Helen Frankenthaler

American painter

• Date of birth: December 12, 1928
• Place of birth: New York, New York
• Date of death: December 27, 2011
• Place of death:Darien, Connecticut

An innovator in painting, printmaking, and sculpture, Frankenthaler developed stain painting and was the key transitional figure between abstract expressionism and color-field painting.

Early Life

The youngest of three sisters, Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York City on December 12, 1928. Her father, New York Supreme Court justice Alfred Frankenthaler, and her mother, Martha (Lowenstein) Frankenthaler, a talented amateur painter, recognized Helen’s talent early and nurtured her abilities by sending her to the experimental and progressive schools Horace Mann, Brearley, and Dalton. At Dalton, she quickly became a favored student of the well-known Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, with whom she studied until she entered Bennington College in the spring of 1946. Studying with painter Paul Feeley at Bennington, Frankenthaler was introduced to the cubist aesthetic, which continued to influence her throughout her college years.

While still a student, Frankenthaler worked for Art Outlook, a review magazine; studied at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil; taught art at Hale House in Boston; and worked as a writer for The Cambridge Courier during nonresidential terms. After graduation, Frankenthaler took several courses at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Columbia University.

In 1950, Frankenthaler was asked to organize a benefit exhibition of Bennington alumnae paintings at Jacques Seligmann and Company. Among the invited guests attending was the influential Clement Greenberg, a critic who wrote for The Nation and Partisan Review. Greenberg introduced Frankenthaler to David Smith, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, all of whom were abstract expressionists of the first generation of the New York School. The year 1950 was also significant in that Frankenthaler’s work was selected for inclusion in Fifteen Unknowns, an exhibition at the Kootz Gallery, New York, the first of her professional exhibitions. Soon afterward, she became involved with New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which presented her first solo exhibition in New York in 1951 and helped establish her as a major new painter.

Most important to Frankenthaler’s development as an artist, however, was Pollock’s 1950 show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Unlike Willem de Kooning’s paintings, which at that point used thick, thrusting brush strokes of paint sweeping across the canvas in what has come to be known as gestural abstraction or action painting, Pollock’s mural-sized paintings contained no brush strokes at all. Thick paint was dripped directly onto the canvas, an innovative technique that was both abstract and expressionist. Forcing viewers’ eyes through implied movement along convoluted paths, the paintings suggested constant and somewhat frenetic movement across a canvas that dissolved the distinction between the background and the foreground.

Life’s Work

Impressed by Pollock’s new technique but not wanting to become simply an imitator, Frankenthaler, in October 1952, developed the soaked paint technique for which she became famous. Her painting Mountains and Sea, often described as a landmark painting, was the first work to be created with this technique.

Thinning oil paint to a watery consistency with turpentine or kerosene, Frankenthaler poured the paint directly onto a raw canvas stapled to the floor, a technique known as soak stain or stain technique. The resulting delicate colors in various shades of pale greens, blues, grays, oranges, and pinks create the effect of soft but intense watercolors lightly flowing across the immense seven-by-ten-foot canvas that showed through in spots, and each section to which the soak stain was applied appears to have a halo. The landscape does not fill the canvas as other expressionist works of the time typically do; instead, it floats in the center of the canvas, the white edges neither framing nor limiting the painting.

Mountains and Sea, painted after a visit to Nova Scotia when Frankenthaler was twenty-three years old, was the most celebrated of her paintings shown at her second solo exhibition, held at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, yet Frankenthaler did not become an immediate success. Throughout the 1950s, her audience consisted primarily of fellow artists such as Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Al Leslie, and Grace Hartigan, who were all, like Frankenthaler, second-generation members of the New York School. Nevertheless, she continued to work and to travel extensively throughout Europe. From 1958 until 1971, she was married to painter Robert Motherwell, and in 1958 she began teaching art in an adult education program at Great Neck, New York, along with other members of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Her solo exhibition at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York in 1959 was the first in what became a long-standing association. The next year saw her first retrospective.

During the 1960s, Frankenthaler’s work became much better known and appreciated. She had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Paris, Milan, and London, and she represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. In 1968, she was named the first female fellow of Calhoun College at Yale University, and in the following year, the Whitney Museum in New York held her second retrospective. Additionally, she was awarded her first honorary doctorate from Skidmore College in 1969, one of more than a dozen doctorates that she received, including from Harvard University (1980), Yale University (1981), Dartmouth College (1994), the University of Pennsylvania (1996), and the Pratt Institute (2004).

Frankenthaler began to experiment with acrylic paints during the 1960s, although her overall technique remained essentially the same. Instead of using thinned oil paints, she diluted her acrylic pigments and poured them directly onto unprimed canvas, using sponges, mops, and squeegees to position the color. Consisting of bright splashes of two or three colors on the white canvas, the works are much starker and more consciously geometric than her earlier oil paintings.

Frankenthaler received even more acclaim in the 1960s and also began to expand into other artistic media: paper, bronze, clay, ceramic, and set making. Her awards include the Spirit of Achievement Award from Yeshiva University (1970), the Garrett Award of the Art Institute of Chicago (1972), the Art and Humanities Award from the Women’s Forum of Yale University (1976), an Extraordinary Woman of Achievement Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews (1978), the New York City Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture (1986), the Connecticut Arts Award (1989), a Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association of New York (1994), the Lotos Medal of Merit (1994), the Jerusalem Prize for Arts and Letters (1999), the National Medal of Arts (2001), and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (2003), to name a few. She became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991, a member of the National Academy of Design in 2001, and an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy, also in 2001. In 2005 she was inducted into the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame.

Frankenthaler was a member of the National Council on the Arts (1985–1991) and was the subject of several national films and videos, including Barbara Rose’s American Art in the ’60’s (1973) and Perry Miller Adato’s Frankenthaler: Toward a New Climate (1978), one of seven in a series of programs focusing on women in art and produced by WNET/Thirteen, New York. In 1985 she was commissioned to design sets and costumes for the Royal Ballet production of Number Three, set to Sergei Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, a major project done while helping to organize a retrospective of her works on paper at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 1988 her work was chosen for the poster and programs for the New York City Ballet’s fortieth anniversary. She also taught at several universities, including Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. In 1994, she married banker Stephen M. DuBrul Jr.

Moving to printmaking, Frankenthaler avoided simply making spinoffs or studies of her better-known paintings. Instead, these expressionistic works, among which are etchings, lithographs, pochoirs, and woodcuts, explore the use of open space and color. Often these works employ mixed media. In one eight-foot-wide work, three panels are mounted in a cast bronze screen. The screen, front and back, functions as one unified work of art, relating the graphics in the triptych format to the back, which is flat bronze with a chemical overpainting; sculptural drawing is welded or painted onto the frame, which corresponds to the interior graphics. Additionally, Frankenthaler made use of techniques well before they became generally popular, for example, making unique impressions for each color used in a lithograph rather than one impression for all colors. She completed five print editions and a sculpture relief using the Mixografia process, a process involving the use of wax, copper, and paper to create a three-dimensional effect.

Frankenthaler investigated the possibilities of sculpture in 1972 while spending two weeks working in the London studio of English sculptor Anthony Caro. She produced ten steel pieces, whose attenuated lines and vertical orientations suggest both grace and sturdiness in the face of gravity. They were first exhibited in New York soon after their completion and, in November 2006, Knoedler and Company offered a reprise exhibition of nine of these sculptures, also in New York. Of these nine works, critic Karen Wilkin observed,

Cumulatively, they bear witness to the combination of audacity, willfulness, and acute sensitivity to material properties that has been a hallmark of Frankenthaler’s work since her radiant, allusive stain paintings first announced her as a painter to be taken very seriously indeed.

In 1998, Frankenthaler had a major retrospective of her most celebrated early paintings at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (and later at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin). The retrospective, After Mountain and Sea: Frankenthaler, 1956–1959, featured fourteen of her major canvases that, according to critics, define a special moment in the history of the New York School. Frankenthaler’s works from late in her career again evoke nature in ways reminiscent of Mountain and Sea. As critic David Cohen wrote of the acrylic works Yoruba, Warming Trend, Ebbing, and Bacchus, all from 2002, “It is somehow touching that this veteran’s abstractions should reverse historic due process, turning 'inscapes' back into landscapes. By so doing she reconnects with Old Master painting, and emphatically disconnects with minimalism.”

Frankenthaler’s paintings are much sought after. In the first decade of the twenty-first century they were featured in solo exhibitions around the world, including Canberra, Berlin, London, and Ontario, and in New York, Miami, Houston, Seattle, and Boca Raton. Frankenthaler died at the age of eighty-three on December 27, 2011, at her home in Darien, Connecticut.

Significance

Frankenthaler is recognized as the key transitional figure between abstract expressionism and color-field painting. Her technique of stain painting influenced many artists. Indeed, fellow artists Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis were so impressed with Frankenthaler’s ability to spread color on the surface of the picture without creating an illusion that they began a series of studio visits to experiment with the technique.

Pouring the pigment into schematic patterns, Noland and Louis began to create paintings of almost pure color and thus pioneered the color-field school of painting. Critics agree that Frankenthaler’s stained paintings are innovative and provide a major contribution to modern art. Unlike the work of the male painters of her generation, Frankenthaler’s 1950s work has a subtle delicacy of color and light. The stained color fills the canvas, leading viewers to focus on the materials and processes of the painting while responding to the intense color. Moving to other media, Frankenthaler continued as a vital proponent of expressionistic color, and her novel explorations with mixed media and Mixografia are extensions of her innovation. Two retrospectives, the 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the 1993 retrospective of her printmaking at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, first brought her works to a wide audience and confirmed her place as one of America’s major artists.

Bibliography

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