the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation "to advance their own personal interests and careers" and were committed to completely shutting down the foundation in the near future.

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). 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). In 2016 her work was included in the exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum. 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. 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.; 2020: "9th Street Club", Gazelli Art House, London; curated by Will Corwin

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".

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.

Every Sound Is a Shape of Time, a collections-focused group exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, showcased Frankenthaler's work in the collection alongside Julie Mehretu, Jules Olitski, and Louis Morris, among others.

From October 25, 2025-February 8, 2026, the Museum of Modern Art is exhibiting Helen Frankenthaler A Grand Sweep.

Collections

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Art Institute of Chicago
Centre Pompidou, Paris
The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Museum Reinhard Ernst, Wiesbaden, Germany
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
National Gallery of Australia
Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL
Portland Art Museum, Oregon
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY
Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS
Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

National Endowment for the Arts

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". 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?"

Death

Frankenthaler died on December 27, 2011, at the age of 83 in Darien, Connecticut, following a long and undisclosed illness.

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.
Helen Frankenthaler in 'Oral history Interview with Barbara Rose, 1968, for the Archives of American Art - Smithsonian Institution

External links

Helen Frankenthaler Foundation
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: Oral History Interview
Video: Helen Frankenthaler at Turner Contemporary, Margate by Laura Bushell on Artinfo 4 March 2014
Roberta Smith, "Two Artists Who Embraced Freedom" New York Times, 12/29/11
Helen Frankenthaler Artwork Examples on AskART.
"Frankenthaler's New Way of Making Art", The Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2008
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
Helen Frankenthaler in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts Collection