Helen Frankenthaler

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(b New York, 12 Dec 1928). American painter and printmaker. She studied with Rufino Tamayo while at Dalton School, New York, with Paul Feeley (b 1910) at Bennington College, VT (1946-9), and privately with Wallace Harrison in 1949 and Hans Hofmann in 1950. In that year she met Clement Greenberg, David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and others. Like several of the exponents of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM she was concerned with the forms and energies latent in nature. In the mythology of technical breakthrough that was part of the culture of the New York School, her work Mountains and Sea (1952; artist's col.; see fig.) has an established place. Extending Pollock's method of painting on unprimed canvases on the floor, she allowed thinner pigments to soak directly into the canvas. This created a closer relationship between image and surface, the weave of the raw canvas being visible within the painted image. At the same time the visibility of the canvas beneath the painted surface negated the sense of illusion and depth. It was a device that called attention to both the material and the nature of the medium. The technique also generated a new range of liquid-like atmospheric effects reminiscent of the watercolours of John Marin. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, the leading figures of a group sometimes known as the WASHINGTON COLOR PAINTERS, were among several painters who saw Mountains and Sea in 1953 and developed its implications in their own work. Louis in particular pursued the possibilities of the technique of 'staining' colour into the canvas.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The American painter Helen Frankenthaler (born 1928) was a central figure in the development of color-field abstraction during the late 1950s and the 1960s.

Helen Frankenthaler was born on December 12, 1928, in New York City. As a painter her earliest training was with the Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo at the Dalton School in New York. She studied with Paul Feeley at Bennington College, where she received her bachelor of arts degree in 1948. She then lived in New York City, although she traveled extensively throughout Europe. She was married to the painter Robert Motherwell.

In the early 1950s Frankenthaler participated in several important group shows and had her first solo exhibition in 1951. She exhibited regularly during this decade and by 1960 had begun to receive national and international recognition. Large exhibitions of her work were held at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 1960 and at Bennington College in 1962. In 1969 she enjoyed a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Frankenthaler's style developed in ways counter to the better-known trends of abstract painting during the 1950s. Inspired by Jackson Pollock's black-and-white paintings of 1951, she began to stain thinned pigment into unprimed canvas. The paintings which resulted possessed a delicate, liquid appearance, and their surfaces were devoid of any hint of physical pigment. By contrast, most abstract painting of this time took inspiration from Willem de Kooning's work and emphasized dense surface face textures and aggressive brushwork. But Frankenthaler's direction gradually became influential. In 1953 she introduced the stain technique to Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, both of whom adopted and developed it within the personal structures of their own painting. Along with Frankenthaler, these two painters profoundly influenced the direction of nonpainterly color abstraction in the 1960s.

The painting which Frankenthaler showed to Louis and Noland is called Mountains and Sea (1952). It clearly reveals the advantages of the staining technique, particularly in the flowing spontaneity of the color areas. Because the thinned pigment soaks naturally into the canvas ground, passages from one color to the next are experienced within a continuous optical field rather than as abrupt jumps from one discrete plane to another. In other words, the space is generated within the acknowledged limits of the two-dimensional canvas surface.

As its title suggests, Mountains and Sea bears a lingering resemblance to a natural landscape. In 1989 the editor-in-chief of American Artist referred to Mountains and Sea as one of the four "landmark paintings in the history of contemporary art." In her work after the early 1950s, Frankenthaler became more abstract in her imagery and devoted increasing attention to the development of her lyrical color sensibility.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Frankenthaler continued to develop her own style, one which emphasizes the notion of beauty. She explored the use of acrylic paints, and her work during this era tended to be larger, simpler, and more geometric than previous pieces. Still, her goal was to capture emotion through the use of color without using scenes or subjects. In the late 1970s she explored cubist ideas of space that she had learned in art school.

During the late 1980s critics began to realize more fully how significantly Frankenthaler's work had contributed to the art world. They credit her with many technical achievements and approaches to the use of color during her four decades of creativity. Retrospective exhibitions of her work began to tour museums, even as she continued to create. In late 1996 Eric Gibson noted in ARTnews that her latest round of prints, Spring Run Monotypes, "convey a wide array of sentiments that were barely noticeable in her earlier works."

Critics consider Frankenthaler one of the most highly regarded painters of the 20th century. Though she has experimented with a variety of techniques, her style has remained truly individual. She told Newsweek in 1989, "I continue to do the work I do." This beautiful and poetic work has assured her a place among the masters of contempory art.

Further Reading

For Helen Frankenthaler's position in relation to postwar American painting see Barbara Rose, American Art since 1900: A Critical History (1967). Two excellent retrospectives of her work are John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997; and Ruth E. Fine, Helen Frankenthaler: Prints, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993. Interviews with Frankenthaler are featured in Bradley W. Bloch, "Pigments of the Imagination," New Leader, September 4, 1989; and Carter Ratcliff, "Living Color," Vogue, June 1989.

Helen Frankenthaler
Mountains and Sea (1952), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Born	December 12, 1928 (1928-12-12) (age 80) New York City
Nationality	American
Field	Abstract painting
Training	Dalton School. Bennington College.
Movement	Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Lyrical Abstraction
Works	Mountains and Sea
Influenced by	Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann
Influenced	Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland

Helen Frankenthaler (born December 12, 1928) is an American Abstract Expressionist painter. She is an important and major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. She began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in important 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 New York City, she was influenced by Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock's paintings and by Clement Greenberg. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions; including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her work has been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s.

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Style and technique 3 Influences 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links

Early life and education

Frankenthaler comes from a Jewish family. ^[1] She is the youngest daughter of Alfred Frankenthaler, who was a justice on the New York State Supreme Court. She studied at the Dalton School under Rufino Tamayo and also at Bennington College in Vermont. She later married fellow artist Robert Motherwell.

Style and technique

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 and others; and was adopted by other artists (notably Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland) 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.

Influences

One of her most important influences was Clement Greenberg, an influential art and literary critic. 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 Parson's Gallery in 1950. She had this to say about seeing Pollock's paintings Autumn Rhythm, Number 30, 1950 (1950), Number One (1950), and Lavender Mist:

"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.^{[citation needed]} 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)

See also

• Abstract expressionism
• Color field painting
• Post-painterly abstraction
• Lyrical abstraction
• Wash (painting)

Notes

1. ^ http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/frankenthaler-helen - "Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York City on December 12, 1928. Her father was Alfred Frankenthaler, a respected New York State Supreme Court judge. Her mother, Martha (Lowenstein), had emigrated with her family from Germany to the United States shortly after she was born. Her two sisters, Marjorie and Gloria, were six and five years older, respectively. Growing up on New York’s Upper East Side, Frankenthaler absorbed the privileged background of a cultured and progressive Jewish family that encouraged all three daughters to prepare themselves for professional careers."

References

• Helen Frankenthaler, After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956-1959 (New York : Guggenheim Museum, ©1998.) ISBN 0810969114 9780810969117 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

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Helen Frankenthaler

• 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

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